Accountant and tax prep Google Ads cost per click

Clicks for bookkeeping and payroll cost the most at $11.20, 3.5 times those for tax preparation at $3.20. A campaign that takes every service pays somewhere between, set by which ones people search for most where it runs.

Keyword Planner puts the top-of-page bids for these searches at $5.50 to $28.90: what advertisers bid to show above the results. A typical campaign pays less than even the low end, $4.80, because Google charges what it takes to beat the ad below, most ads show under the top on many searches, and the longer searches with fewer bidders cost less. Planning a budget on the top-of-page bid overstates what clicks will cost.

No published study measures this business on its own, so its price level is the median for its industry in LocaliQ's studies, moved a third of the way toward Google's prices scaled to what campaigns paid. Google's prices set how its services and the states compare.

Searches peak in February, at 227% above November, the slowest month. A budget sized for the slow months runs out sooner in the busy ones.

Google's own search counts and click prices for the year to August 2026 (Keyword Planner, through DataForSEO), scaled to what campaigns paid in LocaliQ's published studies, rounded to ten cents. They are medians: half of campaigns pay more. The full method is on the benchmark page, and the budget calculator runs on the same data for any ZIP code.

Written by Grant Epley. Last reviewed October 11, 2026. Search data to August 2026.