Accountant Pricing Transparency: 140 of 27,281 Firms Name a Number

If it feels impossible to find out what an accountant charges before you call one, that is because it very nearly is. Across 27,281 US accounting firms profiled from their own public websites, 2,176 say anything at all about price, and 140 name an actual dollar figure. That is one firm in 195.

The 2,036 firms in between are the interesting group. They have decided to say something about money and then said something that carries almost no information, and the shapes those statements take are consistent enough to be worth cataloguing.

How many accounting firms publish a price?

For comparison, 4,130 firms name the software they work in and 17,702 say they hold a CPA. Firms are roughly 30 times more likely to tell you their platform than their price, and 126 times more likely to tell you their credential.

What do they say instead?

We sorted every pricing statement into the strongest signal it contains, so each firm appears once. Ranked from most informative to least.

The single most common thing an accounting firm publishes about price is that the first meeting is free. 712 firms, five times the number that name a figure. It is a real offer and it is worth taking, but as pricing information it tells you only that the discovery call is not billed.

The 423 firms in the adjective row are the ones to be careful with. "Affordable" and "competitive" are the two dominant words, and both are unfalsifiable. Every firm believes its prices are reasonable.

The 637 in the last row are statements our buckets could not classify, and they are worth a mention because some are genuinely useful: no-surprise billing guarantees, month-to-month terms with a stated notice period, contingent fee arrangements on tax savings, discounts for cleaning up prior years, and fees capped as a percentage. Several of those tell you more about your risk than a headline rate would.

Which services are most likely to come with a number?

The gradient runs from productised to bespoke. Bookkeeping carries the most dollar figures of any service at 93, because monthly bookkeeping is the one job in accounting that can honestly be sold as a subscription. Audit, forensic work and business valuation sit at the bottom, under 5%, because each engagement is scoped from scratch and any published number would be misleading.

Fractional CFO is the outlier worth noting: only 2,034 firms offer it, but 31 of them name a figure, the third highest count in the table against a small base. That service was productised from the start.

Who publishes prices?

Not the firms you would expect, and the strongest predictor is not credentials.

Remote firms publish prices at more than double the rate of everyone else. So do firms that name their software. Both are the same underlying thing: a practice that has to sell without a handshake writes a more informative website.

Holding a CPA makes no difference at all, 7.9% against 8.1%, which is as close to identical as this data gets. On actual dollar figures the non-CPA firms are slightly ahead, 66 of 9,579 against 74 of 17,702. Pricing transparency is a marketing choice, not a credential effect, and you should not read a published price as a signal about qualifications in either direction.

What do the published numbers look like?

Among the 140 firms that name a figure, the recurring shapes are monthly bookkeeping packages, an entry price with an explicit "starting at", and flat annual fee agreements. Bookkeeping subscriptions in this group commonly start in the low hundreds a month and run to several thousand for full outsourced accounting. Hourly rates appear far less often than fixed fees.

We are not publishing a price range from those 140, and we would rather explain why than give you a number that looks authoritative. A self-selected sample of the 0.5% of firms confident enough to post a price is exactly the sample that will not represent the market: the firms that post are disproportionately remote, productised and selling a subscription. Averaging them would produce a figure that is precise and wrong. For grounded ranges built the proper way, see how much a bookkeeper costs and how much a CPA costs.

What to ask when a firm publishes nothing

Since 92% of firms will not tell you before the call, the call has to do the work. Six questions, in the order that saves the most time.

1. What is the fee, and is it fixed or hourly? Ask for the structure before the number. It determines everything else.
2. What exactly is in scope each month? Get the deliverables named: bank reconciliations, a monthly close, financial statements, payroll runs, the annual return. "Bookkeeping" covers all and none of those.
3. What is the rate for anything out of scope? This is where fixed-fee arrangements quietly become expensive, and it is the question most people forget to ask.
4. Is there a cleanup or onboarding fee? If your books are behind, there almost certainly is, and it is usually billed separately from the monthly fee. Our catch-up bookkeeping guide covers how that work is normally scoped.
5. Who does the work, and is any of it subcontracted? Especially relevant with a remote firm, where 15.8% publish prices but the delivery chain is harder to see.
6. What are the notice period and the exit terms? Ask who owns the file and how long an export takes. Firms that publish month-to-month terms tend to answer this crisply.

The IRS publishes its own guidance on choosing a paid preparer, including a warning about fees based on a percentage of your refund, at Choosing a Tax Professional. It is short and worth reading before any first call.

You can browse bookkeeping services and check the profile of any firm you shortlist for a published price before you dial.

Method

What was counted. Any statement about price, fees, rates or free consultations published on the public website of each of 27,281 US accounting firms in the AccountingNearYou corpus, as of 28 August 2026, captured verbatim into a pricing field. Statements were classified by pattern matching on that text and assigned to the single strongest signal each contains, so the six categories are mutually exclusive and sum to the 2,176 firms that said anything. "Names a dollar figure" means the text contains an actual amount.

From what. Firms' own websites. Nothing was gathered by contacting firms, requesting quotes or purchasing rate cards.

What these numbers do not mean. This is a measure of what firms publish, not of what they charge. A firm with no published price is not expensive and a firm with one is not cheap. Because classification is pattern based, an unusual phrasing can land in the "something else" bucket or be missed entirely, and the count of firms publishing a price is a floor rather than an exact figure. The corpus is not a census and undercounts firms with thin websites, which are also the firms least likely to publish anything about price, so the true share across all US firms is probably lower than 8%. Figures move as firms rewrite their sites: treat this as a snapshot of August 2026.