QuickBooks Online Pricing 2026: Cost, Plans and Subscription Levels Compared

QuickBooks Online costs between $20 and $340 per month depending on the plan. Solopreneur is $20, Simple Start $38, Essentials $85, Plus $140 and Advanced $340. Those are the US list rates in effect after August 1, 2026. Payroll, payment processing and time tracking are charged separately on top of the subscription.

Most small businesses with staff or contractors land on Essentials at $85 a month or Plus at $140 a month. Simple Start at $38 covers one user who needs invoicing, expense tracking and basic reports. Plus is the first tier that includes inventory, project profitability and class tracking, which is usually what forces the upgrade.

There are five: Solopreneur, Simple Start, Essentials, Plus and Advanced. They differ by how many users they allow and which features unlock. Solopreneur suits one-person businesses, Simple Start and Essentials cover ordinary bookkeeping, Plus adds inventory and project tracking, and Advanced adds batch invoicing, deeper reporting and 25 seats.

Yes. For billing cycles on or after August 1, 2026, Essentials rose to $85 a month, Plus to $140 and Advanced to $340. Intuit left Simple Start, Ledger and the free and Lite tiers unchanged. Advanced also picked up Bill Pay Elite at no extra charge, which Intuit values at $540 a year.

Immediately before August 1, 2026, Essentials was $75, Plus was $115 and Advanced was $275. That is what pricing trackers updated in spring and early summer 2026 were showing. Plenty of articles instead cite $60, $99 and $200 as the old prices. Those are earlier rates from previous increases, not the figures that applied in July 2026.

The distinction matters if you are trying to work out how much your own bill moved. Compare the new rate against your last invoice, not against a number in an article, because Intuit has raised these plans more than once and any given write-up may be a full cycle behind.

On your first billing date on or after August 1, 2026, not on August 1 itself. If your card is charged on the 20th, the new rate starts on the 20th. Annual subscribers keep their existing rate until renewal. New subscribers get roughly six months of price protection, so the increase reaches them around the seventh invoice.

At current monthly list rates, a full year runs $240 for Solopreneur, $456 for Simple Start, $1,020 for Essentials, $1,680 for Plus and $4,080 for Advanced. Intuit routinely discounts the first several months for new customers, so year one is often well below these figures and year two is the real number to plan around. We break down every QuickBooks Online discount that genuinely exists, including the only one that does not expire after three months.

QuickBooks Online Advanced costs $340 per month, or $4,080 a year, after the August 2026 change. It includes 25 users, batch invoicing, custom report builder, workflow automation and now Bill Pay Elite at no extra cost. In percentage terms it took the largest increase of any plan in this round, which is why so many Advanced subscribers went looking for the new figure.

Solopreneur and Simple Start include one user, Essentials three, Plus five and Advanced twenty five. Your accountant does not count against that limit, because QuickBooks provides separate accountant access on every plan. If you need more seats than your tier allows, the only route is moving up a plan; individual extra licenses are not sold.

Choose by the feature that forces the upgrade rather than by price. Simple Start if one person invoices and tracks expenses. Essentials if you need up to three users, bill management or multiple currencies. Plus if you carry inventory, bill by project, or track classes and locations. Advanced if you need 25 seats or batch invoicing.

Paying for a tier whose headline features you never open is the most common way businesses overspend here. It is worth opening your own QuickBooks and checking whether you have ever used inventory, projects or class tracking before renewing on Plus.

Plus costs $55 more per month and adds inventory and cost of goods sold tracking, profit and loss by project, class and location tracking, and two extra user seats (five against three). Essentials already covers bill management, time tracking and multiple currencies. If none of the four Plus features apply to you, Essentials does the same bookkeeping for $660 less a year.

That gap used to be $40 a month and is now $55, so the decision is worth more than it was. There is a full breakdown in QuickBooks Essentials vs Plus.

There is a free Solopreneur tier and a 30-day trial of the paid plans, but no free version of Simple Start, Essentials, Plus or Advanced. Any business needing several users, inventory or project reporting will be on a paid plan. Intuit generally makes you pick either the free trial or the introductory discount rather than both.

Payroll is a separate subscription with a monthly base fee plus a per-employee charge. Published 2026 figures vary by source, commonly $45 to $50 base for the entry tier plus $6 to $6.50 per employee per month. Intuit also changed per-employee pricing on July 1, 2026, so confirm the live rate at checkout rather than trusting a review.

Yes. Payment processing is charged per transaction, payroll and time tracking are separate subscriptions, and some add-ons such as the Advanced construction module bill monthly on top. The subscription covers the accounting software only. If you take card or ACH payments through QuickBooks, processing fees will usually outweigh the subscription itself.

No. Every QuickBooks Online plan accepts uploaded bank files in CSV, QBO, QFX and OFX format, so importing history does not require Essentials or Plus. Uploads are capped at 350 KB per file, and QuickBooks Online never accepts QIF. Splitting a large export into smaller files is normal and does not affect which plan you need.

If the history you need is locked in Quicken, that is the one case where a conversion step is required first. Quicken exports QIF, QuickBooks Online does not read QIF, so the file has to be turned into a Web Connect QBO first. Our QIF to QBO converter does exactly that, and it writes deterministic transaction IDs so re-importing the same file will not double post.

Yes. You can move down a tier from account settings and the change takes effect at your next billing cycle. Features from the higher plan stop working, so inventory quantities, project reports and class tracking become unavailable once you drop below Plus. Export any report you still need before the downgrade rather than after.

For most small businesses it is now the only option rather than the cheaper one. Intuit stopped selling new Pro Plus, Premier Plus and Mac Plus subscriptions on September 30, 2024, and the 2024 release is the final one, supported to September 30, 2027. Enterprise is the only Desktop edition still sold. See QuickBooks Desktop discontinued for the full timeline.

Drop to the lowest tier whose features you genuinely use, check whether annual billing beats monthly for your plan, and cancel add-ons that are running unnoticed. Importing transactions from a file instead of paying for a third-party sync tool also keeps you off higher tiers. Review this at renewal, since that is when a downgrade costs you nothing.

If the new price has pushed you past what the software is worth, it is worth pricing the alternatives honestly rather than switching in frustration. Migration takes real work and the cheaper tool often lacks the one feature you rely on.

Each plan caps a few lists, and the two that catch people are classes and locations and the chart of accounts. Intuit states the Plus allowance as "Track classes and locations (40)" and Advanced as unlimited, and classes and locations are not available at all on Simple Start or Essentials. Simple Start, Essentials and Plus each cap the chart of accounts at 250 accounts, while Advanced is unlimited.