Bench Accounting Pricing in 2026: Plans and Fine Print

Quick Answer: Bench Accounting is open again and lists its prices publicly. On its pricing page today, monthly done-for-you bookkeeping is $399, Bookkeeping + Tax is $649, and Bookkeeping Light for businesses with $250K or less in yearly revenue is $199, with 20% off for paying annually. Bench paused operations in December 2024, was bought by Employer.com within days, and resumed service in January 2025.

If you are pricing Bench now, you are looking at a different company than the one that went dark in late 2024. It is the same brand and service model under new ownership, with a revised price list and terms of service that meter bookkeeper time. Here is what it costs, what the fine print adds, and what to do if you would rather leave.

What does Bench cost in 2026?

These figures come from Bench's pricing page, read on October 28, 2026. The page splits its services into four tabs: Bookkeeping + Software, Just Bookkeeping, Catch-up bookkeeping and Taxes.

Two other options sit outside the subscription grid:

• Fractional bookkeeper ("Just Bookkeeping"): $55 an hour plus a $1,200 one-time onboarding fee. A Bench bookkeeper works inside your existing QuickBooks Online account rather than in Bench's own software.
• Catch-up bookkeeping: the page offers to catch up the current year's books at no extra charge when you sign up for an annual plan. If you are more than a year behind, Bench gives a flat custom quote after a call.

The tax-only plan carries conditions in its footnote. The monthly rate assumes a 12-month commitment and has to be bought at least three months before your filing deadline, otherwise the discounted annual price applies instead. If Bench reviews the books you bring and finds they need cleanup before it can file, it offers discounted bookkeeping on top.

What does the price not include?

The pricing page describes access to your bookkeeper by phone, message and video call without a stated cap. The terms of service (last updated March 3, 2026) set the actual limit. Section 2.9 says each plan includes a "Service Time Allocation" of bookkeeper and tax advisor hours per billing period. Time counts against it when a bookkeeper categorizes and reconciles, answers your questions, processes corrections you ask for, or does catch-up and other non-routine work.

When you go over, section 5.7 sets default overage rates:

1. 1 to 10 hours over the allocation: $215 an hour
2. 11 to 25 hours over: $220 an hour
3. 26 or more hours over: $245 an hour

Bench says it sends a notice when you reach 85% of the allocation, but adds that a missed notice does not cancel the charge. The pricing page did not show how many hours each plan includes when we read it, so ask for that number in writing before you sign. A business with messy receipts, lots of cash transactions or frequent revision requests is exactly the kind that burns through service time.

Other terms worth knowing before you commit:

• Auto-renewal. Plans renew for the same length as the first term. To stop renewal you must give written notice 15 days ahead on a monthly plan or 60 days ahead on a yearly one.
• Closing the account is not cancelling. The terms say that ceasing to use the service does not end the agreement, and you stay responsible for fees through the rest of the term.
• Refunds. Fees are stated as non-refundable unless the agreement says otherwise.
• Revisions. You get 30 days after a deliverable, such as a year-end financial package or a tax return, to ask for changes at no extra charge.

None of this is unusual for a service business, but it changes the comparison. A $399 plan with a modest hour allocation can cost more than a pricier competitor with a flat scope if your books generate a lot of questions.

What happened to Bench in December 2024?

Bench's own About page gives the timeline: the company had been doing small business bookkeeping since 2012, paused operations in December 2024, was acquired within days by Employer.com, and resumed service in January 2025 under that ownership. It now describes itself as an online bookkeeping service for U.S.-based businesses, "operating today as an Employer.com company," and says historical customer data is intact.

The page also says you can export your completed work at any time, including after your subscription ends. If you were a customer during the pause and never came back, log in and download your financial statements and year-end packages before you need them for a loan application or a tax question. Bench's help center article on financial reports shows where the income statement and other reports sit inside the app.

Should former Bench customers go back?

That depends on what you need and how much the pause cost you. Some points to weigh:

• Continuity. If Bench has years of your categorized history, staying avoids paying someone else to rebuild it. A new bookkeeper will want the prior year-end balances either way.
• Metered time. If your business generates a lot of back-and-forth, compare the overage rates above with a flat-scope provider.
• Software lock-in. Bench's main plans run in its own software. The fractional option works in QuickBooks Online, which you keep if you leave.

What are the alternatives to Bench?

For a sense of the online-service market, Pilot's pricing page lists its Essentials bookkeeping plan at $99 monthly for businesses with up to $100,000 in monthly expenses, using AI categorization and cash-basis books. Intuit's offering, what it covers and what it leaves out, is in our QuickBooks Live bookkeeping review. The pricing models across the market, monthly, hourly and per-project, are compared in what bookkeeping services cost a small business.

Doing it yourself is realistic for a sole proprietor with one bank account and one card. QuickBooks Online and Xero both pull transactions through bank feeds, and the setup steps are on our QuickBooks and Xero pages.

How do you move your history out of Bench?

Whichever way you go, the new provider needs the same raw material:

1. Download Bench's reports for every closed year: income statement, balance sheet and the year-end package your tax preparer used.
2. Gather bank and card statements for the open period, starting from the last month Bench closed. Most banks let you download past statement PDFs from online banking.
3. Turn the statements into rows. A new software's bank feed may not reach back as far as the months you need, so older months come from statements. A bank's own CSV export is the cleanest source if it covers the dates. For PDF-only months, QuickBankConvert reads the statement and gives you CSV or Excel rows to import, or QBO files for QuickBooks on paid plans (see pricing).
4. Agree on an opening balance date. Your new bookkeeper should start from a month Bench fully reconciled, so the opening balances match a statement.

If you go the other way and join Bench with a backlog, its document upload guide lists the file types it accepts (PDF, CSV, XLS and XLSX among them) and explains that bank statements go through a Plaid upload window. Our older guide on importing bank statements into Bench covers preparing those files.

Related guides

• Catch-up bookkeeping: what it involves and costs
• QuickBooks Live bookkeeping review
• Bookkeeping services for small business: cost and choice
• Converter comparisons