Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown

What Does an Accountant Cost in Singapore in 2026? Most Singapore SMEs pay S$150 to S$600 monthly for accounting. Here's what drives the price, which services cost extra, and how outsourcing stacks up. Try asking a Singapore accounting firm for a number and watch the subject change. You'll hear "it depends on your requirements" and get pushed toward a discovery call. Which is useless if you're only trying to forecast next year's costs. Let's skip to what things actually cost. For most Singapore small businesses, expect to pay S$150 to S$600 a month at up to 300 transactions a month. Across the whole market the range stretches further, from about S$80 a month at the very light end to S$2,000 or more for complex operations. The vast majority of small businesses sit in the narrower range. Plan on it. What moves your number up or down This is where most people misjudge it. the price isn't keyed to turnover. It's driven by how many transactions run through your accounts. Take two examples. A consultancy billing S$800,000 a year across twelve invoices has almost nothing to reconcile. An e-commerce store doing S$200,000 across 900 small orders, complete with gateway fees, returns and disputes, costs considerably more to handle. The smaller business pays more. A quote based purely on revenue is a placeholder, not a price. Make them count the lines. The reason volume dominates is mechanical. Each line needs recording, categorising, and reconciling to the copyright. Most of that is fast when the data is clean. The cost sits in the exceptions, and they look like this. A payment that doesn't tie to an invoice, a duplicate charge, a refund processed weeks after the sale, a supplier who changed their billing name. Those need a human to investigate. One at a time. A business with 900 transactions doesn't just have thirty times the data of one with 30, and exceptions are where the hours go. A handful of extras change the total: Staff payroll: charged per employee per month, and the spread between providers is huge, from under S$10 to S$80 per employee depending who you ask. GST filing: typically another S$80 to S$200 per filing once you're registered. Catch-up work: when nobody's touched the accounts since incorporation, that's reconstruction. It's a one-off project fee, not a monthly rate. Xero and copyright subscriptions: occasionally passed on with a margin attached. Confirm the subscription is included. Reporting frequency: asking for monthly numbers costs more than a once-a-year close. Decide whether you actually read them before paying for them. More than one company: every entity carries a separate set of accounts, so two companies rarely cost the same as one and a half. Why payroll pricing varies so wildly Payroll deserves its own explanation because the quotes look irrational. Quotes range from single digits to S$80 per employee. They're often not describing the same work. Different scope entirely. At the low end you're getting a calculation and a payslip. The higher price includes the statutory filings, and in Singapore that means CPF. Employer CPF contributions run 17 percent of wages for employees under 55, and the employee adds 20 percent. The rates taper as employees get older. 13 percent for 55 to 60, then 9 percent, 7.5 percent, and 5 percent for the older bands. One misclassified employee means an amended filing. Ceilings complicate it further. As of 2026 the Ordinary Wage ceiling is S$6,800 monthly, raised from S$6,300, which shifted the numbers for better-paid staff. The Additional Wage ceiling works annually, at S$102,000 minus the Ordinary Wage contributions already made that year. Bonuses fall under that second ceiling, which is where most calculation errors happen. Check that one twice. Then there's the Skills Development Levy, charged at 0.25 percent of gross wages with a monthly cap in the S$10 to S$17 range. CPF submissions are due by the 14th of the following month, with 1.5 percent monthly interest on anything overdue. So when you compare payroll quotes, ask what's included. A firm charging more but handling CPF and SDL submissions correctly may be cheaper than one that computes payslips and leaves the filings to you. Why two quotes are rarely comparable In Singapore, "accounting" gets used to describe four separate regulated jobs, but just one is what you need every month. It explains how one firm quotes S$1,200 and another S$250 without either being dishonest. The recurring monthly piece is bookkeeping, covering bank reconciliation, accounts payable and receivable, payroll with CPF submissions, and SFRS-compliant year-end statements. That's the number in the range above. Nothing else. The other three are separate engagements. Corporate tax work is handled by a tax agent, not your bookkeeper. GST filing only matters once your taxable turnover crosses S$1 million, the threshold that triggers mandatory IRAS registration. Statutory audit requires an ACRA-registered public accountant to sign. Plenty of SMEs are exempt from audit entirely. Exemption applies when you satisfy two of three criteria, and here they are. revenue at or under S$10 million, total assets at or under S$10 million, or 50 or fewer employees. The company must be private for the whole financial year too, and ordinarily you'd meet the tests in the two prior years, though a company less than two years old is judged on the current year alone. That exemption matters more than most owners realise. Audit is a distinct engagement carrying its own cost, often several thousand dollars, so your exemption status materially changes what you'll spend each year. Find out where you sit. Outsourcing versus hiring someone The math here is one-sided for smaller firms. A full-time accountant in Singapore costs S$62,000 to S$87,000 a year once you add employer CPF, annual leave, and software. Compare that to roughly S$7,200 a year at the upper end of the outsourced range. Salary is the headline, not the total. Add 17 percent employer CPF for anyone under 55, then leave entitlement, medical benefits, workspace, and software. And there's a risk that rarely appears in the comparison: when a single in-house accountant leaves, the function stops with them. A firm has cover. One person is a single point of failure. Outsourcing is cheaper for the majority of SMEs. The crossover comes later than owners assume, generally once volume and reporting needs fill a full-time role. Until then, you're paying a salary for accounting services pricing capacity you aren't using. The honest exception is complexity, not size. A business with inventory across multiple warehouses, foreign currency exposure, and daily management decisions that depend on live numbers justifies someone on site. That's not the same as just getting bigger. Red flags worth checking Cheap isn't automatically bad, though it deserves questions. A well-run fixed-fee practice can price below the market through efficiency alone. The concern is a price that's low because something's been left out. Ask these before signing. First, does the fee include year-end financial statements, or just monthly bookkeeping? Plenty of cheap quotes stop at the monthly reconciliation and bill separately for the annual close. Second, what's the rule when transactions increase? An unannounced jump at a volume threshold isn't a fixed fee. It's a starting price. Third, who actually does the work? Ask whether you get a named contact who knows your business or a rotating queue. The difference shows up fast. Get the answers in writing. A provider confident in their pricing will commit to it. Hesitation tells you plenty. What to ask for Skip the discovery call theatre and hand over three things. monthly transaction volume, number of employees, and your GST registration status. That's enough for a firm to give you a fixed figure quickly. A firm that still won't quote is telling you something. Counting your transactions is easier than it sounds. Pull one typical month of bank statements and count the entries. Include gateway payments if you're selling online. Don't use your peak month or your slowest, since an atypical month produces a quote that changes on you. Average is what you want. Get the fee confirmed in writing before you sign, with a stated rule for what happens when volume increases. A fixed monthly fee you can budget around is worth more than a cheap hourly rate that drifts. That's the whole game with accounting fees: predictability, not the lowest number on the page.