The best published benchmark for UK bookkeeping rates is the 6 Figure Bookkeeper Pricing Report 2025, a survey of practising UK bookkeepers: median hourly rate £33.36 (mean £35.67), median monthly fee for routine bookkeeping £150.50, with £101 to £200 a month the single most common band. Advertised pricing on UK practice websites runs wider, commonly £20 to £45 an hour or £100 to £500 a month on a fixed retainer, and per-transaction pricing, where offered, typically £0.50 to £2.00 per item. There is no official government price index for bookkeeping, so any article quoting a single national average without a source is inventing one.
What actually sets your price is not turnover. It is transaction volume, VAT status, and how much of the record capture is already automated. A consultancy invoicing four clients a month costs a fraction of what a café with daily takings, weekly supplier deliveries and a card terminal costs, even at identical turnover. Below: the three pricing models, a freelance versus practice versus in-house versus software comparison, a worked transaction-volume example you can rerun on your own numbers, and what Making Tax Digital for Income Tax adds from 6 April 2026.
Bookkeeper Hourly Rates, Monthly Fees and Per-Transaction Prices
Almost every UK bookkeeping pricing structure falls into one of three models. They are not interchangeable, and the cheapest one depends entirely on how predictable your business is.
| Model | Typical range | Source and date | Best suited to | Main risk |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hourly | £20 to £45 per hour (survey median £33.36) | Advertised range, checked Aug 2026; median from the 2025 pricing survey[2] | Ad hoc work, catch-up jobs, erratic volume | Open-ended bill. No incentive for the bookkeeper to work faster. |
| Fixed monthly retainer | £100 to £500 per month (survey median £150.50) | Advertised range, checked Aug 2026; median from the 2025 pricing survey[2] | Steady businesses wanting a predictable cost line | Priced against an assumed volume band. Exceed it and the fee is reviewed. |
| Per transaction | £0.50 to £2.00 per item | Typical advertised range, checked Aug 2026 | Seasonal or spiky volume (retail, events, ecommerce) | Definition of "transaction" varies. Get it in writing. |
| Catch-up or rescue work | £30 to £60 per hour | Typical advertised range, checked Aug 2026 | Businesses several months or years behind | Often quoted per hour precisely because the scope is unknown. |
Retainers dominate for a reason. Both sides prefer a known number, and a bookkeeper who has priced a job properly is usually cheaper on a retainer than the same work billed by the hour, because they are not padding for uncertainty. The survey data shows why the "average" is slippery: one cluster of bookkeepers charges £100 to £200 a month, another charges £300 to £500 or more, which is why the mean monthly fee (£288.94) sits nearly double the median.
The trap in per-transaction bookkeeping prices is the definition. Some practices count a bank line as one transaction. Others count the bank line and the matching invoice as two. On 1,000 items a month that distinction is the difference between £500 and £1,000. Ask before you sign.
What Actually Drives Bookkeeping Prices for a Small Business
Four factors do most of the work.
- Transaction volume. The single biggest driver. Bookkeeping is per-item work, so 900 lines costs roughly ten times what 90 lines costs, regardless of the pounds involved.
- VAT registration. Once you cross the £90,000 rolling twelve-month VAT registration threshold, quarterly returns, partial exemption checks and correct rate coding all enter scope. Expect this to add materially to a quote.
- Payroll. Usually priced separately, commonly per payslip per month, and a genuinely different discipline. Real Time Information submissions and P32 reconciliation are not bookkeeping.
- State of the records. A business handing over a clean Xero file with connected bank feeds and Dext capture costs far less than one handing over a carrier bag. Rescue work is priced accordingly.
Location matters less than people expect. A cloud bookkeeper working from Wrexham can service a business in Soho, and most do. Where geography still bites is in-house hiring, and in practices that operate purely face to face.
A Worked Example: Pricing by Transaction Volume
Take a VAT-registered trades business with 250 transactions a month (bank lines plus supplier invoices, counted once each) and reasonably clean records. Three ways the same job gets priced:
| Basis | Calculation | Monthly cost |
|---|---|---|
| Per transaction at £0.90 per item | 250 × £0.90 | £225 |
| Hourly at the £33.36 survey median | About 6 hours of processing and reconciliation × £33.36 | £200 (rounded from £200.16) |
| Fixed retainer, priced against a 200 to 300 item band | Quoted, VAT return preparation included | £220 to £280 |
The three land within about 25% of each other, which is the point: a sensible quote on any basis should reconcile against the other two. Divide any retainer by the hours the work should take. If the implied hourly rate falls under about £18 or over £55, ask what you are missing, because either the scope is thinner than you think or you are paying for something that is not in the letter of engagement.
What a Bookkeeper Does That an Accountant Does Not
The line matters because paying the wrong rate for the wrong work is the most common way small businesses overspend here.
| Task | Bookkeeper | Accountant |
|---|---|---|
| Bank reconciliation, sales and purchase ledgers, expense coding | Yes, the core job | Can, but at accountancy rates |
| VAT return preparation and submission | Yes, commonly in scope | Yes, often at a higher fee |
| Payroll and RTI submissions | Often, priced per payslip | Often, priced per payslip |
| Credit control and supplier payment runs | Sometimes, check the quote | Rarely |
| Statutory accounts filed at Companies House | No | Yes |
| CT600 corporation tax return, SA100 and SA103 self assessment | No | Yes |
| Advice on structure, remuneration and reliefs | No | Yes |
If your accountant charges accountancy rates and spends five hours a month doing data entry, you are paying several times what a bookkeeper would charge for identical work. That is the crossover most businesses miss. What accountants themselves charge for the statutory side is a separate budget line with its own moving parts, and our guide to UK accountancy fees covers it in the same level of detail as this page covers bookkeeping. The underlying record-keeping duty is not optional either way: Companies Act 2006 s.386 requires every company to keep records that show and explain its transactions.
As ICAEW qualified accountants, the pattern we see work best in small companies is a bookkeeper monthly through the year and an accountant at year-end, with one conversation between them in month ten so nothing surprises anyone in month twelve.
Freelance, Practice, In-House or Software: Realistic Monthly Costs
| Option | Realistic monthly cost | What you get | What you carry |
|---|---|---|---|
| Freelance bookkeeper | £100 to £350 for most small businesses | One named person, flexible scope, usually the cheapest professional option | Single point of failure: their holiday, sickness and capacity are your risk |
| Bookkeeping through a practice | £150 to £500+, typically 20 to 40% above freelance for the same volume | Cover within the team, review layer, smoother year-end handover if the same firm does the accounts | Higher fee, and you may not deal with the same person each month |
| In-house employee (£28,000 salary) | About £2,675 (£32,103 a year, see below) | Full-time attention, on-site, immediate answers | Employer NI, pension, holiday, sickness, recruitment and idle capacity |
| Software only (Xero, QuickBooks, FreeAgent, Sage) | Roughly £10 to £35 + VAT by tier, plus your own time | Bank feeds, invoice capture, VAT return preparation | All judgement calls, all reconciliation, all errors are yours |
The in-house comparison is usually done wrong, because people compare a salary to a fee and forget the on-costs. Take a bookkeeper on £28,000:
| Cost element | Annual amount | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Gross salary | £28,000 | Assumed full-time salary |
| Employer National Insurance | £3,450 | 15% on earnings above the £5,000 secondary threshold |
| Auto-enrolment pension (employer minimum) | £653 | 3% of qualifying earnings (£6,240 to £50,270 band) |
| Fully loaded cost | £32,103 | Before software, equipment, holiday or sickness cover |
Two caveats. If the company is eligible for the Employment Allowance (up to £10,500, with single-director companies excluded), that employer NI figure may be covered, which materially changes the comparison for a business already running payroll. And the £32,103 buys you one person with no cover: holiday, sickness and resignation are your problem, not a supplier's.
Against that, outsourced bookkeeping at £500 a month is £6,000 a year. The lines cross somewhere around 20 to 25 hours of genuine weekly work, which for most small businesses means a few hundred transactions a week before an in-house hire makes arithmetic sense.
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When DIY Plus Software Is Genuinely Enough
Not every business needs to pay any of the rates on this page, and a firm that tells you otherwise is selling, not advising. Doing your own books on a cloud subscription is a perfectly sound answer when all of the following hold:
- You are under a few dozen transactions a month and not VAT-registered, so a coding error costs you a correction, not a penalty.
- Reconciliation takes you under three or four hours a month. Above that, your time at even £30 an hour costs more than the survey-median bookkeeper doing it faster.
- Your income mix is simple: one trade, no payroll, no stock, no marketplace settlements hiding hundreds of orders in one payout.
Entry-level cloud subscriptions typically run in the region of £10 to £35 a month plus VAT depending on tier, and list prices are revised most years, so check the vendor's current pricing page rather than any figure in an article. The honest crossover: software plus your own time is the cheapest option right up until VAT registration, quarterly MTD filing or sheer volume makes an error expensive, at which point it stops being cheap and starts being a hobby.
What Making Tax Digital Adds From April 2026
This is the change most likely to move your bookkeeping bill in the next three years. Making Tax Digital for Income Tax becomes mandatory in phases, based on qualifying income (gross self-employment plus property income, before expenses):
- 6 April 2026: qualifying income above £50,000 (tested on the 2024/25 tax year)
- 6 April 2027: qualifying income above £30,000 (tested on 2025/26)
- 6 April 2028: qualifying income above £20,000 (tested on 2026/27)
Partnerships are in scope at a later date that HMRC has not yet set. The practical effect is that records must be digital and updates go to HMRC quarterly, followed by a final declaration. That converts bookkeeping from an annual chore into a quarterly discipline.
Where a business already keeps monthly records in compatible software, the incremental cost is often just the submissions themselves. Where a business has been dropping a bag of receipts on someone in January, the cost rises, sometimes sharply, because the work that used to be compressed into one messy job now has to happen four times a year properly. Our VAT and Making Tax Digital section covers the software and submission mechanics; the sole trader guides cover which income counts toward the threshold.
Three Worked Profiles
A Stockport landscaping sole trader, £68,400 turnover, around 90 transactions a month, not VAT-registered. Roughly three to five hours of bookkeeping monthly. Expect £120 to £200 a month on a retainer. Qualifying income above £50,000 puts this business in Making Tax Digital for Income Tax from 6 April 2026, so quarterly updates should be priced in now rather than discovered in April.
A two-director consultancy in Norwich, £197,600 turnover, VAT-registered, around 60 transactions a month. Low volume, higher complexity. Bookkeeping here is often £150 to £300 a month, with the VAT return the main driver rather than the transaction count. The bigger spend for this business is accountancy, not bookkeeping, because dividend planning and the CT600 matter more than data entry.
A Bristol harbourside ecommerce limited company, £412,000 turnover, around 1,100 transactions a month across two marketplaces. Fifteen to 25 hours monthly, so roughly £450 to £900 depending on how much marketplace settlement reconciliation is involved. Marketplace payouts are the cost driver: a single monthly payout hiding 400 orders, fees and refunds is more work than 400 clean bank lines, not less.
Questions to Ask Before You Hire a Bookkeeper
- What volume is this priced against, and what happens if I exceed it? Most retainers assume a band. Get the band and the review trigger in writing.
- Is the year-end handover pack included? This is the most commonly excluded item and the most expensive to buy later, because your accountant rebuilds it at accountancy rates.
- Who owns the software subscription? If the bookkeeper owns your Xero file, moving practices becomes their decision as much as yours.
- Who supervises you for anti-money-laundering purposes? Bookkeeping is not a reserved activity in the UK, so anyone can call themselves a bookkeeper, but anyone providing bookkeeping services in business must be AML-supervised, either by a professional body (ICB, AAT, ICAEW, ACCA) or directly by HMRC. Ask which one, and ask for the supervision number. A bookkeeper who cannot answer that is a compliance problem, not a bargain.
- How do you count a transaction? If any part of the fee is per item, the definition decides the bill.
You can compare the tax side of your own numbers using our calculators before any of those conversations.
The Short Answer
Budget £100 to £200 a month if you are a low-volume sole trader, £200 to £400 if you are a VAT-registered small limited company, and £450 or more once you are past a few hundred transactions a month. Treat the surveyed £33.36 median hourly rate as the sanity check on any retainer: divide the fee by the hours the work should take, and if the implied rate is under £18 or over £55, ask why.
If your qualifying income was above £50,000 in 2024/25 and you are still keeping records on a spreadsheet, the trigger for getting advice is now, not next April. Quarterly filing under Making Tax Digital for Income Tax started on 6 April 2026, and the first quarter is the expensive one to get wrong. Our services page sets out how the bookkeeping and year-end pieces fit together, and the bookkeeping and compliance guides cover the record-keeping side.
This article is general guidance on typical UK market rates and tax rules, not personal advice. Rate figures are either cited survey data or clearly labelled advertised ranges observed in August 2026, not published statistics.
Sources
- gov.uk: Check when to sign up for Making Tax Digital for Income Tax - GOV.UK (£50k April 2026, £30k April 2027, £20k April 2028)
- 6figurebookkeeper.com: The 6 Figure Bookkeeper Pricing Report 2025 (median hourly rate £33.36, mean £35.67; median monthly fee £150.50, mean £288.94; £101 to £200 the most common monthly band at 32.8%)
- gov.uk: Rates and thresholds for employers 2025 to 2026 - GOV.UK (employer NIC 15% above £5,000 secondary threshold; Employment Allowance £10,500)
- gov.uk: Register for VAT: When to register - GOV.UK (£90,000 registration threshold)
- gov.uk: Workplace pensions: contributions - GOV.UK (3% employer minimum on qualifying earnings £6,240 to £50,270)