How Much Does a Bookkeeper Cost in Canada? The In-House Number Nobody Adds Up

Ask how much does a bookkeeper cost and you'll get an hourly rate back, usually somewhere between $25 and $50. That number is real, and it's also the smallest part of what the role costs you. The wage is the part you negotiate. Employer contributions, coverage, vacation pay, software and the weeks when nobody is at the desk are the part you inherit.

So here is the whole thing, with every rate sourced, for a full-time bookkeeper in Ontario in 2026. Then the monthly alternative, priced the same way, so you can compare like for like instead of comparing a salary to a feeling.

How much does a bookkeeper cost in Canada?

For an in-house hire in Ontario, the median wage is $28.50 an hour, which works out to roughly $59,280 a year at 2,080 hours. Outsourced bookkeeping isn't priced by the hour at all, it's priced monthly by volume, which is why the two numbers are so hard to hold side by side.

The Ontario wage range is wide. Job Bank puts bookkeepers at $19.23 an hour at the low end, $28.50 at the median and $46.15 at the high end, updated November 19, 2025 from Statistics Canada Labour Force Survey data. We've used the median below, because that's the person most small businesses actually end up hiring.

What does an in-house bookkeeper cost in Ontario, line by line?

Take the median wage, add what an employer is legally required to add, and the number moves by about nine per cent before you've bought a single software licence. Here's the arithmetic with the 2026 rates.

Two honest caveats. WSIB is shown at the 2026 average premium rate and your actual rate depends on your class, so treat that line as a placeholder rather than a quote. Vacation pay is already inside a salaried figure, which is why it sits below the total rather than in it.

What do CPP and EI add on top of the salary?

About $4,672 a year at this wage, and neither is optional. They're also both indexed, so the gap between the wage you agreed to and the cost you carry widens a little every January.

For 2026, CRA sets the employee and employer CPP rate at 5.95 per cent, on maximum pensionable earnings of $74,600 with a $3,500 basic exemption, to a maximum employer contribution of $4,230.45. EI runs at 1.63 per cent of insurable earnings for employees outside Quebec on maximum insurable earnings of $68,900, and employers pay 1.4 times the employee rate, to a maximum employer premium of $1,572.30. At our median wage neither maximum is reached, which means a higher-paid or senior bookkeeper costs proportionally more than this table shows.

Do you owe the Ontario employer health tax?

Probably not, and that's worth knowing before someone quotes it at you. Eligible private-sector employers get an exemption on the first $1 million of Ontario payroll, so a small business is very unlikely to owe anything.

The employer health tax rates run from 0.98 per cent on payroll up to $200,000 to 1.95 per cent on payroll over $400,000, and no exemption can be claimed once an associated group's combined Ontario payroll is over $5 million. If you're a growing group with related companies, check the associated-group rule rather than your own payroll number.

What does outsourced bookkeeping cost per month?

It's priced by volume, not hours, which makes it predictable in a way a salary isn't. Our own packages start at $995 a month for up to 3 accounts, 150 monthly transactions per account, 5 employees and one support meeting, $2,225 a month for up to 500 transactions, 20 employees and two meetings, and $5,195 a month for custom volume with weekly meetings.

Annualised, that's $11,940, $26,700 and $62,340. Set the middle package against the roughly $64,681 loaded cost above and the phrase "less than the cost of a full-time employee" stops being a slogan and starts being a subtraction.

Which one makes sense at your size?

Roughly: if you're under 500 transactions a month and 20 employees, a monthly package almost always lands under a loaded in-house hire. Above that, or if your volume is genuinely unusual, the comparison gets closer and the right answer may be a salaried person with outside support behind them.

What's in neither number?

Coverage and continuity, which is where the real cost usually hides. A salary buys one person's attention minus their vacation, their statutory holidays and their sick days. A monthly package buys a team's attention, and teams don't all book the same week off.

The lines nobody budgets: the two weeks of vacation when nothing gets reconciled, the month a bookkeeper gives notice and the catch-up work that follows, the recruiting cycle, the software licence in their name, the training on your systems that leaves when they do. None of those appear in an hourly rate, and all of them are why the question "how much does a bookkeeper cost" is really a question about what happens in the months the answer breaks down.

The YNL Group Inc. approach

We'd rather you made this decision with real arithmetic than with a range someone quoted you on a call. The rates above are public, the packages are published, and the comparison holds up whether or not you end up working with us.

What we sell isn't hours. It's a back office that's already staffed, already trained and already there in August, with organized books, CRA-compliant payroll and the reporting that makes the rest of your decisions easier. A trusted extension of your team, for less than the cost of a full-time employee.

If you want the numbers run against your actual transaction volume rather than a median, schedule a free consultation. We typically respond within one business day.