Top Bookkeeping Franchises in 2026 | Real Earnings Data

Bookkeeping, accounting and tax franchises at a glance: 2025 and 2026 FDD data

Back-office bookkeeping and accounting brands — year-round business-to-business work.

Seasonal tax preparation brands — consumer-facing, concentrated in a roughly ten-week season.

Revenue figures are not comparable across the two tables, and only partly comparable within them. Each brand defines its revenue base differently — gross sales, gross revenues, net fees, gross volume of business — and each reports on a different cohort of outlets. Outlet counts are total outlets at the most recent fiscal year end, including company-owned units where the franchisor operates any.

How to use this guide

Each brand is presented on the terms of its own disclosure rather than forced into one shared format, because the formats genuinely differ. Where a brand reports something the others do not — Padgett's profit bands, Liberty's return counts, Toro's fee per return — we report it rather than dropping it to make the columns line up. Where a brand's Item 19 rests on a sample too small to describe a system, we say so in place of the number. Two of the eight fall into that category, and a buyer is better served by knowing that than by seeing a confident-looking figure with no population behind it. Several of these Item 19 disclosures carry more detail than a comparison page can hold — Padgett's four band-level profit-and-loss statements and Toro Taxes' eight performance tables are best reviewed in the original document once you have narrowed your shortlist to one or two brands.

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Two businesses wearing the same label

Search for a bookkeeping franchise and you will be shown tax preparation storefronts alongside business-to-business accounting practices. They are sold through the same channel and they file the same kind of disclosure document, but they are not the same business, and buying one when you wanted the other is the most common expensive mistake in this category.

The back-office model — Padgett, Paramount Tax & Accounting, Ledgers, Booxkeeping — sells recurring monthly work to small business owners: bookkeeping, payroll processing, financial statements, and business tax filings. Revenue arrives every month. Clients stay for years. The franchisee is usually selling professional services rather than staffing a counter, and the build is often a home office or small suite rather than retail frontage. Padgett's low-end investment estimate starts at $8,700 for that reason.

The seasonal model — Liberty Tax, Jackson Hewitt, ATAX, Toro Taxes — sells individual tax returns to consumers in a window that runs from late January to mid-April. Most of the year's revenue arrives in roughly ten weeks. The office needs to be visible, staffed up for the season and staffed down after it, and the operator's core problem is filling a queue during a short window rather than retaining accounts across years.

Two pieces of context frame both models. On the back-office side, the constraint is supply: the Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 1,579,800 accountants and auditors in 2024, projects 5% growth through 2034, and expects roughly 124,200 openings a year, largely from retirements and career changes. Small firms have been losing capacity faster than they replace it, which is what creates room for a franchised practice to take on work.

On the consumer side, the trend runs the other way. Through the week ending March 13, 2026, the IRS had received 69,707,000 individual returns, of which 34,059,000 were e-filed by tax professionals and 34,637,000 were self-prepared. Self-preparation now edges out professional preparation on volume. That does not make a tax office unviable — tens of millions of returns still go through a preparer — but it does mean the seasonal model is competing against free and low-cost software for the simplest returns, and the disclosure data below reflects that.

What the Item 19 disclosures show: the back-office brands

This is the segment buyers searching for "bookkeeping franchise" usually have in mind, and it is also the segment where the disclosure quality varies most sharply.

Padgett Business Services: the only profit picture in the category

Padgett is the largest back-office system here at 164 franchises, all franchisee-owned — the franchisor operates none itself. It does not publish a system-wide average or median revenue per office, which is a real gap. What it publishes instead is more useful: averaged profit-and-loss statements for 130 franchisees sorted into four revenue bands, for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2025.

Three things stand out. First, the spread is enormous: the top band earns seventeen times the revenue of the bottom band. Second, the bottom band barely earns anything — $5,318 of adjusted operating income on $66,136 of revenue is not a living, and sixteen franchisees were in that position. Third, and least intuitively, the highest margin is not in the highest band. The $300,000–$499,999 group returned 36.7%, against 23.8% for the $500,000-plus group. Bigger practices carry more staff, and staff costs eat the difference.

The word doing the heavy lifting is "adjusted." Padgett states plainly that adjusted profit excludes depreciation, interest, owners' salaries and discretionary owner expenses, and that this treatment increases the reported figure. A franchisee paying themselves a salary out of that operating income would show a materially smaller number. Read these as pre-owner-compensation figures, not take-home.

Padgett's Item 19 also carries a per-client table — average annual fee of roughly $9,028 per client at the median — which is genuinely useful for modelling, but is a per-client figure and not a per-office one. Multiplying it by an assumed client count is your own projection, not the franchisor's.

Paramount Tax & Accounting: revenue and a net income line

Paramount is the fastest-growing brand in this segment, up from 39 outlets at the start of 2022 to 93 at the end of 2024. Its Item 19 covers 30 franchised outlets that operated full time through all of calendar 2024 — about a third of the 91 franchised outlets open at year end. The other 61 were excluded as too new, part-time or unopened.

The gap between the average and the median is the point. Average gross sales of $497,814 are more than double the median of $204,162, and only 9 of the 30 outlets — 30% — reached the average. One outlet at $3,322,740 is pulling the mean upward. The median outlet is the honest reference: roughly $204,000 in sales producing roughly $87,000 of net income before the owner's compensation is addressed.

Paramount's disclosure also includes a second table covering two affiliate-owned outlets with combined gross sales of $12,826,603. Do not blend it with the franchise numbers. Most of that revenue came from one Utah office doing tax consulting work on mineral property donations and conservation easements — a specialty the franchisor itself notes the IRS may phase out. It describes a business a new franchisee is not buying.

Ledgers and Booxkeeping: read the sample size first

Both brands make a Financial Performance Representation, which is why they appear here at all. Neither one is currently in a position to describe what a franchisee earns.

Ledgers reports maximum, minimum, average and median gross revenues for outlets in operation three years or longer. That cohort is two outlets. Average and median are both $294,192, which is arithmetically inevitable with a sample of two — they are not two independent findings. The range runs from $223,911 to $364,474, one outlet is a storefront and the other is virtual, and every outlet that opened in 2025 is excluded. Ledgers had a difficult run before that: total outlets fell from 8 to 4 to 2 across 2023 and 2024, then rebounded to 16 during 2025. The system is essentially being rebuilt, and fourteen of its sixteen outlets have no reported results yet.

Booxkeeping's Item 19 is a thirteen-year set of income statements for the franchisor's own affiliate — a single bookkeeping company that reported $969,148 of bookkeeping income in 2024 — plus a one-year statement covering that affiliate and the single franchisee open twelve months or longer. That franchisee is a conversion, meaning it arrived with an existing client base rather than building one. The franchised system stood at nine outlets at the end of 2024. There is real information in that thirteen-year series about how a bookkeeping practice's cost structure behaves as it scales, and the gross profit percentage moving from 64.5% in the first year down to 29.5% by 2024 is worth studying. But it describes the franchisor's business, not a franchisee's, and it should not be read as an earnings expectation.

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What the Item 19 disclosures show: the seasonal tax offices

This segment has the opposite problem to the back-office brands. The samples are large — over 2,600 offices in one case — and the figures are smaller than most buyers expect.

Jackson Hewitt: two formats, very different economics

Jackson Hewitt is the biggest system on this page at 5,197 offices, and it is the only brand that reports separately by format. Storefronts are stand-alone offices. Kiosks sit inside a host retailer. The disclosure covers 2,663 franchised offices for the fiscal year ended April 30, 2025.

A storefront generates roughly 2.7 times the revenue of a kiosk at the median, and costs roughly three to five times as much to open — $71,050 to $105,000 for a new franchisee's storefront against $14,900 to $43,500 for a kiosk. The blended "all offices" median of $86,880 describes neither format well. If you are evaluating Jackson Hewitt, the number that matters is the one for the format you would actually operate.

Two cautions. Barely a third of offices in any cohort reach their own cohort's average, so the averages overstate the typical result in every column. And gross volume of business is the same base the 15% steady-state royalty and the 6.5% advertising fee are charged against — there is no profit, cost or earnings data anywhere in this disclosure.

Liberty Tax: the deepest sample, and a return count to go with it

Liberty reports on 1,411 franchise-operated offices for tax season 2025 — 83.2% of its franchised offices, and by a wide margin the largest usable sample on this page. It publishes revenue and return volume side by side, which lets you see the two levers separately.

The median office prepared 494 returns and collected $139,486 in net fees. That is the clearest single picture of a franchised tax office in this entire data set. Note what "net fees" excludes, though: it covers tax preparation and transmission less discounts, and leaves out financial product income, check printing, bookkeeping and credit repair revenue. It is a revenue proxy, not total revenue, and it is not profit. There is no cost or profit data in Liberty's disclosure at all.

The cohort is also survivor-screened. Only offices that operated in tax season 2025 and were still active as of February 15, 2026 are counted. Offices that closed are not in the sample.

ATAX: maturity is the variable

ATAX reports 93 offices sorted by time in operation, which makes it the most useful disclosure on this page for understanding the ramp.

A first-year ATAX office averaged $34,318 and prepared 85 paid returns. A fourth-year office averaged $195,963 on 758 returns. That is a slow, multi-year build, and anyone modelling year one off the $130,902 system average will be badly wrong. Note also that ATAX publishes cohort medians but leaves the system-wide median cell blank, and that the cohort medians sit far below the cohort averages at every level of maturity — $124,840 against $195,963 even in the mature group. Only 40% of offices cleared their own average.

One figure deserves flagging on its own: the lowest office in the two-to-three-year cohort took in $795 for the full year. The floor in this system is very close to zero.

Toro Taxes: high volume, small tickets

Toro Taxes is the smallest per-outlet business on this page. Across 192 operational franchise outlets in calendar 2025, median total gross sales were $42,598 and average total gross sales $63,874, on a median of 161 returns per outlet. The average overall fee per return was $279.28.

The fee structure explains part of the model. Toro's 10% royalty applies only to gross sales from bank-product transactions — returns where the client's refund funds the preparation fee — with a flat $30 per non-bank return and a $5,000 minimum per tax season. Bank-product returns carry a much higher average preparation fee ($417.23) than cash-file returns ($252.04), which is where the royalty base comes from. Bank-product volume fell sharply in 2025, though: the median outlet did 9 such returns against 18 the year before.

Toro also has the lowest entry cost in the segment at $17,835 to $79,150, and offers an initial fee ladder that runs from $40,000 down to $5,000 for conversions and $0 for existing franchisees. A low entry price against a $42,598 median outlet is an internally consistent proposition — but it is a small business, and the disclosure carries no expense or profit data of any kind.

What it costs to open, and what it costs to run

The pattern is hard to miss. The seasonal tax brands charge between 17% and 21.5% of revenue in continuing fees. The back-office brands charge between 9% and 15%. On a median Liberty office at $139,486, a 19% load is roughly $26,500 a year before rent, staff or software. On a median Jackson Hewitt office at $86,880, 21.5% is roughly $18,700 — taken from a business that earns most of its revenue in ten weeks.

Padgett at 9%, with no advertising fund currently being collected, is the lightest ongoing structure in the category by a wide margin. That has to be weighed against its start-up franchise fee of $62,750, the highest here.

Minimums matter too, and they are easy to miss. ATAX requires $5,000 in royalty in year one rising to $10,000 from year three, regardless of revenue. Liberty's royalty minimums climb to $11,000 a year. Booxkeeping's combined royalty and brand fee minimums reach $2,400 a month by the seventh year. A slow office pays these anyway.

Who is buying units back: what Item 20 shows

Outlet counts in this category tell a sharper story than usual, and it is the single most useful piece of context on this page.

The two national tax brands are moving in the same direction at the same time, and it is worth understanding what that means. Jackson Hewitt's franchised offices fell by 669 over three years while its company-owned offices grew by 353. Liberty's franchised offices fell by 454 while company-owned grew from 114 to 126, including 43 offices reacquired in 2025 alone.

A franchisor buying offices back is not automatically a bad sign — sometimes it reflects a deliberate strategy of taking key markets in-house, and sometimes it means the franchisor is absorbing units nobody wanted to buy. What it does mean is that in both systems, the number of independent operators is falling year after year. Any buyer should ask directly: of the offices that left the system, how many were sold to a new franchisee, how many were taken over by the franchisor, and how many simply closed. Item 20's transfer and termination tables in the current FDD answer that question, and the answer should shape the conversation.

Paramount is the only brand on this page in sustained, uninterrupted expansion, more than doubling its franchised base in three years. Growth of that speed carries its own risk — the majority of its outlets were too new to appear in the Item 19 cohort — but the direction is unambiguous.

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Which type of bookkeeping franchise is right for you?

Start with the calendar, because it decides almost everything else. A seasonal tax office concentrates a year of revenue into ten weeks, needs to hire and release staff around that window, and leaves the operator with a long off-season to fill or to use elsewhere. A back-office practice bills monthly, twelve months a year, and grows or shrinks with client retention rather than seasonal foot traffic. Neither is better. They suit different people.

If you want recurring revenue and are prepared to sell professional services to business owners, the back-office segment is where the profit disclosure lives. Padgett is the most established route and the cheapest to run at 9%, with the caveat that its bottom revenue band earned almost nothing and its start-up fee is the highest here. Paramount is the fastest-growing and publishes a net income line, at a higher fee load and a higher entry cost.

If you already own an accounting or bookkeeping practice, look hard at the conversion paths. Padgett's conversion franchise fee starts at $3,500 against $62,750 for a start-up, with an introductory royalty of 5% in the first year. Booxkeeping converts at $30,000 against $50,000. Converting brings a client base with you, which is precisely what the start-up franchisees in the bottom bands are missing.

If you want a consumer-facing business with a defined season and lower entry cost, the tax segment works — but size the opportunity honestly. The median franchised Jackson Hewitt office took $86,880 and the median Toro outlet $42,598. A Liberty office at the median took $139,486 on 494 returns. These are viable owner-operator businesses at the median and good ones at the top, but they are not the six-figure-income machines the category's marketing sometimes implies, and the fee load of 17% to 21.5% comes off the top.

If capital is the binding constraint, a Jackson Hewitt kiosk at $14,900 to $43,500 or a Toro Taxes outlet at $17,835 to $79,150 are the two lowest doors into this category. Both come with correspondingly small revenue expectations — a kiosk's median is $49,630 — and neither franchisor discloses any profit data.

Frequently asked questions

How much does a bookkeeping franchise cost?
Total estimated investment runs from $8,700 for a Padgett conversion franchise up to $166,000 for a Paramount Tax & Accounting outlet. On the tax preparation side, a Jackson Hewitt kiosk starts at $14,900 and a new storefront runs to $105,000. Initial franchise fees range from $25,000 to $62,750, with conversion and veteran discounts available at several brands.

How much do bookkeeping franchise owners make?
It depends entirely on scale and model. Padgett's 47 largest franchisees averaged $1,143,869 in revenue and $271,781 in adjusted operating income; its 16 smallest averaged $66,136 and $5,318. Paramount's median franchised outlet reported $204,162 in gross sales and $87,255 in net income. On the tax side, the median Liberty office collected $139,486 in net fees and the median franchised Jackson Hewitt office $86,880 in gross volume of business, with no profit data disclosed by either.

Is a bookkeeping franchise profitable?
Only two brands here disclose profit at all. Padgett's adjusted operating margins ran from 8.0% in its smallest revenue band to 36.7% in its $300,000–$499,999 band, before owner compensation. Paramount reported median net income of $87,255 on median gross sales of $204,162. Every other brand on this page discloses revenue only.

What is the difference between a bookkeeping franchise and a tax preparation franchise?
A bookkeeping or accounting franchise sells recurring monthly back-office work to business clients and bills year-round. A tax preparation franchise sells individual returns to consumers, concentrated in roughly ten weeks between late January and mid-April. They carry different revenue profiles, different staffing patterns and different fee structures — the tax brands here charge 17% to 21.5% of revenue in continuing fees against 9% to 15% for the back-office brands.

Do I need to be an accountant to own one?
None of these brands requires a CPA licence for the franchisee, and all run training programs. Several offer conversion terms specifically for existing practitioners, which is a signal about where they see their strongest operators coming from. Padgett's data is the relevant evidence: its bottom band of 16 franchisees earned an average of $5,318 in adjusted operating income, and the difference between bands is client acquisition, which is a sales problem before it is an accounting one.

Which brands are missing from this guide, and why?
We only feature brands that publish an Item 19 Financial Performance Representation. H&R Block, the largest name in the category, states in its FDD that it does not make any representations about franchisee financial performance, so it is not covered here. FocusCFO is excluded on the same basis. Several other brands commonly listed in this category — including Succentrix, Supporting Strategies and Payroll Vault — were not available in the filing set used for this analysis.

Key questions to ask before signing

1. What did the outlets you excluded from Item 19 earn? Every disclosure on this page excludes some outlets. Paramount's covers 30 of 91 franchised outlets. ATAX's excludes all 22 that closed during the year. Ask what the excluded group looked like.

2. Of the franchises that left the system last year, how many sold and how many closed? Item 20's transfer and termination tables answer this. In the two national tax systems, it is the most important question on the page.

3. What does the owner actually take home? Padgett's adjusted operating income excludes owner salary. Paramount's net income line does not state whether owner compensation is deducted. Ask for the treatment in writing.

4. What are the minimums, and when do they start? ATAX, Liberty, Booxkeeping and Toro Taxes all impose royalty or fee minimums that apply regardless of revenue. Get the schedule and model a slow year against it.

5. For a tax office: what happens in the other forty weeks? Ask what the brand supports off-season — bookkeeping, payroll, business returns — and what share of a typical office's revenue comes from outside the filing window.

6. For a conversion: what happens to my existing clients' pricing? Conversion terms are attractive because you bring revenue with you. Establish before signing whether the franchisor's pricing, software and service standards will require you to reprice or re-paper that book.

The bottom line on bookkeeping franchises

This category rewards reading the disclosure carefully more than most. The two segments look alike in a search result and behave nothing alike in practice, the sample sizes behind the published figures range from one outlet to 2,663, and the continuing fee load varies by more than two to one across otherwise similar brands.

If profit visibility is what you want, Padgett and Paramount are the only two brands here that offer it, and Padgett's band-by-band statements are the most informative document in the category — provided you read "adjusted" as excluding your own salary. If sample depth is what you want, Liberty's 1,411 offices and Jackson Hewitt's 2,663 are the only figures here backed by a population large enough to describe a system, and both point to businesses considerably smaller than the category's reputation. If you want to be early in a growing system, Paramount is the only brand on this page expanding without interruption.

And if a brand's headline number rests on one or two outlets, treat it as an anecdote regardless of how confidently it is presented. Two of the eight brands here are in that position today. That may change as their systems mature — but it is the situation the current filings describe.

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