What a bookkeeper costs in Canada, with the numbers actually sourced

Almost every page ranking for this question in Canada invents its numbers. There is exactly one independently collected wage figure for Canadian bookkeepers, it comes from the federal government, and it is lower than the rates you will be quoted. Understanding the distance between those two things is the whole skill of reading a bookkeeping quote.

The wage data, and where it comes from

The Government of Canada Job Bank wage report for bookkeepers (NOC 12200) is built from the Statistics Canada Labour Force Survey. It reports what employed bookkeepers in Canada are actually paid, by province, from a reference period of 2023–2024. The wage figures were last updated on 2025-11-19.

Nationally, the low is $19.55 an hour, the median is $28.02, and the high is $45.07. At full-time hours the median works out to just under $60,000 a year in salary — before an employer adds a single dollar of payroll cost on top.

Source: Government of Canada Job Bank, wage report for NOC 12200, drawn from the Statistics Canada Labour Force Survey. Reference period 2023–2024; wages updated 2025-11-19.

Why this page does not publish a market rate range

Because there isn't one to publish. No Canadian body surveys what bookkeeping firms charge. Every dollar figure you have seen attached to Canadian bookkeeping services — hourly rates, monthly packages, catch-up pricing — was written by a company that sells bookkeeping, about its own prices or its impression of its competitors' prices. That is a market observation, not data.

The wage figures above are different in kind. They come from a national labour survey run by Statistics Canada, they are reported by the federal government, and nobody quoting them has a price to defend. That is why this page leans on them, and why it declines to invent the rest.

There is one rate on this page: ours, further down. It is published because you are entitled to know what we charge before you spend twenty minutes reading, and it is held to exactly the test above — it is a self-report, and it is labelled as one.

Why nobody sells you an hour at the median wage

A quoted service rate and an employment wage measure different things, and the gap between them is not markup for its own sake. Here is what sits inside a retail rate that is not inside a wage:

• Employer payroll cost. An employer pays Canada Pension Plan and Employment Insurance contributions on top of the wage, plus workers' compensation coverage and paid time off. On a $55,000 salary the statutory CPP and EI contributions alone add roughly one dollar for every twelve of salary; add a software seat, a workstation and the cost of hiring and it comes closer to one in eight. Both figures are worked through line by line on the in-house versus outsourced comparison.
• Software licences. Accounting software, a receipt-capture tool, a payroll module and a document portal are all paid per client or per seat. Your fee carries a share of each one, so you are not separately buying and administering four subscriptions.
• Errors-and-omissions insurance. A firm carrying professional liability coverage is paying a premium every month so that a mistake in your file has a remedy behind it. That is the cost of you not carrying the whole risk yourself.
• Review time. In a firm that works properly, someone other than the person who did the data entry looks at the file before it goes out. A second pair of eyes catches the misposted GST/HST and the duplicated supplier payment, so the error surfaces in a review instead of in a CRA notice.
• The cost of carrying the risk of being wrong. If a remittance is filed late or a return is wrong, someone absorbs the consequences and the rework. A firm prices that in. An employee simply gets paid.
• Unbilled time. Chasing you for a missing receipt, sitting on hold with CRA, onboarding your file, answering a five-minute question in March — most of that is never invoiced. It is recovered inside the rate, which is why a fee divided by the hours you can see always looks high.

None of that makes a high quote automatically fair. It means the honest comparison is not "rate versus wage." It is what the fee covers, who reviews the work, and what happens when something goes wrong.

What this practice charges

$120 an hour, for Kelly Lao's time.

Apply this page's own test to that number before you use it for anything. It is not a benchmark, it is not an average, and it is not evidence about the Canadian market — it is one practice reporting its own price, which is the same thing every other rate you have read this week is. The only figure on this page you should treat as evidence is the Job Bank wage data above, and that measures employment, not service rates.

To quote a monthly fee, we need the same things any competent firm would ask for: how many bank and credit card accounts, roughly how many transactions a month, whether GST/HST filing and payroll are in scope, and how current the books are. The contact page lists them, and the ten questions further down this page are worth asking of us as readily as of anyone else.

Why a rate above the wage can still cost a quarter of the wage

Here is the thing the wage comparison hides. A salary is a fixed annual cost and a rate is a variable one. An employee costs the same in the quiet months as in the busy ones. An hourly arrangement costs what the work actually takes.

So the comparison that decides this is not rate against wage. It is hours you need against hours you buy, and you can do that arithmetic yourself in about a minute.

Where a small business actually lands

Most small businesses do not need ten hours of bookkeeping a week. A business with two or three bank accounts, a couple of hundred transactions a month, quarterly GST/HST and a handful of employees is usually a few hours a week — and a good deal of that is the same few tasks in the same order, which is exactly the kind of work that gets faster rather than slower with practice.

Run the numbers at that volume and the shape becomes obvious. Two and a half hours a week at $120 is roughly 25% of what that salaried role costs you — for the same filings, on the same deadlines. The saving is not a discount on the work. It is that you stop paying for the fifty weeks a year of capacity you were never going to use.

What you are actually buying at either price

Neither number means much on its own, because hours are not the product. The product is that the GST/HST return goes in on your period's real due date, the payroll remittance lands before the 3% penalty starts, the books reconcile to the bank, and your accountant gets a year-end package they can work from instead of a shoebox to bill you for. A cheap arrangement that misses one payroll remittance has already cost more than the difference.

The employment-cost figure above is worked line by line, with the 2026 CRA rates and ceilings, on the in-house versus outsourced comparison. The hourly figure is this practice's own rate, and is a self-report like every other published rate in this market.

The three ways bookkeeping gets priced

Hourly

You pay for time recorded. It suits genuinely unpredictable work — a cleanup where nobody yet knows how bad the file is, or ad-hoc help alongside someone who does the day-to-day themselves. Its weakness is that your bill goes up when your records are messy, which is exactly when you can least predict it, and you have no way to budget. If you are quoted hourly, ask for an estimate in hours and a point at which the firm has to come back to you before continuing.

Monthly fixed fee

You pay the same amount every month for a defined scope. This is the common shape for ongoing work, and it is the one that makes budgeting possible, because the number does not move when a month is busy. The thing to check is the scope boundary: a fixed fee is only fixed for the volume it was quoted against. Ask what happens when your transaction count grows, and whether GST/HST and payroll sit inside the fee or beside it.

Per transaction

You pay by volume — per transaction, per bank line, or per document processed. It is honest in one specific way: it scales with the thing that actually drives the work. It also makes your bill hardest to predict, and it can quietly reward a provider for processing rather than for fixing the reason you have so many transactions in the first place.

What actually moves your quote up or down

Two businesses with identical revenue can be quoted very differently, and none of the reasons are mysterious. These are the variables a competent firm asks about before pricing anything:

• How many bank and credit card accounts. Each account is a separate reconciliation every month. Four accounts is roughly four times the closing work of one.
• Monthly transaction volume. The single biggest driver. Not revenue — the number of lines that have to be coded.
• Whether GST/HST filing is included. Preparing the numbers and actually filing the return on your period's due date are two different commitments. Confirm which one you are buying.
• Whether payroll is included, and for how many employees. Payroll adds a hard deadline every pay run, source deductions, remittances and year-end slips. Headcount and pay frequency both matter.
• Inventory. Tracked inventory means costing, counts and adjustments — a materially different job from a service business.
• Multi-currency. Foreign-currency accounts add exchange gain and loss work and revaluations at period end.
• How far behind the books are. A current file is maintenance. A file that is eighteen months behind is a project first and maintenance afterwards, and it is normally quoted separately — see what catch-up bookkeeping costs when you are behind.
• How your source documents arrive. Receipts in a shared folder, named and dated, cost less to process than a shoebox in February. This is the one variable you control completely, and it is worth real money.

Ten questions that make two quotes comparable

Quotes are hard to compare because firms bundle differently, not because one is hiding something. Ask all ten and the fees become like-for-like.

• What is inside the monthly fee, and what gets billed on top?
• Is GST/HST prepared only, or prepared and filed on my due date?
• Is payroll included — for how many employees, and how many pay runs a month?
• How many bank and credit card accounts is this quote based on?
• What monthly transaction volume is assumed, and what happens if I exceed it?
• Is year-end preparation for my accountant included, or extra?
• Who holds the software subscription, and who owns the data file if I leave?
• What is the rate for out-of-scope work, and who approves it before it starts?
• Does anyone review the file other than the person who prepared it?
• What is not included that I might assume is?

If you are still deciding whether you need this at all, the case for hiring a bookkeeper — and the honest case for waiting works through the trigger points. If you already have quotes in hand, how to check that a bookkeeper is who they say they are matters more than the fee, because bookkeeping is an unregulated profession in Canada and the price tells you nothing about competence.

If you want to see what a scope actually looks like written down, what our bookkeeping service covers and what it gets you lists each piece and where it stops.

Questions people actually ask

How much does a bookkeeper cost per month in Canada?

Nobody can honestly answer that without seeing your volume, and any page that gives you a monthly figure without asking is quoting itself. What determines the number is your bank and credit card account count, your monthly transaction volume, whether GST/HST filing and payroll are inside the fee, whether you carry inventory or foreign currency, and how far behind you are. The one independently sourced figure in this market is a wage rather than a price: the Government of Canada Job Bank reports a national median of $28.02 an hour for employed bookkeepers. Get two or three quotes against the same written scope and the comparison becomes real.

What is the average hourly rate for a bookkeeper in Canada?

There is no surveyed average for bookkeeping service rates in Canada, because no independent body collects them. The defensible number is the employment wage: the Government of Canada Job Bank, using Statistics Canada Labour Force Survey data, reports a national median of $28.02 an hour, a low of $19.55 and a high of $45.07 for bookkeepers under NOC 12200. Service rates are higher than that wage, because a firm's rate also carries employer payroll cost, software licences, professional liability insurance, review time and unbilled admin. Treat any published service rate as the publishing company's own self-report — including the one published further up this page.

Why is a bookkeeping service rate so much higher than a bookkeeper's wage?

Because a wage buys one person's time and a service rate buys a business's capacity. Inside the rate are the employer's Canada Pension Plan and Employment Insurance contributions, paid time off, software subscriptions, errors-and-omissions insurance, the time a second person spends reviewing the file before it goes out, and all the unbilled minutes spent chasing documents and waiting on CRA. The gap is not automatically fair, but it is not arbitrary either. Judge a quote on what it covers and who checks the work, not on how close it lands to an hourly wage.

What do you charge?

$120 an hour for Kelly Lao's time on work that cannot be scoped in advance — an ad-hoc question, or one-off help alongside someone who does the day-to-day themselves. Ongoing monthly bookkeeping is not sold by the hour; it is quoted as a fixed monthly fee against a written scope, because an hourly bill rises in exactly the months your records are worst.

That rate is a self-report, the same as every other Canadian bookkeeping rate you will find quoted online, and it should not be read as a market benchmark. To get a monthly figure rather than an hourly one, the contact page lists the handful of things a quote actually depends on — account count, monthly transaction volume, whether GST/HST and payroll are in scope, and how current the books are.

Isn't an hourly rate above a bookkeeper's wage a bad deal?

Not if you need fewer hours than a salary buys, which most small businesses do. A salary is a fixed annual cost — it does not shrink in the months when there is less to do. An hourly arrangement tracks the actual work.

The arithmetic is on this page and you can check it: a $55,000 salaried bookkeeper costs just over $60,000 a year fully loaded, which at this practice's rate buys around 510 hours, or about ten hours every week. Below that line the hourly arrangement is cheaper; above it the employee is. A business needing a couple of hours a week lands near a quarter of the employment cost. Put your own volume into the sum rather than trusting the ratio.

Should I pay hourly or a fixed monthly fee for bookkeeping?

A fixed monthly fee is usually better for ongoing work, because the number does not move when a month is busy and you can budget against it. Hourly makes more sense for genuinely unpredictable jobs, like a cleanup where nobody yet knows how bad the file is. If you go hourly, insist on an estimate in hours and a point where the firm has to check in with you before carrying on. If you go fixed, pin down the transaction volume and account count the fee assumes.

Does catch-up bookkeeping cost more than ongoing monthly work?

Yes, and it is normally quoted as a separate project rather than folded into a monthly fee. Catch-up work means reconstructing periods where the records may be incomplete, chasing statements from banks, and sorting out returns that were filed on estimates or not filed at all. It is slower per month than current work because nothing can be assumed. Once the file is current, the monthly fee is priced on ongoing volume instead.

Is a bookkeeper less expensive than an accountant?

Generally yes per hour, but they are not doing the same job, so the comparison only helps if you know which one you need. A bookkeeper records and reconciles what happened and keeps your filings on time. An accountant works on tax planning, structure, and the returns and engagements that need a professional designation. The common pattern is a bookkeeper handling the year and an accountant handling year-end and tax, which usually costs less overall because the accountant is not being paid to sort receipts.