A UK accountant typically costs £50 to £150 a month for a sole trader and £200 to £400 a month for a limited company, with one-off Self Assessment work usually falling between £150 and £600.
WallsMan Creative offers a year-round service for sole traders and limited companies, and the pricing typically varies on the complexity of a business setup.
Key Takeaways
- Most UK sole traders pay £50 to £150 a month for ongoing accountancy support, while most limited companies pay £200 to £400.
- A one-off Self Assessment return usually costs £150 to £600, depending on how many income sources the return has to pull together.
- The biggest single driver of your quote is your trading structure, because a limited company carries around three times a sole trader’s compliance load.
- Bookkeeping, VAT returns and payroll are usually priced outside the headline fee, which is where most of the gap between two quotes hides.
- Turning up with reconciled records is the one lever you fully control, and it can move a quote by several hundred pounds a year.
- Creative businesses sit at the top of their band because project income, royalties and grant conditions add work to the same annual cycle.
- A fee is only good value if it buys you advice during the year rather than a return filed on time and nothing else.
Table of contents
1. What an accountant costs in the UK?
Trading structure sets the band and everything else moves you within it.
Sole traders sit in the £50 to £150 a month range for ongoing support, limited companies in the £200 to £400 range, and ad hoc hourly advice runs from £50 to £150 an hour depending on who is doing the work.
Which sounds like you?
Irregular income, multiple streams and quiet months. We build your numbers around how you actually earn.
- Personal tax
- Self Assessment
- First-time freelancer
- Thinking about going limited
Corporation tax, dividends, payroll & the full suite of creative-sector reliefs. Tailored for your business.
- VAT
- Payroll
- Year-end accounts
- R&D/creative reliefs and funding
The same limited company can be quoted £180 a month by one firm and £450 by another, and both quotes can be fair, because they are pricing different amounts of work.
What separates them is scope:
- whether bookkeeping is included,
- whether payroll runs through the fee,
- how many personal returns are covered, and
- whether anyone is expected to talk to you during the year or
- simply file what you send them in month twelve.
If you are still weighing up whether to operate as a sole trader or a limited company, the accountancy fee is a real cost of incorporating and belongs in that calculation.
2. What a monthly fee usually covers, and what sits outside it
A standard monthly fee covers the compliance cycle: your annual accounts, the tax return that goes with them, and the filings that keep you straight with HMRC and Companies House.
For a limited company that normally means:
- statutory accounts,
- the CT600,
- the confirmation statement and
- (maybe) one director’s Self Assessment.
For a sole trader it means:
- the annual accounts and
- the personal return.
What sits outside the fee is where quotes diverge and where clients get caught out. Bookkeeping is the big one, because plenty of headline prices assume you hand over clean, reconciled records, and the fee climbs once someone has to categorise your bank feed for you. VAT returns are often extra, or bundled only at a higher tier. Payroll is usually priced per employee per month. Anything outside the annual cycle, such as a mortgage reference, an HMRC enquiry, a company restructure or an R&D claim, is almost always billed separately.
Ask what happens between filings as well. A cheap fee often buys a filing service and nothing more, which is fine if all you need is the return submitted on time.
It is a poor deal if you wanted someone to tell you in November that your January bill was going to be uncomfortable. Knowing your own filing and payment deadlines makes it much easier to judge whether a quote is buying real support or just a submission.
3. What actually drives accountant costs?
Four things move an accountancy quote:
- your trading structure,
- your transaction volume,
- the state of your records and
- how unusual your income is.
Turnover and transaction volume
Turnover matters less as a headline number than as a proxy for how many transactions someone has to process.
A consultant billing £120,000 across twelve invoices is cheaper to serve than a maker turning over £60,000 across two thousand marketplace orders, refunds and platform fees.
When a firm asks which turnover band you are in, it is usually estimating volume rather than judging your success.
The state of your records
Records are the biggest lever you control.
If your bank feed is reconciled, your receipts are attached and your software is current, you are buying a review. If you arrive with a carrier bag and a spreadsheet, you are buying reconstruction, and reconstruction gets charged at bookkeeping rates on top of the accountancy fee.
Getting your bookkeeping into decent shape before you ask for quotes might change the numbers you are given.
How unusual your income is
Unusual income turns a routine job into a specialist one.
Royalties, foreign withholding tax, grant income with conditions attached, deferred revenue on a long production, multiple currencies, dividends split across several shareholders, a property let on the side – each of these adds work and risk.
4. How to work out if a quote is good value for accountant costs?
Put two quotes side by side and list what each one includes: accounts, corporation tax return, confirmation statement, how many personal returns, VAT, payroll for how many people, bookkeeping or not, and how much contact you get during the year.
Half the time a quote that looks 40% more expensive is covering two services the cheaper one leaves out.
Then ask the practical questions:
- Who will actually do the work, and are they qualified?
- What happens if HMRC opens an enquiry, and is that covered, insured or billed?
- What does the fee do next year if your turnover doubles?
The last test is if the fee is likely to pay for itself.
An accountant who spots that you should be paying yourself differently, that you have been missing a relief, or that your VAT scheme is wrong will often recover their annual fee in a single conversation.
One who files exactly what you send them and says nothing will not… So, maybe that £50 a month that is between two quotes is the most important difference when you are working out how to find an accountant rather than just the cheapest one.
5. Getting a price that fits your business
WallsMan Creative are specialist accountants for the creative industries, working with freelancers, studios, agencies and production companies from offices at Somerset House and in Kingston upon Thames. We spend our days on the things that make creative-sector quotes hard to compare, including project income, royalties, grant conditions and claims under the audio-visual and video games expenditure credits, so we can price the work with our eyes open instead of padding it for uncertainty.
The short version of everything above: the number you are quoted is a function of your structure, your transaction volume, the state of your records and how unusual your income is. The fee is only worth paying if it buys you attention as well as filings.
If you want to know what your own situation would actually cost, we are happy to talk it through and give you a straight figure. There is no obligation, and no pressure to move if the answer is that your current arrangement is working fine.
