How Much Do Accounting Services Cost in Singapore?
What does a Singapore accountant cost? Most SMEs pay S$150 to S$600 monthly. See what sets the price, what isn't included, and when hiring in-house wins.
Getting a straight price out of a Singapore accounting firm is weirdly hard. Everyone wants a call before they'll say a number. Not helpful when you're doing a simple cash flow projection.
Here are the real figures. For a typical SME here, the going rate is S$150 to S$600 a month at up to 300 transactions a month. The full market spread is wider, roughly S$80 monthly for the smallest setups up to S$2,000 plus for books that have gone properly complicated. The vast majority of small businesses sit in the narrower range. Plan on it.
What moves your number up or down
Here's the thing most owners get wrong. it's not about how much money you make. It's set by transaction volume.
Take two examples. A consultancy billing S$800,000 a year across twelve invoices has almost nothing to reconcile. A Shopify shop doing S$200,000 through 900 tiny transactions, with payment gateway fees, refunds and chargebacks, takes many times the hours. The smaller business pays more. A quote based purely on revenue is a placeholder, not a price. Make them count the lines.
It's worth understanding why volume matters so much. 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. an unmatched payment, a duplicated charge, a late refund, a vendor who renamed their entity. Those need a human to investigate. Manually. A business with 900 transactions doesn't just have thirty times the data of one with 30, it has thirty times the opportunities for something to go wrong.
A handful of extras change the total:
- Payroll processing: billed per head monthly, with enormous variation between firms, from under S$10 to S$80 per employee depending who you ask.
- Quarterly GST: usually S$80 to S$200 extra per return once you're registered.
- Backlog reconstruction: if your books are a year behind, someone has to rebuild them. Expect a separate one-time charge, which is fair, but get it quoted on its own.
- Accounting software: occasionally passed on with a margin attached. Confirm the subscription is included.
- Reporting frequency: monthly management accounts cost more than annual statements alone. Decide whether you actually read them before paying for them.
- More than one company: each company needs its own books and its own filings, so the second entity costs close to a full second fee.
Understanding the payroll line
Payroll pricing confuses people, and the reason is scope. Quotes range from single digits to S$80 per employee. They're often not describing the same work. Same word, different job.
At the low end you're getting a calculation and a payslip. The expensive end includes statutory submissions, and CPF is the bulk of it. For staff below 55, the employer contributes 17 percent, with the employee contributing 20 percent on top. The rates taper as employees get older. 13 percent employer for ages 55 to 60, 9 percent for 60 to 65, 7.5 percent for 65 to 70, and 5 percent above 70. One misclassified employee means an amended filing.
Ceilings complicate it further. The Ordinary Wage ceiling sits at S$6,800 a month in 2026, up 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. accounting services fees Worth double-checking.
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. The CPF deadline is the 14th of the month after, and late payment attracts interest at 1.5 percent per month.
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, and only one of them is the monthly work. It explains how one firm quotes S$1,200 and another S$250 without either being dishonest.
The recurring monthly piece is bookkeeping, covering reconciling your bank feed, tracking what you owe and what's owed to you, running payroll and CPF, and preparing SFRS financial statements. That's the number in the range above. Just that.
Three more get billed apart. Corporate tax work is handled by a tax agent, not your bookkeeper. GST only becomes your problem after taxable turnover passes S$1 million, which is the point IRAS registration becomes compulsory. And statutory audit can only be signed off by an ACRA-registered public accountant.
Most small companies never need that audit. You qualify for the small company exemption if you meet two of three tests, and here they are. S$10 million or less in revenue, S$10 million or less in total assets, or no more than 50 staff. You also need to be a private company throughout the financial year, 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. Check which side you're on.
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: if your only accountant resigns, your books stop. An outsourced provider has continuity built in. Nobody prices that in.
For most small businesses, outsourcing wins comfortably. The tipping point arrives further out than most expect, usually when transaction volume, headcount and reporting demands justify a dedicated person. Before that, you're funding idle capacity.
The honest exception is complexity, not size. Multi-warehouse inventory, multi-currency exposure, and decisions that copyright on same-day figures benefits from someone in the building. That's not the same as just getting bigger.
What a suspiciously cheap price usually means
Cheap isn't automatically bad, though it deserves questions. A lean fixed-fee provider can undercut the market by working efficiently on modern software. 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? A fee that jumps without warning at 40 transactions isn't fixed. That's an opening rate. Third, who's doing the work? Ask whether you get a named contact who knows your business or a rotating queue. The difference shows up fast.
Put all of it in writing. A provider confident in their pricing will commit to it. If they stall, that's your answer.
How to get a real number
Skip the discovery call theatre and hand over three things. Your average monthly transaction count, your headcount, and whether you're GST-registered. 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 transaction volume takes ten minutes. Pull one typical month of bank statements and count the entries. Include gateway payments if you're selling online. Avoid picking your busiest month or your quietest, because a quote built on an unrepresentative month will get revised later. Average is what you want.
Insist on a written fixed fee up front, 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. Predictability is what you're actually buying, not the smallest figure you can find.