How Much Does a CPA Cost in 2026? What the Data Actually Says

A CPA costs an average of $323 for a Form 1040 with itemized deductions plus a state return, $903 for an S corporation return and $733 for a partnership return, according to the most complete figures available, the National Society of Accountants Income and Fees survey, which was conducted in 2020 and covers data for 2019 and 2020. No current, representative national survey of CPA fees exists, and what you pay depends on the form, the market you are in and the state of your records. The newest figures are bands rather than averages, from Ignition’s 2025 pricing benchmark, a survey of 219 of its own US accounting-firm customers fielded in July 2025, in which nearly half of the firms charged between $400 and $799 for a basic individual return.

The short version: treat the 2020 survey averages as a floor rather than a quote, expect a business return to cost several times a personal one, and get the scope in writing before anyone starts work. For what the profession earns and charges more broadly, see accounting industry statistics.

How much a CPA costs, by the way they bill

Four billing shapes cover almost every engagement, and the figure you are quoted means something different in each.

Per return or per form. The standard model for tax work. The price attaches to the return, and each additional schedule carries its own fee. This is what the National Society of Accountants survey measures, and it is the only per-form fee data with a published sample behind it.

Hourly. Common for advisory work, audit representation and cleanup, and still used by smaller firms for tax preparation. The same 2020 survey put the average hourly fee for federal and state tax returns at $179.71 and for bookkeeping advisory at $108.61. Intuit’s own rate survey, conducted in November 2021 and published in March 2022, reported an average of $126 an hour for CPAs. Both are old, and the gap between them shows how little settled data exists. CPA hourly rates covers what is and is not known there.

Monthly retainer or subscription. Outsourced accounting firms sell bookkeeping, and sometimes a tax return, as a monthly plan. These are list prices rather than survey data, and the firms selling them are not all CPA firms.

Project or fixed fee. Used for defined pieces of work: a cleanup, an audit response, an offer in compromise. The 2020 survey found that firms charging a retainer for IRS audit work averaged $902, and for an offer in compromise $1,277.

Narrower versions of this question have their own pages: what a CPA charges to do taxes goes form by form, tax preparation cost compares every route including software and volume preparers, and how much a bookkeeper costs covers the work that happens before a return exists.

Average tax preparation fees by form

Every figure below is a mean, not a median. Means in this industry are pulled upward by the most complex returns in the sample, so an average is not the same thing as a typical price.

Two things about that table matter more than the numbers themselves.

The 1040 figures are for a federal return plus a state return, which is how the survey’s own column headings read. A page quoting $323 as the price of a federal 1040 is quoting it wrong.

The schedules are add-ons, not prices for a return. A sole proprietor does not pay $192; they pay the 1040 fee plus $192 plus the self-employment schedule.

The same survey also reports a minimum fee, which is the floor a firm will charge regardless of how simple the work turns out to be. For a Form 1040 with itemized deductions and a state return, the national average minimum was $249.29 against that $323 average actual fee. The minimum is the more useful figure when you are calling around, because it is the number a firm can commit to before it has seen your documents.

The survey was fielded by Association Research on behalf of the National Society of Accountants and drew 1,009 usable responses from 5,372 invitations, an 18.8 percent response rate, with almost all states represented. Its respondents are members of a society whose base is small and mid-sized practices, so it describes that end of the market rather than national firms.

What firms reported charging in 2025

A newer survey covers broad service categories rather than individual forms, and it is worth reading for where the bands sit. Ignition’s 2025 pricing benchmark, a survey of 219 of its own US accounting-firm customers fielded in July 2025, reports the share of firms sitting in each fee band by service rather than an average fee. It is not a representative sample of US firms, and it publishes no hourly rates of any kind.

All figures from the Ignition 2025/2026 U.S. Accounting and Tax Pricing Benchmark, fielded July 2025. The full band tables sit in the narrower pages: the two return types in what a CPA charges to do taxes, the monthly bookkeeping bands in how much a bookkeeper costs, and the CFO and controller bands in fractional CFO cost.

Two cautions travel with that table. The report defines a basic individual return as one with “mostly pre-filled data and some deductions but no rental property, capital gains, etc.” and does not define a business return by form at all, so neither row maps onto a named form the way the NSA table does. And the two surveys sample different populations, NSA members against one vendor’s customers, so the distance between the NSA means and these bands is not a measure of fee inflation.

Of the same 219 firms, 79.9% said they planned to raise fees in 2026, most commonly by 5% (37.1% of firms) or 10% (30.3%).

What the IRS says a return costs

The freshest official cost data is not a fee survey at all. It is the taxpayer burden estimate the IRS prints in the Form 1040 instructions, based on statutory requirements as of October 1, 2025 for a 2025 return.

The IRS defines a business filer precisely: someone filing Schedule C, E or F, or Form 2106, with their 1040. That is the closest thing to an official figure for a small business owner’s tax situation.

Read the cost column carefully, because almost every page that quotes it gets this wrong. The $290 is total out-of-pocket cost, which the IRS says includes preparation and submission fees, postage, photocopying and tax software. It blends people who filed with consumer tax software and people who paid a CPA, so it sits well below what a preparer charges. The IRS adds its own caveat: these are national averages that do not necessarily reflect a typical case, and most taxpayers experience lower than average burden.

The usage data is worth knowing alongside it. For the filing season running April 18, 2025 through April 17, 2026, the IRS counted 72,821,000 individual returns e-filed by tax professionals against 64,796,000 self-prepared, so professionals filed roughly 53 percent of e-filed returns.

What monthly outsourced services charge

If the question behind your search is really “what will this cost me every month”, the subscription market publishes its prices, and these are the most current figures on this page. All list prices as of September 2026.

The pattern to notice: almost none of the monthly bookkeeping plans include a tax return, and the firms that sell both sell them as separate line items. Comparing a monthly bookkeeping subscription against a CPA’s annual tax fee compares two different things.

What moves the price

Complexity, measured in schedules. Each additional activity adds a fee, and the IRS burden table says the same thing in hours: 21 hours for a business filer against 8 for a nonbusiness one.

Entity type. At the 2020 averages, a partnership or S corporation return costs between two and three times a personal return with itemized deductions, before the owner’s own 1040 is prepared at all.

The condition of your records. This is the largest controllable item in the survey. Of the firms responding, 78 percent charge extra for disorganized or incomplete files, at an average of $165.82. Nothing else on the add-on list is charged by so many firms.

Your market. State averages in the same survey run from $141 in South Carolina and $163 in Ohio to $552 in Maryland, $500 in Wyoming and $486 in Hawaii, against a national average of $323 for the same 1040. Treat those as evidence that location matters a great deal, not as what a return costs in a given state: 1,009 responses spread across 50 states leaves some state cells small enough for one expensive firm to move.

Credential. A CPA is not the only person who may prepare your return. As of September 1, 2026 the IRS counted 886,338 PTIN holders, of whom 209,076 were CPAs and 71,966 were enrolled agents. Roughly 24 percent of the people paid to prepare US tax returns hold the credential most clients assume their preparer has.

What the fee does not include

The same survey asked firms what they charge for separately. The share charging matters as much as the amount, because it tells you whether to expect the item on your invoice.

All figures from the National Society of Accountants survey covering 2019 and 2020.

Two of those deserve a note. The firm’s deadline is not the filing deadline: on average, firms that charge for late information set their cutoff 16 days before the filing date. And in-person representation at an IRS audit is a different engagement with its own economics, charged by 84 percent of firms at an average hourly fee of $167.63, and 68 percent of firms ask for a retainer on IRS audit work, averaging $902.

What a typical business actually pays

The arithmetic below uses the 2020 survey averages, which means it produces a 2020 answer. It is a structure for your own quote, not a forecast.

A sole proprietor with itemized deductions. The 1040 with Schedule A and a state return at $323, plus Schedule C at $192, plus Schedule SE at $41:

$323 + $192 + $41 = $556

The survey does not publish that combined figure; it is the sum of three of its own line items, each a mean.

An S corporation owner. The 1120S at $903, plus the owner’s personal 1040 with itemized deductions and a state return at $323:

$903 + $323 = $1,226

If the records arrive disorganized, add the average surcharge of $165.82 and the figure becomes $1,391.82. If the firm also prepares W-2s and 1099s, add $69.75 and $67.72.

The same owner buying a monthly service instead. At September 2026 list prices, 1-800Accountant’s Starter plan is $299 a month billed annually, which is $3,588 a year, and includes the entity return and the personal return but provides bookkeeping software rather than a bookkeeper. Pilot’s Essentials bookkeeping at $99 a month is $1,188 a year, and Pilot’s partnership and S corporation tax service starts at $2,000 a year, for $3,188 before any add-on. Neither figure is comparable to the $1,226 above, because both include bookkeeping through the year and the $1,226 is tax preparation alone.

How to compare two quotes

Ask each firm the same five questions, and the numbers become comparable.

• Which returns and which schedules does the fee cover, and does it include the state return? A quote for a 1040 that excludes the state filing is not the same product as one that includes it.
• Is that a minimum fee or a fixed fee? The survey’s own gap between a $249.29 average minimum and a $323 average actual fee for the same return is the size of that question.
• What triggers an additional charge, and at what rate? Disorganized records, late information, extensions and payroll forms are the usual four.
• Who does the work, who reviews it and who signs the return? The signature carries the responsibility.
• What happens if the IRS writes? Representation on a return the firm prepared and representation on one it did not are priced differently.

Ask for the answers by email. A firm that will not put scope in writing before the engagement will not be easier to pin down afterward.

When the cheaper option is the wrong one

Sometimes the choice is not about price at all, because only a CPA can do the work.

Audited and reviewed financial statements are restricted to CPAs in licensed firms. If a lender, investor, franchisor or regulator asks for them, the decision is made for you. One concrete example: under the SBA’s SOP 50 10 8, effective June 1, 2025, a CAPLine over $1,000,000 requires compiled, reviewed or audited financial statements rather than borrower-prepared ones. From October 1, 2026, SOP 50 10 8.1 also requires a Quality of Earnings report on business expansion and initial acquisition transactions with a purchase price of $3 million or more, though the SBA specifies an “independent qualified financial professional” rather than a CPA.

Representation before the IRS is the opposite case. CPAs, enrolled agents and attorneys all hold unlimited representation rights, meaning they can represent any taxpayer on any matter before any IRS office whether or not they prepared the return. An enrolled agent is licensed federally by the IRS for tax matters, qualifying either by passing a three-part IRS exam or through experience as a former IRS employee, and satisfies that requirement exactly as a CPA does. If tax is the whole of the problem, paying CPA rates for it is a choice rather than a requirement.

And if the underlying problem is that nobody is keeping the books, a tax preparer is the expensive way to fix it. Cleanup billed at tax-season rates costs more than doing it properly through the year, either in accounting software you run yourself or through a bookkeeper.

How to find the right one

Check the credential before you check the price. A CPA license is issued by a state board of accountancy, and the board’s own register is the authoritative lookup; NASBA’s licensee database, which counted 650,667 actively licensed CPAs as of August 27, 2026, aggregates 53 of the 55 licensing jurisdictions. For anyone preparing returns for a fee, the IRS publishes a searchable directory of preparers who hold a recognized credential or an Annual Filing Season Program record of completion. Our directory lists practices by state and city, with a verification seal for those whose credentials match IRS records. If what you actually need is someone to interpret the numbers rather than file them, fractional CFO work is a different role at a different price.

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