How Much Does a CPA Cost? Hourly, Monthly, and Per-Service Prices

Tax professionals who bill by the hour charge $182 on average, and half of them charge between $129 and $250, according to the 2025 National Association of Tax Professionals fee study reported by Accounting Today. Most people never see an hourly bill, though, because most CPA work is sold at a fixed price: an average of $280 for a basic individual return, $733 to $913 for a business return on the most recent national survey, and $350 to $3,000 a month for ongoing small business service, depending on whether you’re buying bookkeeping, tax, advisory, or all three. What you pay comes down to what you’re hiring the CPA to do, how complicated your finances are, and the state your records are in.

How much does a CPA cost per hour?

Around $180 for tax work, with a wide spread by market and firm. The NATP 2025 study put the average hourly rate at $182, up from $179 in 2023. The National Society of Accountants survey (2020-2021 edition, the last with this level of detail) broke rates out by type of work.

Type of work	Average hourly fee	Source
Tax preparation and tax services	$174 to $182	NSA 2020-2021, NATP 2025
Bookkeeping and write-up work	$106	NSA 2020-2021
Offers in compromise	$201	NSA 2020-2021
IRS audit representation	$168	NSA 2020-2021
Expert witness case review and preparation, all fields	$450 median	SEAK 2024 survey
Ad hoc strategic advisory, our published rate	$395	Blue Cloud CPA

Those are billing rates, which aren’t the same as what accountants earn. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts median pay for accountants and auditors at $83,680 a year, or $40.23 an hour, as of May 2025. The gap between $40 and $182 is the firm: software, insurance, licensing, review time, and the hours in every week that can’t be billed to anyone.

How much does a CPA cost for a tax return?

An average of $280 for a basic Form 1040 prepared by a CPA, per the NATP 2025 study, against $228 for an enrolled agent and about $185 for a preparer with no credential. Schedules stack on top: $53 to $61 for itemizing, $123 to $135 for a Schedule C business, $56 to $66 for investment sales. The NSA survey’s national averages for business returns were $733 for a partnership return, $903 for an S corporation, and $913 for a C corporation.

Those business figures are five years old, so quotes today are higher. The NSA’s 2024 survey summary puts a corporate Form 1120 at $750 to $1,250 and an itemized Form 1040 at $300 to $600. The tax preparation cost guide has the full tables, form by form, and the LLC tax preparation cost guide covers how an LLC’s tax classification sets its price.

How much does a CPA cost per month?

Anywhere from $350 to $3,000 a month for a small business that wants its books kept, depending on what else the fee covers. Monthly bookkeeping alone runs $350 to $1,000 at our published prices, and a bundle of books, tax, and advisory from one firm is at the top. A tax-only membership costs less, about $160 a month. A fractional CFO is a separate tier above that.

Monthly service	What you get	Published prices
Tax membership	Annual returns, quarterly estimates, a routine notice handled, email support	From $1,895 a year at our firm
Bookkeeping	Monthly reconciliation and close, financial statements, tax-ready books	Pilot from $99, Bench $199 to $649, QuickBooks Live from $300, ours from $350
Books, tax, and advisory bundled	All of the above from one firm, with regular review meetings	Ours from $875, $1,425, and $2,995 by business size
Fractional CFO	Forecasting, reporting, and decision support on top of clean books	Pilot from $1,750, ours from $1,750

The vendor prices come from each company’s own pricing page as of September 2026: Bench, QuickBooks Live, and Pilot. Ours are on the pricing page. When you compare, look at what each plan includes, in particular whether a CPA reviews the books and whether the same firm files the return.

How much does a CPA cost for a small business?

For a typical small business, plan on $4,000 to $14,000 a year for the core of it: monthly bookkeeping, the business return, and the owner’s personal return. The low end is a software-first bookkeeping service at $200 to $300 a month plus two returns at the survey averages. The high end is $1,000 a month of bookkeeping plus CPA-firm returns. A business with under $25,000 a month in expenses is usually near the bottom of that range. One with payroll, inventory, several states, or $1 million or more in revenue moves toward the top and past it once advisory work is added.

The cheapest structure is rarely the lowest sticker price. Buying bookkeeping from one provider, the tax return from another, and advice from a third means three fees and nobody responsible for whether the pieces agree. Year-end cleanup, where the tax preparer fixes a year of bookkeeping before starting the return, is the most common surprise on a small business’s accounting bill. The small business accountant cost guide breaks the annual budget down by business size.

Why does a CPA cost more than other tax preparers?

Partly credentials and partly the kind of work CPAs take on. A CPA license takes a degree, the four-part Uniform CPA Exam, supervised experience, and continuing education every year. Under the IRS’s preparer rules, CPAs, enrolled agents, and attorneys have unlimited rights to represent clients before the IRS on audits, collections, and appeals. A preparer with no credential has no authority to represent clients, unless they’ve completed the IRS’s Annual Filing Season Program, and then only for returns they prepared and signed.

On a W-2 return with the standard deduction, that difference won’t show up in the result, and the $95 average premium for a CPA isn’t buying much. It starts to matter when the return involves a business, a rental, equity compensation, multiple states, a foreign account, or an open IRS notice, where the cost of a wrong answer is far bigger than the fee gap.

What makes a CPA’s fee go up or down?

Records, more than anything. In the 2020-2021 NSA survey, 78.1% of preparers charged extra for disorganized or incomplete information, $166 on average for a tax return, and a full year of bookkeeping reconstruction costs far more than that. Owners who deliver reconciled books pay the quoted price. Owners who deliver a box pay for the box.

After records, the drivers are the number of entities, the number of states, payroll, inventory, foreign activity, and how late in the season you show up. Rush work in the last two weeks before a deadline often carries a premium. Fixed fees protect you from the meter, and they’re now the norm: in a 2024 survey of 345 firms, 54% priced tax preparation on a fixed or value basis, and 57% planned to raise fees across all services the following year.

What does Blue Cloud CPA charge?

Every price we charge is published and fixed in writing before work starts. Individual returns start at $275, business returns at $1,295, bookkeeping at $350 a month, payroll at $145 a month plus $20 per employee, the bundled Blue Cloud Complete plans at $875 a month, and fractional CFO service at $1,750 a month. All of those are fixed fees, so a longer call or one more question doesn’t change the invoice. The full list, add-ons included, is on the pricing page.

What should I do next?

List what you need done over the next 12 months: which returns, whether you want the books kept, whether you run payroll, and whether you want someone to call before big decisions. Then ask each firm for a fixed annual number for that list, in writing, with the add-ons priced. A quote you can compare is worth more than a low hourly rate you can’t.

• The tax preparation cost guide has national average fees for every common return and schedule.
• The bookkeeping cost guide covers monthly bookkeeping prices and what changes them.
• The fractional CFO cost guide covers what CFO-level help costs against a full-time hire.
• The guide on when to hire a CPA covers the points where a growing business outgrows doing it alone.

This guide is general information, not tax advice for your specific situation. Which points apply, and how, depends on your facts.