Cost to Hire a Remote Accountant or Bookkeeper for a Small Business at US Rates

A US bookkeeper costs $25 to $60 an hour freelance, $300 to $1,500 a month through an outsourced firm, or $45,000 to $80,000 a year as an employee. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the national median wage for bookkeeping, accounting and auditing clerks at $49,210 a year, or $23.66 an hour, as of May 2024, with the bottom 10 percent under $34,600 and the top 10 percent over $72,660. Remote roles at growing companies tend to sit above the median rather than below it, because the pool is national instead of local.

Three things move the price more than anything else. Transaction volume is the big one: a business running 100 transactions a month is a few hours of work, while one running 2,000 across multiple bank accounts and a payment processor is a part-time job on its own. Cleanup is the second. If your books are six months behind, expect to pay a one-off catch-up fee before anyone will quote you a monthly rate, and it is often the largest single invoice you will see. Scope is the third: payroll processing, accounts receivable chasing, sales tax filings and inventory each add real hours that a basic reconciliation package does not include.

Watch the total cost, not the rate. An employee at $60,000 costs closer to $75,000 once you add payroll taxes, benefits, equipment and software, and that gap is where budgets break. We work the full calculation through in what it costs to hire a remote employee, and the role-specific version in how much it costs to hire a bookkeeper.

A freelance bookkeeper in the US charges roughly $25 to $60 an hour in 2026, with most small business work landing between $30 and $45. The spread is wide because "bookkeeper" covers everything from someone categorizing a few hundred transactions a month to a full-charge bookkeeper running payroll, sales tax and month-end close. What you are quoted depends far more on scope than on geography, which is the main thing that has changed since remote work made the market national.

Two notes on reading those numbers honestly. They are typical market ranges rather than published rates, because freelancers do not post rate cards and the same person quotes differently for a clean set of books than for a mess. And they have moved: rates quoted around 2020 commonly started nearer $20 an hour, so any figure you find from that period understates today's market by roughly a third. If you are working from an older article, adjust upward before you budget.

For calibration against employment data rather than market chatter, the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median wage for bookkeeping, accounting and auditing clerks at $23.66 an hour as of May 2024. A freelancer charges meaningfully above that because the rate has to cover their own payroll taxes, software, insurance, unbilled admin and the gaps between clients. A freelance rate and an employee wage are not comparable numbers, which is the most common mistake in this comparison.

When freelance stops being the cheap option. The arithmetic flips at around 15 to 20 hours a month. At $40 an hour, 20 hours is $800 a month, or $9,600 a year, which is already inside the range of an outsourced firm running a managed process with backup staff. Past about 30 hours a month you are paying employee money for contractor coverage, and a part-time hire on your own payroll usually costs less and gives you someone whose priorities are yours. That is the point to post the role rather than raise the retainer.

Most US small businesses spend between $150 and $900 a month on a remote freelance bookkeeper, and the number is driven by transaction volume and scope rather than by the hourly rate. A sole proprietor with a single bank account and few transactions sits at the bottom of that range. A business running accounts receivable, accounts payable and payroll sits at the top, and full-charge work with a monthly close runs higher still.

Those monthly figures are the market hourly ranges in the section above multiplied by the hours each scope typically takes. They are planning ranges for budgeting, not quoted prices, and any real quote should come after someone has looked at your transaction volume and your chart of accounts.

Two thresholds are worth knowing before you choose. Freelance stops being the cheap option somewhere around 15 to 20 hours a month, because at that point an outsourced firm retainer, commonly $300 to $1,500 a month for a small business and up to about $2,500 for full service, buys backup coverage and a reviewer for a similar spend. And a part-time employee starts to make sense when the work is steady enough to fill a fixed schedule, at which point the comparison is against the US median wage for bookkeeping, accounting and auditing clerks of $49,210 a year, or $23.66 an hour, in May 2024 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, plus payroll taxes and benefits on top.

Most small businesses need both, in that order, and they are not interchangeable. A bookkeeper records what happened: transactions, reconciliations, accounts payable and receivable, expense categorization, and the monthly close. An accountant or CPA interprets it: financial statements, tax strategy, entity structure, and anything that has to be signed and filed. Hiring a CPA at $150 to $400 an hour to categorize your card transactions is the most common way small businesses overspend on finance.

There is a middle tier worth knowing about. A full-charge bookkeeper runs the entire cycle end to end: they close the month, produce the financial statements, handle payroll, and hand your CPA a clean file at year end rather than a shoebox. For a business between roughly $1M and $10M in revenue, one good full-charge bookkeeper plus a CPA on retainer is usually cheaper and better than an office manager plus a bookkeeper plus emergency cleanup work. Expect to pay $60,000 to $85,000 for that role.

If you are still deciding, our breakdown of bookkeeper vs accountant covers where the line falls in practice. And if the role you actually need is the higher tier, the remote accounting jobs board carries CPA-track candidates rather than transaction-tier ones.

Bookkeeping is one of the few roles where a skills test is genuinely predictive, so use one. Give a short paid exercise built from a sanitized month of your own data: a bank feed with 30 to 40 transactions including three deliberate traps, such as an owner draw miscoded as an expense, a duplicate vendor payment, and a transfer between your own accounts that looks like revenue. A competent bookkeeper finds all three and asks about them. A weak one categorizes everything neatly and reconciles to a number that is quietly wrong.

Beyond the test, screen for four things. Software fluency in your stack, named specifically: QuickBooks Online and Xero are not interchangeable, and a QuickBooks Desktop veteran may struggle with a modern bank-feed workflow. Industry pattern-matching, because a bookkeeper who has done ecommerce understands merchant fee reconciliation and inventory, while one from professional services will not have seen it. The habit of asking, which is the single best predictor of accuracy: you want the person who sends you six questions a month, not the one who guesses silently. And references you actually call, ideally the client's CPA rather than the client, because the CPA knows whether the file arrives clean.

Credentials are a weak signal on their own. The QuickBooks ProAdvisor certification is free to obtain and tells you very little; the AIPB Certified Bookkeeper and NACPB licenses require experience and exams and mean more. Neither substitutes for the test.

Match it to the volume and the control you want. If the work is a few hours a week and you are happy for someone to fit you around other clients, a contract bookkeeper is cleaner and cheaper. If you want set hours, your processes, your systems, and someone who is genuinely part of the team, hire an employee and post the role.

Be careful with the classification, because bookkeeping is a role US employers get wrong often. If you set the person's schedule, require them to work in your systems under your direction, and they work for you more or less full time, they are almost certainly an employee under IRS and state tests, regardless of what the contract says. Calling them a 1099 contractor to avoid payroll tax is a real liability, and states have grown noticeably more aggressive about it. The trade-offs are covered in 1099 vs W2 remote work.

One more thing that catches employers out with remote finance hires specifically: a bookkeeper in another state creates payroll registration, withholding and unemployment obligations for you in that state, even if they are your only person there. It is manageable, but it is not free and it is not automatic. See hiring remote employees in another state before you make an offer, and which states you can employ someone in for the full map.

Bookkeeping is a role where remote-only boards work unusually well, because the entire job already lives in cloud accounting software and the candidates who want it have self-selected for working from home. You are not persuading anyone that the arrangement is possible; you are competing on scope, pay and how sane your books are.

Put four things in the first three lines of the listing: the software (QuickBooks Online, Xero, NetSuite, Sage), the monthly transaction volume, whether payroll and sales tax are in scope, and the salary range. Volume is the detail almost every listing omits and every good bookkeeper wants, because it is the only way they can tell whether your "part-time bookkeeper" role is 8 hours a week or 30. Publishing the range is the biggest single lever on application quality.

A listing here is $199 a month with the salary requirement and company verification built in, and applications come straight to your inbox or your ATS link. Full plans are on the remote job posting pricing page, and how employers hire remote workers covers the process end to end. If you are staffing more of the back office at once, the same approach applies to hiring remote developers and hiring remote sales reps. Whoever you hire, the first month decides whether it sticks, so run a real remote onboarding checklist from day one.