How to Price Tax Preparation Services as a New Enrolled Agent: A 2026 Fee Guide

You passed all three parts of the Special Enrollment Examination, your enrollment card arrived, and a neighbor with a side business asks the question every new EA dreads: "So what do you charge?" Most new enrolled agents answer with whatever the preparer down the road charges, minus a little. That number feels safe. It is usually too low, and it stays too low for years, because the 2025 NATP Fee Study found that 87 percent of the average practice's clients are returning clients. The first price you quote is the price you live with.

To price tax preparation services so the fee holds up, you need three numbers you can work out before the season opens: what it costs you to stay in practice, what the market pays someone with your credential, and how much complexity and risk each return carries. Get those three right and the price for any return follows from them.

This guide comes from a CPA firm that provides outsourced accounting and tax preparation to businesses with $1 million to $10 million in revenue. We quote business returns every week, and the gap between a fee that covers the work and one that does not shows up by March. Every figure below comes from the 2025 NATP Fee Study, IRS publications or the federal rules that govern practice before the IRS, so you can check each one yourself.

What tax preparers charge in 2026

The National Association of Tax Professionals released its 2025 Fee Study in November 2025, and it is the newest national survey that breaks fees out by credential. For a base Form 1040 with Schedules 1 to 3, CPAs averaged $280, enrolled agents averaged $228 and non-credentialed preparers averaged about $185, as Accounting Today reported in December 2025. Your enrollment is worth roughly $43 a return over an uncredentialed preparer before you add a single schedule.

Business returns sit on a different scale. The same study found an average minimum fee of $634 for business forms, and half of respondents set that minimum between $350 and $850. The IRS publishes its own figure at the end of each business return's instructions: in the 2025 editions, the average out-of-pocket cost for a small S corporation return is $4,200 and for a small partnership return $3,300, counting preparer fees, software and filing. For how firms split those totals by return type, billing method and extra charges, this breakdown of CPA tax preparation costs by return type walks through each one.

Two things follow for a new EA. You do not need to price at the bottom, because clients already pay a premium for the credential. And business returns are where underpricing costs the most, so they need their own fee schedule instead of a 1040 price with a business form attached.

Start from your cost floor

Before you look at anyone else's prices, work out the lowest average fee that keeps your practice running. Some of your costs are set by the IRS:

• PTIN renewal: $18.75 for 2026, made up of a $10 IRS user fee and an $8.75 contractor fee. Every PTIN expires on December 31.
• EA renewal: $140, filed on Form 8554 once every three years.
• Continuing education: 72 hours per three-year enrollment cycle, with at least 16 hours each year, 2 of them in ethics.

The rest you price yourself: professional tax software, errors and omissions insurance, a secure client portal, CPE courses, and the unbilled hours you spend answering client questions in July. Get real quotes, because these vary far more than the IRS fees do.

Then run the arithmetic. The inputs below are an example to show the method, so swap in your own. Say software, insurance, the portal and courses come to $6,000 a year, and you want $50,000 from the season for your own time. That is $56,000 to recover, divided by the returns you can realistically prepare:

At 250 returns, the floor lands almost exactly on the NATP average for an EA base 1040. Most first-year EAs will not see 250 clients. The NATP averages also come from established offices: 59 percent of respondents have been in the tax business for 21 years or more. So a new practice with 100 clients cannot price like a volume shop. It needs a higher average fee, a client mix weighted toward Schedule C and business returns, or both.

Pick a pricing model

The 2025 NATP study shows how practices actually bill:

• Minimum fee plus complexity (48 percent). You set a floor per return and add a charge for each schedule and form. This protects your cost floor and scales with the work, which makes it the safest model for a new EA.
• Set fee per form (39 percent). Easy to quote and easy for clients to compare. It underprices messy returns, because a Schedule C with clean books and one built from a shoebox of receipts carry the same fee.
• Hourly rate (7 percent). The average set rate was $182 an hour in 2025, up from $179 in 2023, and half of hourly preparers charge between $129 and $250. Clients dislike open-ended quotes for returns, so hourly billing fits notices, amended returns, cleanup and representation better than routine preparation.
• Retainer (6 percent). Monthly fees for clients who need bookkeeping, payroll filings or quarterly estimates all year.

A practical combination for a new practice is minimum fee plus complexity for returns, and an hourly rate for everything that falls outside them. Keep the hourly rate even if you never bill it, as a check on your flat fees. If an S corporation return takes you six hours, six hours at $182 is $1,092, so a $634 minimum covers about three and a half hours of your time.

Build your fee schedule form by form

Use the NATP figures as starting points, then adjust for your market and your speed:

Schedules are add-ons to the base 1040 in the NATP data, and Schedules C, E and F sit at the top of the add-on range because they carry depreciation, basis and business-use questions. Price each one separately on your schedule so the client can see why a rental owner pays more than a W-2 employee.

Charge for risk and messy records

When NATP asked what sets the value of a service, 94 percent of respondents named the complexity of the client's tax situation, 83 percent the time required and 49 percent the risk or liability involved. New EAs tend to price the first two and forget the third.

The clearest example is the paid preparer due diligence rule. When a return claims the earned income tax credit, the child tax credit, the American opportunity tax credit or head of household status, you must complete Form 8867 and keep the records behind it. The IRS penalty for returns filed in 2026 is $650 per failure, up to $2,600 on a single return. The EIC add-on is one of the smallest charges on the NATP schedule, yet one missed check costs more than a season of those add-ons on that client. Build the interview and documentation time into the fee for these returns.

Messy records are the other one. The National Society of Accountants' 2024 survey summary found that 67 percent of firms charge extra for disorganized files, usually $100 to $200. For business clients, write the rule into your engagement letter: books reconciled by a set date, or cleanup billed hourly before return preparation starts. A business that has not reconciled its bank accounts all year is a bookkeeping project first and a tax return second.

The fee rules in Circular 230

Pricing for an enrolled agent sits inside Treasury Department Circular No. 230, the regulations governing practice before the IRS. Section 10.27 sets two limits:

• No unconscionable fees. A practitioner may not charge an unconscionable fee in connection with any matter before the IRS.
• Contingent fees only in three situations. An IRS examination of, or challenge to, an original return (including an amended return or refund claim filed within 120 days of receiving written notice of the examination); a claim for credit or refund filed solely over statutory interest or penalties; and a judicial proceeding under the Internal Revenue Code.

A 2014 federal district court decision, Ridgely v. Lew, limited the IRS's power to enforce the contingent fee rule against ordinary refund claims, so the rule reaches less far than its text suggests. The business case is unchanged. IRS Tax Topic 254 tells taxpayers to avoid preparers who base their fees on a percentage of the refund, and clients who read it will leave. Charge for the work, never for the refund.

Collect payment the way most of the profession does. In the NATP study, 63 percent of preparers expect payment when the work is complete but before the return is e-filed or mailed.

When and how to raise your fees

Fee increases are routine. NATP found that 83 percent of tax professionals raise fees every one to two years, typically by 6 to 10 percent. Because most clients return every year, a small annual increase is easier on everyone than a large catch-up increase in year five.

Three habits make increases stick:

• Announce them in writing before the season. Send the new engagement letter in December, with the fee schedule attached, so nobody learns the price at pickup.
• Raise the minimum fee first. It moves every return at once and affects the clients you are most likely to be underpricing.
• Review your slowest returns each May. If a return took twice the hours its fee assumed, reprice that client, not the whole book.

Your pricing checklist before the first season

Conclusion

A new enrolled agent does not need to compete on price. The 2025 NATP Fee Study puts the average EA base 1040 at $228, about $43 above a non-credentialed preparer, and the average business-form minimum at $634. Those benchmarks only help once you know your own floor, which comes from your fixed costs, the income you need and a realistic count of returns. A first-year practice with 100 clients needs a much higher average fee than an established office with 400.

From there, bill a minimum fee plus complexity, charge separately for due diligence returns, state returns and disorganized books, and keep an hourly rate for the work that falls outside a return. Stay inside Circular 230, never tie a fee to the refund, and raise prices 6 to 10 percent every one to two years. The fee you set this year carries forward with every returning client, so price tax preparation services from your own costs and the market data, never from the cheapest preparer in town.