FP&A and Financial Analyst Contract Bill Rates 2026

Last updated: October 29, 2026

By Jennifer Burdick, Recruiting Manager, KORE1

As of October 16, 2026, a mid-level contract FP&A or financial analyst bills $72 to $94 an hour nationally, median $82, about $42,400 for three months. Senior FP&A analysts bill $94 to $114 an hour, median $106. Both figures are W2 bill rates through a staffing firm, from the KORE1 Contract Rate Index 2026-Q4, modeled from BLS OEWS May 2025 wages.

FP&A and financial analyst searches make up a growing share of what lands on my desk at KORE1 every fall, and budget season is exactly when that share jumps. This year is no different.

A building-products distributor outside Richmond, Virginia called us in September with a reporting backlog, a board deck due in three weeks, and an EBITDA bridge nobody on staff trusted enough to defend out loud. The CFO’s first question, the same one I hear every September and October, was not about resumes. It was what this would cost against a budget already set back in June.

Most of what gets written about FP&A staffing costs treats a bill rate like a salary with something bolted on top, which gets the mechanics backwards and skips the exact numbers that explain why a $100-an-hour pay rate turns into a $150 or $160 invoice.

A plain accounting of where I sit, since the next few thousand words ask you to trust a number. KORE1 earns a fee when a client hires an FP&A analyst or financial analyst we placed, contract or direct. We run these searches through our accounting and finance consulting practice and quote contract staffing engagements most weeks of the year, so read everything below knowing I have a stake in whether you end up calling us.

Every rate below comes from the KORE1 Contract Rate Index 2026-Q4, effective October 16, 2026, built from BLS OEWS May 2025 wages for SOC 13-2051, Financial and Investment Analysts, run through a 24% employer burden and the bill bands we see across KORE1’s wider book of placements.

How Much Does a Contract FP&A or Financial Analyst Cost per Hour in 2026?

A bill rate is the whole invoice. Pay, employer payroll taxes, workers’ comp, insurance, sick pay, the firm’s margin, all of it rolled into one hourly number. Nothing gets added afterward. Here is the national answer, at 40 hours a week, 13 weeks for three months and 26 for six.

What Do FP&A Contractors Bill at Junior, Mid and Senior Level?

One note before anything else. The index prices financial analyst and FP&A analyst as a single combined role. We did not split them, because at the mid and senior end the day-to-day work overlaps almost completely. A financial analyst title and an FP&A analyst title often sit on the exact same seat.

There is no KORE1 observed cell for this role yet. None. A role only earns its own line in the index once we have placed at least five people into it across the window the index covers, and FP&A and financial analyst searches, combined, have not cleared that floor. We will not dress up a thin handful of invoices as a data set. Every number here is modeled from BLS wages, and we say so every time, not just once in the fine print.

Junior sits at the 25th wage percentile, mid at the median, senior at the 75th. Each band’s edges stretch toward its neighbor, which is a polite way of saying a strong junior analyst and a mediocre mid-level one can land on nearly the same line of an invoice, and nobody notices until the renewal conversation gets awkward.

How Much Do FP&A and Financial Analyst Bill Rates Change by Metro?

Less than you’d think, until a coast shows up on the list.

Chicago and Dallas-Fort Worth both land close enough to the national median that a budget built on the national number will not be meaningfully wrong in either city. Orange County and Los Angeles run about a dollar below national, same figures, because the index treats the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim metro as a single labor market. Milwaukee runs under national. New York does not. A mid-level FP&A analyst in New York bills a $102 median against $82 nationally, and the range stretches wider too, $29 wide against $22 nationally.

Senior rates carry the same shape and the dollars spread further apart. A senior financial analyst in New York bills $116 to $144, median $134, which against the $92 to $121 mid-level New York range is a gap big enough to fund most of a junior analyst’s salary on its own. Metro gaps widen as the role gets more senior. They do not hold steady, and budgeting as though they do is how a finance team ends up short mid-search.

What Does a 3-Month or 6-Month FP&A Engagement Cost?

Take the national mid-level median. Three months at 40 hours a week is 520 hours, priced at $42,400. Six months doubles the hours and lands at $84,800. Senior runs $55,000 and $110,000 on the same math. Plain multiplication, nothing clever about it.

Real FP&A engagements rarely stop at exactly 13 weeks. Across every role KORE1 staffs, the median ended assignment ran 116 days, from 1,887 ended assignments in our records. That is closer to 17 weeks than 13. We have not broken that figure out by role yet, so treat it as a signal about contract engagements generally and not a promise about your specific search. A budget build that runs through a full planning cycle and a one-off variance project do not run on the same clock.

What Is Actually Inside a Contract Bill Rate?

Devin Hornick, a Partner at KORE1, explains it with round numbers on purpose. “$100 an hour pay plus a 24% burden is $124 loaded; the bill rate on that pay would likely be around $150 to $160.”

Three numbers, one worker. What the analyst earns. What the employer owes on top of that. What the invoice says. That 24% is not a fee tacked on for appearances. It is the real cost of carrying a W2 worker on payroll. In 2026 the employer pays 6.2% Social Security on wages up to $184,500 and 1.45% Medicare on every dollar, per IRS Publication 15. Add unemployment tax, workers’ comp, and liability coverage. Add paid sick leave, which in California runs at least 40 hours or 5 days a year under the state’s rules, and that cost rides inside the hourly number too, not on a separate line somewhere.

Here is where a budget actually gets burned. A firm that quotes a markup percentage instead of a bill rate will often leave burden out of that percentage completely, so the same stated markup applied to pay alone instead of to loaded cost produces two very different invoices from what sounded like the same quote. Ask every firm you talk to, us included, one plain question. Does your percentage sit on pay, or on the loaded cost? Better still, ask for pay, burden, and bill rate as three separate lines on the same seat, and only compare the last one.

When Budget Season Hits, What Should an FP&A Contractor Actually Deliver?

Budget season is when FP&A contract demand spikes, and it is also when clients ask for the wrong deliverable first. “Build me a model” is not a scope. A model that nobody on staff can run after the contractor leaves is a liability dressed up as a deliverable.

What a competent contract FP&A analyst should be producing during a Q4 or Q1 budget cycle:

• A working budget model built in the tools the client actually keeps, not a parallel version in software only the contractor knows how to open.
• Variance analysis against the prior forecast, with the drivers behind each variance written in plain language a non-finance VP can read without a glossary.
• Scenario planning, usually two or three cases, so the board sees a range instead of a single confident number that turns out wrong by February.
• A handoff document. Formulas labeled. Assumptions dated. The whole point of bringing in a contractor for budget season is that someone on staff can run next year’s cycle without hiring again.

That last point gets skipped constantly, and it is the single biggest source of regret I hear about afterward. A model with no documentation is a model that gets rebuilt from scratch the next time someone leaves.

How Long Do FP&A Contracts Typically Run?

Longer than a single budget cycle usually assumes. A Q4 build runs straight into Q1 variance review almost without a gap, and the same contractor who built the model is nearly always the right person to defend it against the actuals once real numbers start coming in. We do not have a clean, verified median specifically for FP&A and financial analyst engagements yet. What we do have is the sitewide figure above, 116 days across every role KORE1 staffs, and FP&A work tends to sit on the longer side of that range rather than the shorter one, because a budget cycle does not end when the deck is presented.

If a contractor turns out to be someone a client wants on permanent payroll, a KORE1 placement can convert at no additional fee after 1,040 hours, which works out to roughly six months at full time. More than one CFO has quietly used that first stretch as the real interview, long before anyone drafts an offer letter.

Where KORE1’s Own Numbers Fit Against the Modeled Rates

Five is the floor. A role earns its own observed cell in the index once KORE1 has placed at least five people into it over the window the index covers, and FP&A and financial analyst searches, combined, have not cleared that floor. Every rate in this post, every one, comes from BLS wage data run through a 24% burden and the bill bands we see across the wider book of KORE1 placements. Not one of them is pulled straight from our own FP&A invoices.

Ryan McManus, who runs KORE1, built the index this way on purpose. He described the goal plainly on the call where this project started: “Feeding our actual placement data, our actual bill rates and pay rates over the years… the structured data of what people can expect to pay.” For roles like controller, project manager, and a growing list of others, that observed data already exists in the index. For FP&A and financial analyst, it does not, not yet.

Call that a gap. I will not argue with you. I would rather tell you the gap is there than paste a thin handful of invoices into a table and call it research. Once FP&A and financial analyst searches clear five placements, a refresh of this post gets its own observed row, and we will say so when it happens.

Before the CFO Signs Off on the Rate

So what does a contract FP&A analyst actually run per hour?

$72 to $94 an hour nationally for a mid-level FP&A or financial analyst, median $82. A three-month, 40-hour-a-week contract at the median runs about $42,400, and six months about $84,800 (KORE1 Contract Rate Index 2026-Q4). Modeled from BLS OEWS May 2025 wages and a 24% employer burden, not pulled from an observed KORE1 cell for this role.

What about a senior FP&A analyst?

Senior FP&A analysts bill $94 to $114 an hour nationally, median $106, with a 3-month engagement around $55,000 and a 6-month engagement around $110,000. The senior band sits at the 75th wage percentile, so a strong mid-level analyst can occasionally price near the low end of this range.

Does New York cost meaningfully more than the national rate?

A mid-level FP&A analyst in New York bills $92 to $121 an hour, median $102, which is $20 above the $82 national median. Three months at the median runs about $53,200, and six months about $106,400. Senior New York rates widen the gap further, to $116 to $144, median $134.

Is Milwaukee really the budget option it looks like on paper?

For this role, yes. A mid-level FP&A analyst in Milwaukee bills $69 to $86 an hour, median $77, about $5 under the $82 national median. Three months runs roughly $39,900, six months $79,800. Orange County, Los Angeles, and New York all sit well above it at the same level.

If a firm quotes me a markup percentage, how do I know what it actually covers?

You ask, and you do not accept a vague answer the first time you hear one. Devin Hornick’s example holds up here. $100 an hour of pay plus a 24% burden comes to $124 loaded, and the bill rate on that pay lands around $150 to $160. Get pay, burden, and bill rate as three separate lines on the same seat before you sign anything.

Price the Seat Before Budget Season Locks It In

I will leave you with the same thing I tell CFOs on the phone every October. Price the scope the work actually requires, not the title that sounds better on the requisition. An analyst search dressed up as senior to justify a bigger line item in the budget usually just means a longer search, because the pool of people who can genuinely run a full model build is smaller than the pool of people willing to call themselves senior on a resume.

From there, it is arithmetic you can do in the margin of the budget deck. Take your metro’s median, multiply by the hours the cycle honestly needs, and leave room for whatever the variance review surfaces once the actuals start coming in, because something usually surfaces. I have spent this whole post asking you to check our numbers against the source, so here is a number of ours worth checking too. Across the people KORE1 places, retention sits at 92 percent a year after the start date.

Have an actual seat, a start date, and a metro in mind? Reach out to our accounting and finance team and we will tell you where we would push back on the number before you commit to it. For the role itself, our financial analyst job description template and our financial analyst interview questions cover the rest of the hiring process once the budget line is set. Curious what the role should pay on a permanent basis instead of a contract one? The salary benchmark assistant runs that comparison. This index gets rebuilt every quarter, next in January 2027, so treat today’s rates as good through then and not a day longer.