What Would a Bookkeeper Cost You on Salary?

And why that question matters more than you think.

Picture this. A bookkeeper has been running their own practice for a few years. They're doing payroll, BAS, bank recs, accounts payable, management reporting, software troubleshooting. The works. They're bloody good at what they do. Their clients love them. And they haven't reviewed their rates in three years.

Sound familiar?

Here's a question worth sitting with: if a business would pay $85,000 to $100,000 plus superannuation to employ someone to do that work, what does that say about what they should be paying you?

The Hays FY25/26 Salary Guide gives us some useful numbers to work with. And they make for interesting reading.

What the Market Is Actually Paying

According to the Hays guide, employed bookkeepers across Australia are attracting the following typical annual salaries (exclusive of super):

• Bookkeeper to Trial Balance: $72,000–$90,000 depending on location
• Bookkeeper to Balance Sheet: $75,000–$90,000
• Senior Bookkeeper: $80,000–$100,000
• Payroll Officer: $80,000–$95,000

Western Australia sits at the higher end of most of these ranges. Queensland (Brisbane, Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast) tends to sit in the middle. Regional areas, as you'd expect, track a little lower.

These are the going rates for a single employed person, in a single role, doing a defined scope of work. No BAS agent responsibilities. No client management. No software expertise. Just the job.

Now think about what most bookkeeping practices actually deliver. And now.... think about what most of them charge!

The Number Most Bookkeepers Never Calculate

The Hays salary figures are just the starting point. When a business employs someone, the salary on the contract is never the actual cost. There's a whole layer of expense that sits on top, and it's significant.

Here's what the fully loaded cost of a $90,000 bookkeeper actually looks like for a business:

Cost Component	Estimated Amount
Base salary (incl. leave loading)*	$91,700
Superannuation (12%)	$10,800
WorkCover / workers’ comp**	$270–$540
Recruitment costs***	$2,700–$9,000
Total employment cost	~$105,500–$112,000+

*Annual leave loading (17.5% on four weeks’ leave) adds approximately $1,700 to the base cost and is included here for simplicity. It’s a statutory entitlement that’s easy to overlook when comparing a salary figure to a contractor rate. But it’s a real cost that the business carries.

**WorkCover premiums for clerical and administrative roles are significantly lower than the state scheme averages you’ll see quoted in the media. Those figures are skewed upward by high-risk industries like construction and manufacturing. For an office-based role like bookkeeping, the industry-specific rate typically sits around 0.3%–0.6% of wages across most states.

***Recruitment costs vary considerably. A direct hire through job boards like Seek or LinkedIn might cost $500–$1,500 in advertising, plus the hidden cost of management time. Shortlisting, interviewing, and onboarding typically adds another 20–40 hours. Using a recruitment agency runs 10–15% of first-year salary, meaning $9,000–$13,500 on a $90,000 role. The table above uses a conservative blended estimate amortised across a reasonable tenure. But if the hire doesn’t work out in the first year, those costs start again from zero.

A note on payroll tax: not included in the table above, as it only applies once a business’s total Australian wages exceed the exemption threshold in their state. Thresholds and rates vary by state — verify the current figures for your state via your relevant state revenue office before factoring this into any calculations. If your business is above the threshold, it adds meaningfully to the total oncost.

And that’s before you factor in the non-billable reality of employment: sick days, training time, public holidays, and the internal overhead of managing a staff member day-to-day.

A business hiring a $90,000 bookkeeper is realistically spending $105,000 to $115,000+ a year for that person’s time, before payroll tax enters the picture. And that person is available eight hours a day, five days a week, with a contract and an office chair.

An external bookkeeper? They’re running a business. They’re carrying their own software subscriptions, professional indemnity insurance, CPD requirements, TPB registration, and admin overhead. All before they bill a single hour. And unlike an employee, they’re not billing every hour they work.

If the numbers aren’t reflecting that reality, something needs to change.

The Scope Problem Nobody Talks About

Here’s where it gets even more interesting.

Those Hays salary figures represent a contained, employed role. They don’t represent what most bookkeeping practices actually deliver.

As I’ve written about before in Strategic Pricing in a Changing Bookkeeping Landscape, the scope of what bookkeepers do, and what clients actually rely on them for, goes well beyond a position description. Payroll and BAS compliance alone carry significant legal responsibility. Add advisory conversations about cash flow, debtor management, software configuration, end-of-year workpapers, ATO liaison, and you’re looking at a role that, internally, would require more than one person to replicate.

Yet many practices price as though they’re filling a single, narrow role.

If the breadth of what you’re delivering doesn’t match the rates you’re charging, the Hays data gives you something concrete to anchor the conversation. Not as a threat, but as a market reference that puts your value in context.

So, What Does This Actually Mean?

It means that if you haven’t reviewed your rates recently, now is a good time to do it. Not from a place of anxiety, but from a place of evidence.

A few questions worth asking:

• Does your current rate reflect your full scope? If you’re doing payroll, BAS, software management, and advisory conversations, are you pricing that breadth, or just the hours?
• Have you done your own loaded rate calculation? Before you settle on a number, work backwards. What does your practice actually cost to run? What does your time cost when non-billable hours are factored in? What margin are you actually making?
• Are you leaving money on the table relative to the market? The Hays data tells us what a business would pay to employ someone to do a portion of what you do. If you’re charging less than that on a comparable basis, let alone failing to account for the full-service nature of what you deliver, that gap is worth examining.

The financial and insurance services sector is listed in the Hays guide as one of the few sectors currently in genuine growth. Demand for skilled bookkeepers is real. Good operators are hard to find. The market knows your value. The question is whether your pricing does too.

A Final Thought

This isn’t about charging more for the sake of it. It’s about pricing in a way that actually sustains your practice, reflects your expertise, and positions you correctly in the market.

Because a business that understands what an employed bookkeeper truly costs them, all in and fully loaded, is a business that understands the value of a skilled external partner.

That’s a conversation worth having. And now you have the data to have it with confidence.

If you’d like to work through your pricing structure or talk through what fair and sustainable rates look like for your practice, get in touch. That’s exactly the kind of conversation we’re here for.

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Source: Hays Salary Guide FY25/26. All salary figures are exclusive of superannuation and represent typical Australian market rates. WorkCover rates sourced from state scheme publications for FY25/26. Payroll tax thresholds and rates vary by state — verify current figures with your relevant state revenue office.