If you’ve recently incorporated, or you’re shopping around after a poor experience with a previous accountant, the cost of an accountant for a limited company is probably one of the first things you’ve searched for. And you’ll have found a wide range — some quoting under £100 a month, others nudging past £500. That spread isn’t random, but it isn’t always well explained either.

The honest answer is that limited company accountancy fees vary because the scope of work varies. A single-director company with no employees, no VAT registration, and straightforward income has genuinely simpler compliance needs than a growing business running payroll, filing quarterly VAT returns, and drawing a mix of salary and dividends. Those aren’t the same service, and pricing them the same wouldn’t make sense.

What we’ll try to do here is give you a clear picture of what the market looks like, what different fee levels typically include, and where we think the value calculation tends to shift in favour of paying more rather than less.

For ongoing monthly services, UK limited company accountancy fees broadly sit between £75 and £250 per month at the lower end of the market, rising to £250–£750 or more per month for businesses that need bookkeeping, VAT, payroll, and some level of advisory support bundled in.

If you only need year-end accounts and a Corporation Tax return filed once a year, you’re looking at somewhere between £500 and £1,500 annually from most practices — though that range widens considerably depending on the complexity of your accounts and where the accountant is based.

Hourly rates, where firms still quote them, run from around £50 at the lower end to £250 for senior advisory work. We’re not fans of hourly billing for compliance work — it creates uncertainty for the client and doesn’t reward efficiency — but it’s worth knowing the range if you’re comparing quotes.

One thing worth noting: HMRC’s free CATO service for joint CT600 filing closed permanently on 31 March 2026. From 1 April 2026, filing a Corporation Tax return requires commercial software. That affects anyone who was self-filing and relying on HMRC’s own tools, and it’s shifted the economics of DIY accounts for the less straightforward cases.

This is where the comparison gets more meaningful than the headline price. A monthly fixed-fee package from a competent accountancy firm should cover, at minimum: year-end statutory accounts, the Corporation Tax return (CT600), your confirmation statement to Companies House, and reasonable access to advice throughout the year.

If you’re VAT-registered, quarterly VAT return preparation should be in there. If you run payroll — even just a director’s salary — payroll processing and RTI submissions should be included or available as a clear add-on. The same goes for your personal Self Assessment return as a director, which is often priced separately and is worth checking.

What distinguishes better packages isn’t usually the list of compliance deliverables — most firms cover those — it’s the proactive element. Are they flagging dividend planning opportunities before your year end? Are they checking whether your VAT scheme is still appropriate? Are they available when you have a question, or does every query trigger a delay and a billing discussion?

In our experience, the clients who feel underserved by their accountant rarely complain about the compliance. The frustration is almost always about responsiveness and commercial input that never arrived.

A straightforward case for DIY exists: a single-director company, no employees, no VAT registration, consistent and predictable income, no property or investment complexity. In that situation, filing your own micro-entity accounts at Companies House is free (and remains so until at least April 2028 for unaudited micro-entities), and the accounting software to prepare them costs £20–£100 a year. You’ll spend 40–60 hours on it, which is the real cost.

That trade-off makes sense for some people, particularly in the early stages of a business before things get complicated. But the moment you add VAT, payroll, or project-based income with timing differences, the risk profile changes. So does the time cost.

One figure worth holding in mind: the late filing penalty for a CT600 is £200 from day one — even if your company owes no tax. That’s been the position since April 2026. It’s not ruinous, but it illustrates that the compliance burden for limited companies is real and non-negotiable regardless of size.

An accountant who costs £1,500–£2,000 a year and reduces your personal time involvement to a handful of hours annually is covering a meaningful part of that cost simply in time saved — before any tax savings enter the picture.

The clearest cases where paying more for accountancy support makes commercial sense are VAT registration, payroll, and anything involving dividends and salary optimisation for director-shareholders.

VAT alone adds quarterly deadlines, scheme selection decisions (flat rate, cash accounting, standard), and Making Tax Digital compliance. Getting any of those wrong is expensive. Payroll adds RTI submissions, employer’s NIC calculations, and — for CIS contractors — subcontractor deductions to manage. These aren’t especially complex in isolation, but they compound quickly if you’re also running the business.

Dividend and salary planning for owner-managed companies is probably where a good accountant delivers the clearest return. Getting the split right between salary and dividends, timing distributions sensibly relative to your year end, and understanding the interaction with personal tax allowances — this is exactly the kind of thing that saves real money and requires someone who knows your numbers well.

Tax planning, IR35 review for contractors, and R&D claims are further up the value chain again, and they’re the kind of services that a purely compliance-focused accountant won’t raise unless you ask. If your business generates any complexity at all, it’s worth understanding whether the accountant you’re considering actually thinks commercially, or just files things accurately.