Outsourced Bookkeeping Rates UK: What It Really Costs and What Moves the Number

The first cost case for outsourcing usually fits on one line. On one side sits a job advert drafted at £29,000 for an experienced bookkeeper. On the other sits a quote of £1,500 a month for a dedicated offshore bookkeeper. Underneath, someone has written a saving of £11,000. It looks tidy, and it’s wrong in both directions.

The salary isn’t what the hire costs. Add employer National Insurance, pension, a software seat, a desk, and a training allowance, and that bookkeeper costs nearly £38,000 a year before a recruiter has been paid. The quote isn’t what outsourcing costs either, because your reviewer’s time and a seat in your practice software sit on your side of the line. Worked through properly, the saving in that example is closer to £13,800. In another practice, the same exercise can show no saving at all.

That’s rarely a pricing problem. It’s a comparison problem, and it has a handful of usual causes.

We’ve worked on UK accounting for more than 15 years and act as the back office for UK practices, handling bookkeeping, VAT, payroll and year-end accounts from India. That gives us an obvious interest in how this comparison comes out, so every figure below is either from a public source or a stated assumption you can change, and there’s a full section on where outsourcing loses. This piece compares outsourced bookkeeping rates in the UK across the three pricing models, costs a UK hire line by line for 2026/27, names the five variables that genuinely move a quote, and works through a 40-client portfolio.

How outsourced bookkeeping is priced

Practices that outsource bookkeeping in the UK will meet three pricing models. Before comparing any numbers, be precise about which one you’re buying, because each puts the risk of a bad month in a different place.

1. Hourly rates

You pay for the time logged, often in pre-bought blocks. UK freelance bookkeepers commonly charge £20 to £40 an hour, and the 2025 UK pricing report from The 6 Figure Bookkeeper put the median at £33.36. Offshore teams usually charge £12 to £20 an hour for ad hoc work.

Hourly suits catch-up projects, one-off clean-ups, and practices whose volume bunches around VAT quarters and January. The risk of a messy month sits with you, so agree a cap and check whether time spent on queries is billed.

2. Dedicated full-time equivalent (FTE)

You pay a fixed monthly fee for one person who works only on your clients, in your software, to your checklists. Current market rates run from around £1,000 to £2,000 a month for a bookkeeper or accountant, depending on experience, with senior reviewers and managers above that.

This usually gives the lowest effective hourly rate, but only while the person is busy. It starts to make sense at around 120 hours a month of steady, recurring work. Below that, you’re paying for idle time. Ask how holiday and sickness are covered, and how quickly a replacement arrives if your person leaves.

3. Fixed job-based fees

You pay a set fee per client, per return or per month of bookkeeping, often banded by transaction volume. For context, the same survey found a median monthly fee of about £150 for routine bookkeeping, with a sizeable group of bookkeepers charging £300 to £500 or more. That’s the price range your clients recognise, and whatever you pay a provider has to leave room for your review and your margin.

Fixed fees give certainty per job and make your own pricing easy to explain. The provider carries the risk of a difficult month and prices it in, so on clean, automated clients you can end up paying for risk that isn’t there. Per-transaction pricing is a variation on this model. Get the definition of a transaction in writing, because a bank line, a sales invoice and a receipt may each count separately.

Many practices end up with a mix: a dedicated person for the recurring core and hourly support for peaks. You can see how our outsourced bookkeeping services are structured, and whichever provider you speak to, ask whether you can change model once your real volumes are clear.

What a UK bookkeeper actually costs in 2026/27

Salary is the start of the calculation, not the answer. Here’s an experienced bookkeeper on £29,000, close to the current national average for the role, costed for the 2026/27 tax year.

Cost component	Annual cost	Basis
Salary	£29,000	Close to the national average
Employer National Insurance	£3,600	15% on earnings above £5,000
Employer pension	£683	3% minimum on qualifying earnings between £6,240 and £50,270
Software seat	£1,200	Practice management, Microsoft 365 and add-ons (our assumption)
Desk space	£3,000	About £250 a month; less if you have a spare desk (our assumption)
Training and membership	£500	Allowance (our assumption)
Ongoing annual cost	£37,983
Recruitment fee	£5,800	Year one only, at 20% of salary
Laptop, screens and headset	£1,200	Year one only (our assumption)
Year-one cost	£44,983

The National Insurance and pension figures come from HMRC’s rates and thresholds for employers 2026 to 2027 and The Pensions Regulator’s earnings thresholds. Recruitment agencies typically charge 15% to 20% of first-year salary for roles like this.

The number that matters is cost per productive hour. Holiday doesn’t get its own line because it’s already in the salary, but it cuts what you receive. With 28 days of statutory leave, a 37.5-hour week gives about 1,740 available hours a year. Take out sickness, training, meetings and admin (we assume 85% of available time goes on client work) and around 1,480 productive hours remain. That puts the real cost at about £26 an hour ongoing, or £30 in year one.

The four to six months before a junior is productive

Hiring junior looks like the obvious saving. Take a junior on £25,000, just above the National Living Wage of £12.71 an hour for a full-time week. With National Insurance, pension, software, desk and training, the cost is about £33,300 a year, or £2,770 a month.

Plan on four to six months before that junior works at full pace on your clients. If they deliver around half a normal workload for five months, close to £7,000 of paid capacity doesn’t come back, and a senior spends 60 to 70 hours training and checking. The junior saves about £4,700 a year against the experienced hire. The settling-in period can cost twice that.

Setting the offshore equivalent against it

Here’s a dedicated offshore bookkeeper at three price points. The costs your practice still carries are added back in, and we’ve assumed the same productive hours as the UK hire.

	Lower rate	Mid rate	Higher rate
Monthly fee	£1,000	£1,500	£2,000
Annual fee	£12,000	£18,000	£24,000
Software seat you provide	£1,200	£1,200	£1,200
Extra UK review (125 hours at £40)	£5,000	£5,000	£5,000
Total annual cost	£18,200	£24,200	£30,200
Share of the £37,983 UK cost	48%	64%	80%

The honest range is roughly half to four-fifths of the ongoing cost of an experienced UK hire, which is a saving of about £7,800 to £19,800 a year per person. At the mid rate, the all-in cost is about £16 per productive hour against about £26 for the employee.

Two costs are deliberately loaded onto the offshore side: a seat in your practice software, and 125 hours a year of extra review. Leave them out and every offshore figure looks better than it will turn out. An experienced outsourced bookkeeper also needs time to learn your clients, so ask whether you pay full rate while that happens.

The five variables that genuinely move a quote

Two practices with the same client count can receive very different quotes. These five variables explain most of the gap.

1. Ledger volume

Transactions, bank accounts, payment platforms, sales invoices and supplier bills each month set the base. Online sellers show why the count needs care. A single marketplace payout can carry hundreds of orders, fees and refunds, so e-commerce bookkeeping has to be scoped on what sits behind the payout rather than the payout itself.

2. Source-record quality

Record quality can move a quote as much as volume. A client with bank feeds and receipt capture can be coded in a fraction of the time taken by one who sends PDF statements and a bag of receipts at quarter-end. Poor records also create queries, and every query that travels from the bookkeeper to you, on to your client and back again adds cost at both ends.

Automation has widened the gap. Bank feeds and auto-categorisation have cut keying time on clean clients, so pricing is drifting towards exceptions rather than raw transaction counts. Tidying the inputs usually cuts a quote further than haggling over the rate.

3. Software

Xero, QuickBooks Online, FreeAgent and Sage Accounting are the simplest to outsource. Access is controlled user by user, and there’s nothing to install. Desktop software usually needs a remote desktop or hosted environment, which adds cost and slows the work. Running several platforms is workable, but any bookkeeper takes longer to become fluent in all of them. Check, too, whether you’re expected to supply licences.

4. Catch-up work

Catch-up is priced as a project, separately from monthly work, either as a fixed fee once the records have been seen or hourly with a cap. Some UK pricing guides put a typical clean-up at one to three months of normal fees, but a year of missing records with gaps in the statements can cost far more.

A firm price given without sight of the files is a guess. Send a sample, such as one bank account for one quarter, and ask for a timed estimate.

5. Turnaround commitments

A standard turnaround of a few working days assumes the work can be planned. Guaranteed next-day turnaround, weekend cover or a promise to clear everything within days of month-end means capacity is held back for you, and the rate reflects it.

The time difference can work in your favour. India is four and a half hours ahead of the UK in summer and five and a half in winter, so work sent at the end of your day can be under way before your office opens. Agree response times and a single point of contact in writing.

Complexity: the multiplier on top of volume

Volume sets the base, and complexity multiplies it. The same 200 transactions can take very different amounts of time depending on what sits inside them.

VAT is the usual culprit. Partial exemption, the margin scheme and the flat rate scheme each change how transactions are recorded, and the domestic reverse charge adds a second layer for construction clients. That’s why VAT returns are best scoped on the same file as the bookkeeping rather than priced in isolation.

Construction brings its own load. Deduction statements, gross-up checks and retentions are part of every month for construction bookkeeping clients, and our guide to reconciling CIS statements to the SA100 shows how much of that work sits outside a basic package.

Stock, multi-currency and payroll journals add time too, and so does anything that turns bookkeeping into reporting. Management accounts and payroll are usually quoted separately, so check what a package includes before comparing prices.

A worked example: a 40-client bookkeeping portfolio

Take a practice with 25 light clients needing about two hours a month each, 12 VAT-registered companies needing about five hours each, and 3 busier clients with high volumes, stock or CIS needing about ten hours each. That’s around 140 hours a month, or 1,680 hours a year. At 1,480 productive hours per person, it’s about 1.14 full-time UK bookkeepers.

Option	How the cost is built	Approximate annual cost
In-house UK team	1.14 FTE at about £38,000 each, fully loaded	£43,300 (about £50,300 in year one)
Dedicated offshore bookkeeper plus overflow	£1,500 a month for about 120 productive hours, 20 overflow hours a month at £15, a £1,200 software seat and £6,000 of extra review	£28,800
Offshore hourly	1,680 hours at £15, plus the same software seat and review	£32,400
Fixed per-client fees	Fees equivalent to £18 to £22 an hour across 1,680 hours, plus £6,000 of review	£36,200 to £43,000

The dedicated option wins here because the work is steady enough to keep one person busy. It saves about £14,500 a year against employing, and roughly £19,500 in year one, even after allowing another £2,000 of your time for onboarding.

Hourly support costs a little more, but it would be the better choice if the work arrived in bursts. Fixed per-client fees offer the most certainty, yet at the top of their range they cost about the same as hiring. That’s exactly why the figures need running rather than assuming.

The example is weighted against outsourcing on purpose. Every outsourced option carries 150 hours a year of extra review at £40 an hour, while the in-house option carries none. The outsourcing rates are market figures, not our prices.

Where outsourcing is not the cheaper option

A cost case that only lists the wins won’t survive a partners’ meeting. These are the six situations where we’d tell a practice to think twice.

Low or irregular volume. With 15 to 20 hours of work a month, or everything landing in the fortnight before VAT deadlines, a dedicated resource sits idle for part of the month. Onboarding effort doesn’t shrink with volume either. Hourly help or a local freelancer may suit you better.

Capacity you already pay for. If someone in your team is under-used, their salary is already spent. Filling their time costs less than buying more.

A trainee is realistic. Employer National Insurance is zero on earnings up to £50,270 for staff under 21 and apprentices under 25. Eligible employers can also offset up to £10,500 a year through the Employment Allowance, if the existing team hasn’t already used it up. With a senior who has time to train, a local trainee can cost less than you’d expect.

Paper-heavy or high-contact clients. Shoeboxes, posted statements and clients who need a phone call every month pull the work back to your UK team. Your time is the most expensive in the building.

Undocumented processes. If a client’s quirks live only in one person’s head, review and rework will absorb the saving until they’re written down.

Fixed fees on very clean clients. When the books are largely automated, a fixed monthly fee can mean paying for risk that isn’t there. Hourly or dedicated capacity may work out cheaper.

The costs that never appear on the quote

The largest is your own time. Reviewing work, answering questions and correcting errors all cost money, and it’s a recurring complaint on practitioner forums from firms whose outsourcing savings disappeared into review. In our experience, review is heaviest in the first two or three months and should then fall steadily. If it doesn’t, something in the set-up needs fixing, so track review hours per client from the first month.

The rest are easier to spot if you look for them: set-up or per-client onboarding fees, software or remote-access licences you’re expected to supply, minimum monthly hours, charges for queries or rework, premiums for urgent work, annual price increases, and currency risk if you’re not invoiced in sterling. Budget some time for data protection paperwork as well, which is covered below.

What to send a provider for a quote you can rely on

A quote is only as good as the brief behind it. This is the pack we’d want before pricing any portfolio:

• Client numbers and transaction bands. How many clients, with a rough monthly count for each. Bands such as under 100, 100 to 300 and over 300 are enough.
• Software by client. Cloud or desktop, which platform, and any receipt-capture or payment integrations.
• VAT status and scheme. Standard, flat rate, partial exemption, margin scheme or domestic reverse charge, and the return frequency.
• Extras in scope. CIS, payroll journals, multi-currency, stock, management accounts or MTD quarterly figures.
• The honest state of the records. Which clients are up to date, which are behind, and which are always difficult.
• Turnaround and query handling. The deadlines you work to, and whether queries come through you or go to clients in your practice’s name.
• Two or three anonymised sample files. Nothing tightens an estimate faster than seeing real work.

When quotes come back, put them on the same footing. Check what each provider counts as a unit of work, whether their own senior review is included, whether query time is charged, and what the minimum commitment, notice period, annual increase and invoice currency are. Then add your own review time and software costs to each. A rate £2 an hour cheaper can cost more overall if the work needs heavier checking.

What changes in 2026 and 2027

Four changes affect this comparison right now. Two raise the cost or risk of hiring, one changes the rhythm of the work, and one adds paperwork to outsourcing.

MTD for Income Tax is live. Since 6 April 2026, sole traders and landlords with qualifying income over £50,000 have kept digital records and sent quarterly updates, due on 7 August, 7 November, 7 February and 7 May. HMRC puts the first group at more than 864,000 people, and the threshold drops to £30,000 in April 2027 and £20,000 in April 2028. Clients who were an annual job now need their records in order four times a year, which changes the rhythm of bookkeeping more than its total. Quarterly bookkeeping feeding the updates, with the self assessment final declaration at the end, is becoming the standard package. HMRC isn’t issuing penalty points for late quarterly updates in 2026/27, but that concession covers the first year only.

Sick pay from day one. Statutory Sick Pay has been payable from the first day of absence since April 2026, at up to £123.25 a week. Short absences that fell inside the old waiting days now carry a statutory cost.

Unfair dismissal protection after six months. From 1 January 2027, the qualifying period drops from two years to six months, and the cap on compensation goes. A junior’s four-to-six-month ramp-up now runs almost exactly alongside the window in which you need to decide whether the hire is working.

New rules for data transfers. Sending client personal data to a country without UK adequacy regulations, which includes India, needs a safeguard such as the ICO’s International Data Transfer Agreement, backed by a transfer risk assessment. The ICO updated its international transfers guidance in January 2026, and new rules on transfer risk assessments took effect on 5 February 2026, so paperwork agreed before then is worth reviewing with your provider.

Frequently asked questions

What is usually included in bookkeeping packages?

Coding bank transactions, bank and card reconciliations, sales and purchase invoice processing, ledger upkeep and VAT return figures, and increasingly the records behind MTD quarterly updates. Payroll, CIS, management accounts, credit control, year-end adjustments and catch-up work are usually priced separately. Get the scope in writing, because that’s where fixed fees quietly stop.

Should I use UK bookkeeping companies or an offshore provider?

UK bookkeeping companies and freelancers share your working day but usually charge £20 to £40 an hour or more. Offshore providers cost less, and a dedicated full-time person can cost about the same as a part-time local hire, but they need clearer processes and proper transfer safeguards. Plenty of practices use both.

How many clients can one bookkeeper handle?

Somewhere between 10 and 20 with full monthly bookkeeping, 20 to 35 well-organised standard clients, or more where the work is reconciliations only. Hours are the better planning unit: compare each client’s realistic monthly hours, including queries, with about 120 productive hours per person per month.

Will review time wipe out the savings?

It can, but the usual causes are avoidable: vague instructions, no checklists and queries that bounce back and forth. Ask how the provider’s senior staff check work before it reaches you and how your corrections are recorded so mistakes aren’t repeated. Then measure your review hours for the first quarter.

What are the disadvantages of outsourcing bookkeeping?

Less day-to-day control, review time that rises before it falls, and back-and-forth when instructions are loose. Overseas processing brings data protection work, knowledge about your clients builds up outside your firm, and quality varies widely between providers. None of that rules outsourcing out, but each point needs handling in how it’s set up.

Will the outsourced team contact my clients directly?

Not unless you want them to. In a white-label arrangement, the team works behind your practice and queries come through you, which protects the relationship but uses your time. Some practices let the team chase routine missing paperwork in the practice’s name, under clear rules. Decide before you start, because it affects both cost and turnaround.

Is it legal for a UK practice to outsource bookkeeping overseas?

Yes. Accounting outsourcing in the UK is long established, and ICAEW notes that bookkeeping, payroll and accounts preparation have been outsourced for decades, including to the Indian sub-continent. You keep responsibility for the work, confidentiality and data protection, so you need a data processing agreement, a transfer safeguard such as the IDTA with a transfer risk assessment, and confidentiality obligations on everyone who handles client data.

Do I need to tell my clients that I outsource?

We’d say yes. Confidentiality is a fundamental principle in the ICAEW Code of Ethics, and ICAEW’s own test is whether the client would reasonably expect their information to be shared that way. ACCA’s engagement letter guidance also makes clear that practitioners stay responsible for confidentiality when work is outsourced. A clear line in your engagement letter and privacy notice covers it.

Who is responsible if the outsourced team makes a mistake?

Your firm, as far as the client is concerned. The provider agreement should cover how errors are corrected and at whose cost, confidentiality and data protection duties, insurance and breach handling. Keep your own review and sign-off, and check that your professional indemnity cover reflects how you now deliver the work.

How do outsourcing providers keep client data secure?

Ask specific questions. Do staff use multi-factor authentication and work only inside your systems or a secure virtual desktop? Are downloads, USB storage and printing blocked? How are staff vetted, how is access removed when someone leaves, and how fast would a breach be reported? Certifications such as ISO 27001 help, but read the certificate’s scope rather than trusting a logo.

What happens if a dedicated bookkeeper leaves?

Ask how much notice you’d get, how quickly a replacement arrives, whether a second person already knows your clients, and who pays for the replacement’s learning time. Client notes and checklists kept in your own systems mean the knowledge stays with your practice rather than with one person.

Putting real numbers behind the decision

Outsourcing decisions made on a single line, with a salary on one side and a monthly fee on the other, are the ones most likely to disappoint. The practices that get it right cost the hire properly, load the outsourced side with their own review time, and test the result on real files before moving anything else. They also start small, with a handful of clients first and more once the first month has gone well.

We work as the back office for UK accounting firms, delivering bookkeeping, VAT returns, payroll and year-end accounts from India, while your team keeps the client relationship and the sign-off.

If you’d rather test the numbers than trust them, send us one real client file, ideally the one with the patchy bank feed and the missing receipts. We’ll do the work and send it back ready for your review, and you can time that review against the figures in this article.

Start a free trial or talk to our team.

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Related reading: Outsourced accounting services UK: a practice owner’s guide | Which workflows should leave your practice first | Outsourced bookkeeping services

This article is general guidance for UK accountancy practices and is not a substitute for advice on a specific decision. Employment, data protection and MTD for Income Tax rules change; figures are those applying for the 2026/27 tax year as at publication. Outsourcing rates shown are market ranges, not a Probal Global quotation.