If you’ve been searching for bookkeeping prices in the UK, you’ll have noticed that the numbers on offer span a surprisingly wide range — from around £80 a month for a sole trader’s basic records through to well over £1,500 a month for a busier limited company with payroll and VAT in the mix. That range isn’t a sign that someone is being overcharged or that the cheaper end is cutting corners. It reflects genuine differences in what’s included, who’s doing the work, and how complex the books actually are.

We see a lot of business owners who’ve either been quoted something that felt too high without explanation, or who signed up for a package that turned out not to cover what they needed. The goal here is to give you a clear, honest picture of where current UK bookkeeping fees sit in 2026 — so you can walk into any conversation with a bookkeeper or accountant knowing whether the number you’re given makes sense.

Based on current market data for 2026, most UK small businesses are paying somewhere between £120 and £500 per month for outsourced bookkeeping. At the lower end, that typically covers a sole trader or very early-stage limited company with a modest number of monthly transactions — bank reconciliation, categorising income and expenses, and keeping records tidy for year-end. At the higher end, you’re looking at a business with more volume, VAT returns included, and potentially some payroll processing in the mix.

Hourly rates follow a similar pattern. A self-employed bookkeeper handling straightforward work tends to charge in the region of £22 to £40 per hour. An AAT-qualified bookkeeper — or someone working within a practice — will typically sit higher, often between £35 and £60 per hour, with London rates at the top of that range. Entry-level work or simple data entry can be found for less, but the tradeoff is usually experience and the degree to which someone will spot a problem before it becomes an HMRC issue.

For growing businesses that have passed the VAT threshold and run a payroll, monthly fees of £300 to £900 are not unusual. Adding VAT return preparation on its own — without full bookkeeping — typically costs an extra £70 to £200 per quarter depending on the complexity of the return.

These are market benchmarks, not fixed rules. What you pay should reflect what you actually need — and a good bookkeeper or accountant will be specific about what’s included.

This is one of the more common questions we hear, and the honest answer is that it depends on how predictable your transaction volume is from month to month.

Hourly billing can work well if your bookkeeping needs fluctuate — perhaps your business is seasonal, or you only need periodic clean-up work rather than ongoing maintenance. The risk is that without a clear upfront estimate, costs can creep. A messy set of records that takes longer than expected to sort out will show up on the invoice, and there’s limited incentive for the bookkeeper to work faster.

Monthly packages give you a fixed cost you can budget around, which most business owners prefer. They also tend to work better for the bookkeeper, because a fixed fee encourages them to set up efficient systems from the start rather than billing for inefficiency. The key is making sure the scope is agreed upfront — what transactions per month, which software, whether VAT and payroll are in or out.

In our experience, a well-scoped monthly package is almost always the cleaner arrangement for an ongoing relationship. Hourly billing tends to suit one-off catch-up work, where the scope is genuinely uncertain at the outset. If a bookkeeper can’t give you a fixed monthly figure after understanding your business, that’s worth querying.

When two bookkeepers quote very different figures for what sounds like the same job, it usually comes down to one or more of these factors:

• Transaction volume. A business processing 20 transactions a month is fundamentally different from one processing 200. Volume is the single biggest driver of cost — more transactions mean more time, regardless of how slick the software is.
• The state of your records. If your books are already a year behind and categorised inconsistently, a bookkeeper will price in the time to untangle them. Catch-up bookkeeping and clean-up work are typically quoted separately, and rightly so — they’re a different task from ongoing maintenance.
• What’s included. Bookkeeping alone, or bookkeeping plus VAT returns, plus payroll, plus monthly reports? A quote that looks low may simply be excluding services you’ll need to add back in. Always check what is and isn’t in scope before comparing prices.
• Software. Cloud platforms like Xero, QuickBooks, and FreeAgent make bookkeeping faster and more accurate — but there’s a subscription cost sitting somewhere in the chain. Understand whether software fees are included in your monthly price or billed separately.
• Location and experience. London-based bookkeepers generally charge more than those working remotely from elsewhere in the UK. But with cloud accounting now standard, location matters less than it used to — which is part of why online practices can often offer sharper pricing without compromising on quality.

A clear scope document and a fixed monthly price are the two things that protect you from surprise costs.

This comparison comes up most often when a business has grown to the point where the founder no longer wants to handle the books themselves — but isn’t yet sure whether a part-time employee or an outsourced practice makes more sense.

The numbers are fairly stark. Bringing a bookkeeper in-house — even part-time — carries a loaded cost that goes well beyond the salary figure. When you factor in employer National Insurance contributions, pension contributions, holiday pay, and the overhead of recruitment, the total annual cost of an in-house bookkeeper typically sits between £34,000 and £61,000 depending on experience and hours. That’s before you account for periods of absence, training, or the time spent managing an employee.

Outsourced bookkeeping through a practice or a cloud-based accountant starts from around £100 per month for a sole trader, scaling to £500 to £1,500 per month for a more complex limited company with VAT and payroll. For most small and medium-sized businesses, that’s a significant cost saving — and it comes with the added benefit that a practice has depth of expertise across multiple areas, so if a question goes beyond pure bookkeeping, there’s someone to ask.

The in-house route starts to make financial sense only once the volume and complexity of work justifies a dedicated full-time role, or where the business genuinely needs someone on-site and immediately available throughout the working day. For most businesses under that threshold, outsourcing is the more rational choice on cost alone.

One thing we see occasionally is business owners paying for bundled packages that include services they don’t actually use. It’s worth doing a quick audit of your current arrangement to make sure the fee reflects the work being done.

Equally common — and arguably more costly — is the reverse: a business that’s outgrown its bookkeeping setup and is either doing too much in-house or relying on a sole-practitioner bookkeeper who isn’t equipped to handle VAT, payroll, and statutory accounts all together. That gap tends to show up at year-end, when the accountant doing the final accounts has to spend additional time cleaning up inconsistencies — which adds to the overall cost in a way that isn’t always visible until the invoice arrives.

The cleanest arrangement, in our view, is one where bookkeeping and accounting sit with the same practice. It removes the handoff between two separate providers, keeps the records consistently maintained throughout the year, and means the person filing your accounts already understands your numbers inside out. It also tends to make the overall fee more predictable, because there’s no duplication of work at year-end.

If you’re unsure whether your current bookkeeping setup is correctly scoped — or you’ve been quoted a figure and want to sense-check it — a straightforward conversation is usually all it takes to get clarity.