Accountant Cost Per Month in Singapore: A Real Guide
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.
Most Singapore accounting quotes arrive as "it depends," which helps nobody. You'll hear "it depends on your requirements" and get pushed toward a discovery call. That's frustrating when you're just trying to build a budget.
So let's put actual numbers down. For the average Pte Ltd or sole proprietorship, 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. But most owners reading this will land in that S$150 to S$600 band. That's the number to plan around.
What actually drives the price
This is where most people misjudge it. Your fee isn't set by revenue. What matters is the number of lines your accountant has to touch.
Take two examples. A consultancy billing S$800,000 a year across twelve invoices takes very little work. 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. Any firm quoting you off turnover alone hasn't looked at your books. Ask them to count instead.
It's worth understanding why volume matters so much. Every transaction has to be recorded, categorised, and matched against your bank feed. A tidy transaction takes seconds. 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. By hand. 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:
- Payroll processing: 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 returns: typically another S$80 to S$200 per filing once you're registered.
- Clean-up: if your books are a year behind, someone has to rebuild them. 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.
- Management reporting: monthly management accounts cost more than annual statements alone. Decide whether you actually read them before paying for them.
- Multiple entities: 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 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. Same word, different job.
At the low end you're getting a calculation and a payslip. The higher price includes the statutory filings, and CPF is the bulk of it. Employer CPF contributions run 17 percent of wages for employees under 55, 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. 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. Additional Wage is capped yearly at S$102,000 less whatever Ordinary Wage has already absorbed. Bonuses fall under that second ceiling, which is where most calculation errors happen. Easy to get wrong.
SDL sits on top of that, 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, and late payment attracts interest at 1.5 percent per month.
Before comparing payroll prices, establish scope. Paying more for correct statutory submissions can beat paying less and doing the filings yourself.
The four jobs hiding under one word
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 fee we've been discussing. Just that.
Three more get billed apart. Corporate tax filing, meaning your ECI and Form C-S, goes to a registered tax agent. GST filing only matters once your taxable turnover crosses S$1 million, which is the point IRAS registration becomes compulsory. Statutory audit requires an ACRA-registered public accountant to sign.
Most small companies never need that audit. 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, website or 50 or fewer employees. The company must be private for the whole financial year too, and normally you need to have met the criteria across the two preceding financial 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, frequently in the thousands, so your exemption status materially changes what you'll spend each year. Check which side you're on.
Outsourcing versus hiring someone
This one's less close than people expect. Hiring in-house runs somewhere between S$62,000 and S$87,000 annually after employer CPF contributions, leave, and the subscriptions. Set that against S$600 a month, or S$7,200 a year, at the top of the outsourced SME band.
Salary is the headline, not the total. Add 17 percent employer CPF for anyone under 55, then annual leave, medical coverage, a desk, and the accounting software licence. 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. 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. Before that, you're funding idle capacity.
Where in-house wins is complexity. A business with inventory across multiple warehouses, foreign currency exposure, and daily management decisions that depend on live numbers benefits from someone in the building. That's a different situation from simply having grown.
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.
Check these three things. First, are year-end statements included or is this monthly work only? 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 actually does the work? Find out whether there's a named accountant or a shared inbox. It matters more than you'd think.
Put all of it in writing. Firms comfortable with their fees will document them. If they stall, that's your answer.
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. If they still won't commit to a number, that tells you something.
Counting your transaction volume takes ten minutes. Pull one typical month of bank statements and count the entries. Add your payment gateway transactions if you sell online. Don't use your peak month or your slowest, because a quote built on an unrepresentative month will get revised later. Average is what you want.
Get the fee confirmed in writing before you sign, including what happens if your volume grows. 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.