Set a Freelance Bookkeeping Rate: Hourly Floor and Monthly Package

Do not turn employee wages into freelance prices

BLS describes bookkeeping, accounting, and auditing clerk pay using occupational wage data. Its wage figures exclude self-employed workers. Those figures can provide employee labor-market context, but they do not establish a median freelance client rate. BLS bookkeeping occupational profile

A freelance fee must fund time outside client delivery, business operating costs, and the compensation you want to retain. It also needs to fit the service and customers you can actually serve.

Avoid assuming a certification adds a fixed dollar premium. Show what you can do reliably and price the actual assignment.

Worked example: calculate a pretax hourly floor

Assume you want $60,000 in annual owner compensation before personal taxes, have $8,000 of annual business expenses, and expect to bill 25 hours per week for 48 weeks.

• Billable hours: 25 × 48 = 1,200.
• Revenue needed before an additional reserve: $60,000 + $8,000 = $68,000.
• Hourly requirement: $68,000 ÷ 1,200 = $56.67, rounded.

At $45 for those same 1,200 hours, revenue would be $54,000. After $8,000 of expenses, $46,000 remains before personal taxes, which is $14,000 below the compensation target.

If you also want $6,000 of additional business funding for the year, the revenue target becomes $74,000 and the rate becomes $61.67. This is a chosen dollar reserve, not a universally required profit percentage.

If your $60,000 goal means after-tax spending money, this pretax example does not meet it. Estimate the applicable tax and benefit funding separately.

Quote the actual bookkeeping workload

Before offering a recurring package, inspect the books with authorization and enough detail to understand their condition. Record:

• Number of entities, accounts, currencies, and payment channels.
• Transaction volume and how transactions reach the ledger.
• Current reconciliation status and unresolved balances.
• Who handles invoicing, collections, bills, and approvals.
• Reporting frequency, close deadline, and expected meetings.
• Payroll, inventory, tax-return preparation, and other services included or excluded.

Transaction count alone is not a complete workload measure. Reconciling a payment processor with refunds and fees can take a different amount of time from categorizing the same number of simple bank transactions.

Worked example: a monthly close package

Assume a scoped client needs seven delivery hours per month and you choose a $70 internal selling-rate target. A proposed fee of $490 per month equals seven × $70.

Write the service boundaries: named entity and accounts, the defined reconciliation and close tasks, one reporting discussion, document deadlines, and how extra work is quoted. Price any initial cleanup separately so an onboarding backlog does not silently consume the monthly allowance.

If actual delivery takes nine hours, the gross realized rate becomes $490 ÷ 9 = $54.44. That is below the $56.67 pretax floor in the earlier example. Investigate the cause and revise the process, scope, or future price.

Twelve such seven-hour clients require 84 delivery hours per month and generate $5,880 monthly revenue. Check the close-week calendar as well as the average; twelve clients wanting reports on the same day create a scheduling constraint.

Keep professional responsibilities in scope

Bookkeeping support and preparing a federal tax return are different tasks. If your offer extends into compensated return preparation, check the IRS PTIN requirements and any other applicable professional rules. Do not add “tax preparation” to a package merely as a pricing tier. IRS PTIN requirements

Use the Hourly Rate calculator to test your annual plan. For the simplified pretax example, use zero tax, benefit add-ons, and extra percentage buffer to avoid introducing assumptions absent from the calculation. Then assess prospective packages against that floor and your actual delivery records.