Accounting Software Market Share: What 4,130 US Firms Name on Their Sites

Published accounting software market share almost always comes from vendors counting their own subscribers. We can offer a different measure: of 27,281 US accounting firms profiled from their own public websites, 4,130 name at least one platform, and QuickBooks appears on 3,369 of them against 339 for Xero.

The more interesting number is what happens at the edges. Only 64 firms in the entire corpus name Xero and no QuickBooks. If you are choosing a platform partly on who can support it, that asymmetry matters more than any feature table.

How many firms name software at all?

Not many. 4,130 firms, or 15.1% of the corpus, name a single accounting, payroll or practice platform anywhere on their site. The other 84.9% describe their services without ever saying what they work in.

Among the 4,130 who do say, most name exactly one thing: 3,235 firms name a single platform, 561 name two, 202 name three, and 132 name four or more. The whole corpus produces 5,662 firm-to-software mentions.

Names are normalised, so "QuickBooks Online", "QuickBooks Desktop" and "QBO" all count once as QuickBooks, and the Sage row covers Sage Intacct and the older Sage products together.

Does anyone run Xero without QuickBooks?

Barely. The overlap is the finding.

81% of the firms that name Xero also name QuickBooks. Xero is rarely a US firm's only platform: it is usually the second one on a QuickBooks practice's list. QuickBooks, by contrast, is a firm's only named platform 3,094 times.

The practical read: choosing QuickBooks means essentially any firm that names software can take you on. Choosing Xero means a pool of 339 firms nationally in this corpus, most of whom are generalists supporting it rather than specialists in it. Neither is a verdict on the products. It is a verdict on hiring, and it is the reason we broke the whole comparison out separately in QuickBooks vs Xero.

Who is most likely to say what they run?

Two groups, and both are predictable once you see them.

Remote firms. Of the 2,681 firms that say they work with clients remotely, 29.5% name software, against 13.6% of everyone else. A remote practice has no office to describe, so the stack becomes the thing it advertises. Remote firms also skew toward Xero: they name QuickBooks 575 times and Xero 109 times, so Xero runs at 19% of QuickBooks' rate among remote firms against 8% among the rest. More on that group in remote accounting firms.

Firms serving tech and e-commerce clients. The industry a firm serves moves the mix more than anything else we can measure.

Among firms serving software and e-commerce businesses, Xero runs at roughly a quarter to a third of QuickBooks' rate. Among firms serving dental practices it is 3%. If you run a restaurant or a dental practice on Xero, you are choosing from a genuinely small bench.

Geography moves it far less. Software naming rates by state cluster between 10% and 20%, with Florida highest of the large states at 20.3% and New York lowest at 10.6%, and Xero counts in the single digits almost everywhere outside California and Texas. That spread looks more like differences in how firms in each state write their websites than differences in what they run.

Where does the long tail live?

In one-offs. The corpus contains 1,279 distinct software strings, and 1,116 of them, 87%, are named by exactly one firm. That tail is where the vertical tools show up: practice management for law firms, property management platforms, restaurant systems, tax preparation suites, expense and document tools.

It also contains placeholders. 313 firms name something generic such as "cloud accounting software" or "accounting software (unspecified)" rather than a product, and 211 of those name a generic term and no recognisable brand at all. Those firms are telling you they work in the cloud without telling you in what.

What this is not

This is not market share. Three things separate it from one.

It measures advertising, not installs. A firm that runs QuickBooks for every client and never mentions it counts as naming nothing. Since 84.9% of firms name nothing, the unmeasured majority is far larger than the measured minority, and there is no reason to assume it splits the same way.

One of our own categories is circular. The "accounting software setup and migration" service is derived from phrases like "QuickBooks setup" and "QuickBooks ProAdvisor". 85.0% of the 2,629 firms in that category name software, which is close to a tautology rather than a finding. We have left the category out of the analysis above for that reason, and you should discount it anywhere you see it quoted.

Firms are not the market. Vendors count subscriptions, most of which belong to businesses, not to accounting firms. A platform can be large among small businesses and small among the firms that service them, and vice versa. Intuit and Xero both run their own advisor directories, which list only firms enrolled in their partner programmes, so those are not a neutral count either.

For an independent count of how many accounting firms exist in the US at all, the Census Bureau's County Business Patterns publishes establishment counts by industry code, which is a different and much broader universe than the firms with websites we can profile.

What to do with this

1. Decide on the firm before the software. A subscription takes an afternoon to change. A firm takes months.
2. If you already run a platform, filter for firms that name it. Migrating a ledger means rebuilding the chart of accounts and re-mapping history, and it is the cost people forget when comparing monthly prices. Our chart of accounts guide covers what that rebuild involves.
3. Ask what they run rather than reading it off the site. With only 15.1% of firms naming anything, absence of a logo tells you nothing.
4. If you are on Xero outside tech or e-commerce, verify firm by firm. The national pool is 339 firms here, and it thins fast by industry.

You can filter the directory for firms that name a specific platform, starting with QuickBooks bookkeepers, or browse bookkeeping services and check the software shown on each profile.

Method

What was counted. Every software, payroll and practice platform named on the public website of each of 27,281 US accounting firms in the AccountingNearYou corpus, as of 28 August 2026. Names are normalised into product families, so a firm counts once per family however many editions it lists. The result is 5,662 firm-to-software mentions across 4,130 firms and 1,279 distinct raw strings.

From what. Firms' own sites only. No vendor partner lists, no app marketplaces, no purchased data.

What these numbers do not mean. They are not installed base, licence counts or revenue share, and they are not a census. The software field reflects what a firm chose to publish, so it under-represents platforms that firms use routinely without advertising, and it over-represents platforms with marketing programmes that encourage firms to display a badge. The corpus itself undercounts firms with thin websites. Counts shift as firms rewrite their pages and as we add firms, so treat this as a snapshot of what US accounting firms said in August 2026.