Last updated: October 18, 2026
By Devin Hornick, Co-Founder and Partner, KORE1
As of October 16, 2026, a mid-level contract accountant bills $59 to $75 an hour nationally, median $65, and a senior accountant bills $77 to $94, median $87, or about $45,300 for a three-month contract. Those two lines come from the KORE1 Contract Rate Index 2026-Q4, and they’re modeled. Our own accountant placements bill a median $44 across 11 contracts, which looks like a contradiction until you see who those 11 people were.
Last November a controller at a 300-person distributor in Ontario, California, called us with a budget line that read “contract accountant, $45/hr.” She’d pulled it off a salary site on a Sunday night. It was a pay number. Wrong one. Her CFO had already approved it.
That gap, between what the accountant earns and what the invoice says, is the reason this page exists.
How Much Does a Contract Accountant Cost per Hour in 2026?
Start with the national picture. Three levels. Bill rate means the hourly number on the staffing firm’s invoice for a W2 contractor, with payroll taxes, insurance, and the firm’s costs already inside it. Costs assume 40 hours a week, 13 weeks for three months and 26 for six.
| Level (United States) | Bill rate range | Median | 3-month cost | 6-month cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Junior / staff accountant | $48 to $59 | $52 | $27,100 | $54,200 |
| Mid-level accountant | $59 to $75 | $65 | $33,900 | $67,900 |
| Senior accountant | $77 to $94 | $87 | $45,300 | $90,600 |
Need a number for your own metro and start date? Get a bill rate quote for a contract staff or senior accountant for close or audit support. Tell us the role, level, city, start date, and how long you need them, and we’ll come back with a range before anyone sends a resume.
Where I sit, plainly. I’m a partner at KORE1, and our accounting and finance staffing desk places these contractors. So I have every reason to make our rates look reasonable. The fix for that bias is to show the sources and the arithmetic, which is what the rest of this does.
My colleague Robert Ardell described what we were building on an October 16 planning call as “some kind of salary guide, but for contractors.” That’s close. A salary guide tells you what a person earns, which helps if you’re hiring onto your own payroll, but a contract budget needs the other number, the one printed on the staffing firm’s invoice every week, and that’s the number this page tracks.
What Do Staff and Senior Accountants Bill on Contract?
Junior runs $48 to $59. Mid sits at $59 to $75. Senior jumps to $77 to $94, and that jump, $22 at the median, is bigger than the one from junior to mid.
Why? The modeled cells start from the Bureau of Labor Statistics wage for accountants and auditors (SOC 13-2011), and the BLS Occupational Employment and Wages release for May 2025, published May 15, 2026, puts the national median at $40.23 an hour across 1,449,500 jobs. Junior uses the 25th-percentile wage, mid the median, and senior the 75th. The top quarter of accountants earns a lot more than the middle. Bill rates follow. See how the index is built for the sources and exclusions.
Titles blur here, so a quick translation. A “staff accountant” on a req is usually our junior or mid row: reconciliations, journal entries, AP and AR tie-outs, fixed-asset roll-forwards. A “senior accountant” owns a section of the close, writes the flux commentary, handles intercompany eliminations across three or four entities in NetSuite, Sage Intacct, or Dynamics 365, and sits across the table from the audit senior during fieldwork. Different job. Different rate.
Now the awkward part.
KORE1’s own accountant contracts, 11 placements that started between 2023 and 2026, billed $42 to $85 with a median of $44. That’s low. It’s under even our modeled junior rate for Orange County and Los Angeles ($57 median). I’m publishing it anyway, because hiding the one number that came from our own invoices would defeat the point of the index.
Three things explain it. Most of those 11 were staff-level work, AP backlogs and bank reconciliation catch-up, not senior accountants who own a section of the close and answer the audit team. Most were in Southern California, where we do most of our business. And the 75th percentile, $85, shows the upper engagements in that group landing at the top of the modeled Orange County and Los Angeles mid-level band, just under where senior starts. Small sample, skewed toward staff work. Read it as a floor for staff help, not as the price of a senior accountant who can run a consolidation cold.
| Cell | Source | Bill rate range | Median |
|---|---|---|---|
| Accountant, all levels, KORE1 placements (primarily Southern California) | KORE1 observed, n=11, 2023 to 2026 starts | $42 to $85 | $44 |
| Junior accountant, Orange County / Los Angeles | Modeled, BLS OEWS May 2025 | $52 to $65 | $57 |
| Mid-level accountant, Orange County / Los Angeles | Modeled, BLS OEWS May 2025 | $67 to $86 | $75 |
| Senior accountant, Orange County / Los Angeles | Modeled, BLS OEWS May 2025 | $86 to $105 | $97 |
How Much Do Accountant Bill Rates Change by Metro?
About $27 an hour at the senior median. New York tops the list at $109 for a senior accountant. Chicago and Milwaukee both sit at $82, Dallas at $83. Same job, same close calendar, a $14,200 difference over three months. The IT roles for the same city are in our IT contract rates for Los Angeles employers.
| Metro | Mid-level bill range (median) | Mid 3-month / 6-month | Senior bill range (median) | Senior 3-month / 6-month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| New York, NY | $75 to $96 ($84) | $43,600 / $87,200 | $96 to $118 ($109) | $56,700 / $113,400 |
| Orange County and Los Angeles, CA | $67 to $86 ($75) | $38,900 / $77,800 | $86 to $105 ($97) | $50,400 / $100,900 |
| Dallas-Fort Worth, TX (incl. Plano, Irving, Frisco) | $60 to $73 ($65) | $33,600 / $67,200 | $74 to $89 ($83) | $43,000 / $85,900 |
| Chicago, IL | $61 to $73 ($64) | $33,500 / $67,000 | $74 to $88 ($82) | $42,500 / $85,100 |
| Milwaukee, WI | $57 to $71 ($62) | $32,500 / $64,900 | $73 to $88 ($82) | $42,400 / $84,800 |
| United States (national) | $59 to $75 ($65) | $33,900 / $67,900 | $77 to $94 ($87) | $45,300 / $90,600 |
Dallas surprises people. A mid-level accountant in Plano, Irving, or Frisco bills a $65 median, the same as national. Senior? $83, which is $4 under it. Texas has no state income tax, and the BLS wage for accountants in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro tracks close to the national number, so the bill rate does too.
Orange County and Los Angeles land $10 above national at the mid-level median and $10 above at senior ($75 and $97). That’s the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim wage data doing its job. Not a California surcharge. In Irvine, Newport Beach, and downtown LA we see the tightest senior supply in November, when every December fiscal-year company starts audit prep inside the same six weeks. The IT side of the same index, metro by metro, is in IT contractor rates by city. For IT and controller roles in Irvine and Costa Mesa specifically, see our IT and controller rates for the same OC market.
What Does a 3-Month or 6-Month Accountant Contract Cost?
National senior, three months: $45,300. Six: $90,600. Mid-level runs $33,900 and $67,900. The metro table has the rest.
Most close and audit work doesn’t run a clean quarter, though. So here’s the arithmetic for a six-week sprint, 240 hours, which is close to the median length of our accounting contracts (more on that below). At the national medians, a mid-level accountant costs about $15,600 and a senior about $20,900. In Orange County or Los Angeles the senior figure is closer to $23,300. Multiply, don’t guess.
One line item people forget. Overtime.
Year-end close is a long-days job, and an hourly W2 contract accountant is almost always entitled to overtime. The federal professional exemption requires a salary, and the Department of Labor’s Fact Sheet 17D carves out practicing lawyers, doctors, and teachers from that salary test. Accountants aren’t on that list. An hourly contractor isn’t salaried, so the exemption doesn’t fit. California goes further: time and a half after eight hours in a day and double time after 12, regardless of the weekly total. Picture ten-hour days for a three-week fieldwork push. They add up fast. Ask your staffing firm how overtime bills before the first long week, not after the invoice lands.
What Is Inside a Contract Bill Rate?
When I walk a CFO through this, I use round numbers. Say the contractor’s pay is $100 an hour. Employer burden in California runs about 24%, so the loaded cost is $124 before the staffing firm earns anything. The bill rate on that pay would likely land around $150 to $160.
That 24% isn’t a fudge factor. It has line items. The employer side of Social Security is 6.2% on wages up to $184,500 in 2026, and Medicare adds 1.45% with no cap, per IRS Publication 15. Then federal and state unemployment, workers’ compensation, general and professional liability coverage, and paid sick leave. California requires at least 40 hours or five days of paid sick leave a year, and a contractor carries that entitlement whether the assignment is six weeks or six months. We also pay 100% of our contractors’ dental and vision. None of that shows up on a salary site. The same list, with the $100 example drawn to scale, is in the core sample of a bill rate.
Here’s the question I’d ask any firm that quotes you a markup percentage instead of a bill rate. Is that percentage sitting on the pay rate, or on the loaded cost?
It matters. A lot.
On that $100 example, the 24% burden is $24 an hour before any margin. A percentage quoted on loaded cost starts from $124, not $100, so it sounds smaller than the real gap between pay and bill. Some firms quote the small number and leave the burden out of the conversation entirely. The buyer finds it on the first invoice. Ask for the bill rate. Compare bill rates. That’s the number you pay.
For the longer version of how pay, burden, and margin stack up across tech roles, our guide to tech contractor hourly rates in 2026 breaks it apart line by line. And if a firm offers a 1099 or corp-to-corp accountant at a suspiciously low number, read our explainer on W2 vs. C2C vs. 1099 contractor arrangements first. The difference is usually who’s carrying the payroll tax and the misclassification risk.
When Does a Close or Audit Sprint Need a Senior Accountant?
More often than the budget wants.
A staff accountant at $52 to $65 is the right call when the work is volume and the judgment already exists in-house. Bank and credit card reconciliations three months behind. An AP aging nobody’s touched since the controller left. Prepaid and accrual schedules that need to be rebuilt from the GL. Give a good staff contractor a clear checklist and a reviewer, and they’ll clear it. Most do.
Pay for senior when someone has to own an answer. If the work includes any of these, budget the $77 to $94 national band (or $86 to $105 in Southern California):
- Writing the flux analysis and explaining a 14% swing in gross margin to an audit manager who has already asked twice
- Multi-entity consolidation with intercompany eliminations, especially across currencies
- ASC 606 revenue cutoff or ASC 842 lease schedules the auditors flagged last year
- Running the PBC list end to end, so your controller isn’t the only person answering the audit team
- Covering a departed senior during a first-year audit with a new firm
Be honest about which list you’re on.
A shortcut I’ve seen fail more than once is putting a mid-level contractor in a senior seat. You save $22 an hour at the national median, $65 against $87, and spend it back in controller review time by week two. The reverse error is rarer but real: a $95-an-hour senior doing a reconciliation backlog a $55 staff accountant would’ve cleared just as well.
If the gap is actually the controller seat, that’s a different search with a different rate card. Our controller staffing team handles interim controllers, and we cover the timing side, when to open the search for audit season, in our guide to bringing in contract accountants for year-end close.
How Long Do Close and Audit Contracts Last?
Short. Very short. Across 76 accountant and senior accountant contracts KORE1 placed since 2019, the median assignment ran 45 days, and for the 48 that started in 2022 or later it was 43. That’s under 40% of our firm-wide median of 116 days across 1,887 ended assignments. Close support is a sprint by nature.
One honest caveat. A single large audit-support engagement accounts for a good share of those 76 contracts, which pulls the median toward its length. I’d still budget six to eight weeks for a year-end close contract, and 10 to 12 if it’s a first-year audit with a new firm, because new auditors ask for more support and tend to ask for it later than anyone would like.
Starting is quick. Faster than most expect. Across 1,997 KORE1 contract starts, the median gap from offer to first day was three days, and 86% started within a week. The bottleneck is usually your own approval chain.
And sometimes the sprint turns into a hire. On a contract-to-hire arrangement, 37.5% of our placements have converted to direct employment (207 of 552), and a contractor who completes 1,040 hours can convert to your payroll at no additional fee from KORE1. A close is a pretty good audition. You’ll learn more watching someone handle a bad week of fieldwork than in five interviews.
For close and audit coverage specifically, our accounting contract staffing page lays out how we scope those engagements, and our accountant staffing team handles both contract and permanent searches. If you’re comparing direct-hire salary levels instead of contract rates, the salary benchmark assistant is the faster tool.
What Controllers Ask Before a Close Contract
Realistically, what does a senior accountant on contract cost per hour for year-end close?
$77 to $94 an hour nationally, median $87, which is about $45,300 for a full three months at 40 hours a week (KORE1 Contract Rate Index 2026-Q4).
In Orange County or Los Angeles, plan on $86 to $105. New York runs $96 to $118. A six-week close sprint at the national median is about $20,900 before any overtime.
What markup should I expect on temporary accounting staff?
Shop on the bill rate instead, which runs $48 to $94 an hour nationally for junior through senior contract accountants on a W2 basis (KORE1 Contract Rate Index 2026-Q4).
A markup percentage tells you very little unless you know what it sits on. If it’s applied to loaded cost, the 24% employer burden is already underneath it and the real gap between pay and bill is wider than it sounds. Ask every firm for the hourly bill rate, all in, and compare those. Nothing else compares cleanly.
Orange County and Los Angeles. Do they really cost more than national?
Yes, by about $10 an hour at the median: a mid-level accountant bills $67 to $86 (median $75) and a senior $86 to $105 (median $97).
Both counties use the same BLS Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim wage data, so the modeled rates are identical.
Why does KORE1’s own accountant number come in at only $44?
Because those 11 contracts, started 2023 to 2026 and mostly in Southern California, were weighted toward staff-level reconciliation and AP work, so the median sits below the modeled market.
The range ran $42 to $85, and the top of it reaches the modeled mid-level band for Orange County and Los Angeles. Treat $44 as a floor for staff help. A senior close owner won’t bill there in any metro on the index, and we’d be wary of anyone who says otherwise.
Do contract accountants get overtime during a close?
Usually, because an hourly W2 contractor isn’t paid on a salary basis, and the federal professional exemption requires one.
California adds daily overtime after eight hours and double time after 12. Agree on how overtime bills, and who approves it, before fieldwork starts.
Before You Approve the Budget Line
Set the salary-site number aside. It’s the pay. Take the bill rate for your level and metro, $65 for a mid-level accountant or $87 for a senior at the national median, multiply by the hours you expect, and add a cushion for overtime in December and January. Six weeks of a senior is about $20,900. Thirteen weeks is $45,300. Your CFO won’t need to revisit either figure.
The KORE1 Contract Rate Index refreshes quarterly. Next update: January 2027, with new placements and the next BLS OEWS release folded in. If you want a real quote for your close, your city, and your start date, talk to our accounting recruiters. And if the honest answer is that your team can absorb the work with a few Saturdays, we’ll tell you that too.
