What an advisory meeting is worth to a practice

UK advisory work is priced at £100 to £300 an hour against £50 to £150 for compliance. How to price a meeting, and where the hour to run it comes from.

20 October 20268 minute read

UK compliance work runs £50 to £150 an hour outside London, and advisory and tax planning work runs £100 to £300 an hour, rising to £150 to £250 in London or for specialist tax work (accountingstack.co.uk, 2026).
An advisory meeting should be billed at the advisory rate from the first one, with the rate decided and told to the client before the meeting happens.
The hour for that meeting has to come from somewhere. For an owner still doing production work themselves, a seat that takes over that work is where it comes from.
A worked example below sets an 80-hour Production seat's cost, £1,100 a month, against the fee income the freed hours can carry at advisory rates.
Price the meeting this week: pick the rate, write it down, and tell the next client before the meeting starts.

What the meeting is priced at

An advisory meeting is priced at the advisory rate, separate from whatever is already charged for the return, the accounts or the bookkeeping behind it. UK compliance work commonly runs £50 to £150 an hour outside London, and advisory and tax planning work runs £100 to £300 an hour, rising to £150 to £250 an hour in London or for specialist tax work (accountingstack.co.uk, 2026). A practice billing the advisory meeting at the compliance rate, or folding it into the existing monthly fee with no separate line, prices the hour at whatever the compliance fee already covers.

Advisory is also where fee growth is concentrated. Consultancy fee income across the UK's top 100 accountancy firms grew 169% in 2022, from £1.3bn to £3.5bn (Accountancy Age, March 2023).

Where the hour comes from

The fee only lands if the hour exists. An owner still producing bookkeeping, VAT returns or payroll runs themselves has no spare hour for a client meeting. That hour is already spent on production work.

A seat replaces that production work with the same person doing it every month (how it works). An 80-hour Production seat covering bookkeeping and VAT, priced at £1,100 a month (pricing), covers roughly 18 to 20 hours a week of that work. The hours an owner was spending on it become the hours free for advisory meetings.

A worked example

Illustrative, using our own published rates and the lower end of the UK advisory band. An owner spends 6 hours a week, roughly 26 hours a month, producing bookkeeping and VAT for part of the client list themselves. An 80-hour Production seat at £1,100 a month (pricing) takes over that work and the rest of the list besides. Of the 26 hours a month the owner gets back, put half, 13 hours, into advisory meetings billed at £150 an hour, the midpoint of the UK advisory band (accountingstack.co.uk, 2026).

Item	Hours a month	Rate	Monthly value
Seat cost (80-hour Production seat)	80	—	£1,100
Owner's hours freed from production	26	—	—
Half of those hours, billed as advisory meetings	13	£150/hour	£1,950

The seat costs £1,100 a month. Thirteen hours of advisory time at £150 an hour brings in £1,950, before the compliance fee for the production work itself and before whatever the other 13 freed hours are used for. The figures move with the rate charged and the hours booked into meetings, but in this example, half the freed time alone brings in more than the seat costs.

How to price the meeting itself

Decide the rate before the next advisory meeting. Two ways to charge it, either is fine as long as the client is told which before the meeting starts: an hourly rate at the advisory band above, invoiced separately from the production fee, or a fixed amount per meeting, set once and used for every client at that level, reviewed once a year. What does not work is treating the meeting as part of the existing monthly fee with no line of its own: the client never sees a price attached to the time, and the time gets harder to protect every time the diary fills up.

Where to start

Work out how many hours of production work your own client list needs with the capacity calculator before deciding how many advisory hours a seat could free up. The first 30 days with an outsourced team guide covers how a new seat reaches full hours, and re-pricing your client fees ahead of MTD 2027 covers setting new fees once the capacity exists to charge for a wider range of work. For bookkeeping, payroll or back-office production, the back-office page sets out what moves and what stays with the practice. When you are ready to put a seat on your own list and price the first advisory meeting, get in touch.

Published 20 October 2026. Tax rules and rates change, so check current figures on gov.uk before relying on anything here. This is general information for practice owners and is not advice.

Questions

What should a practice charge for an advisory meeting?

Price it at the advisory rate, kept separate from whatever is already charged for the compliance work behind it. UK advisory and tax planning work is priced at £100 to £300 an hour, rising to £150 to £250 an hour in London or for specialist tax work; compliance work outside London runs £50 to £150 an hour (accountingstack.co.uk, 2026). Folding the meeting into the existing monthly fee, with no separate line, prices it at whatever the compliance fee already covers, below the advisory band. Set the rate before the meeting happens, tell the client what it is, and invoice it as its own line or fold it into a fixed amount reviewed once a year. Either works, as long as the client sees a figure attached to the time.

What's the difference between a compliance rate and an advisory rate?

Compliance work is priced for the return, the accounts or the payroll run itself: a fixed job with a known end point, billed at £50 to £150 an hour outside London (accountingstack.co.uk, 2026). Advisory work is priced for judgment on an open question — pricing, cash flow, a planned sale, a tax structure — where the value to the client has little to do with how many hours it took, and the UK market prices it at £100 to £300 an hour, £150 to £250 in London or for specialist tax work. The two rates sit on the same invoice for the same client in the same month, for different reasons: one pays for a task finished, the other pays for a decision made easier. Charging both at the compliance rate collects the fee for the easier of the two jobs and gives away the harder one.

How many advisory hours can freeing up production time buy?

Roughly half the hours a seat frees up, as a starting point, with the other half going toward growth work beyond advisory meetings. In the worked example above, an 80-hour Production seat at £1,100 a month frees up about 26 hours a month that an owner was spending on bookkeeping and VAT. Putting 13 of those hours into advisory meetings at £150 an hour, the midpoint of the UK advisory band (accountingstack.co.uk, 2026), brings in £1,950 a month before the fee for the compliance work itself. The other 13 hours are free for pricing reviews, client meetings that are not billed directly, or the business development the owner was not getting to before. The split moves with the practice. What matters is how many of the freed hours are billed at the advisory rate, and how many stay unscheduled.

Should advisory meetings be billed by the hour or wrapped into a fixed fee?

Either, as long as the client is told the rate before the meeting and sees a figure attached to the time. An hourly rate at the advisory band, £100 to £300 depending on the work, billed as its own line separate from the compliance fee, works well for a meeting that runs long or covers unfamiliar ground. A fixed amount per meeting, set once for a level of client and reviewed once a year, works well where the same kind of meeting happens on a set rhythm, a quarterly review for example, and both sides want a figure fixed in advance. What fails is leaving the meeting inside the existing monthly fee with no line of its own: the time has no price attached to it, so it is the first thing cut when the diary is full, and hard to start charging for once a client has had it without a price for a year.

What if a client will not pay for advisory time separately?

Show the client what the compliance fee already covers: the return filed, the accounts signed off, the payroll run completed. An advisory meeting about pricing, cash flow or a planned sale sits outside that work, and UK advisory and tax planning work is billed at £100 to £300 an hour because it carries a different kind of judgment (accountingstack.co.uk, 2026). A client who will not pay the advisory rate for that work separately is deciding not to buy it from the practice. That is a fair decision for a client to make, and a fair one for the practice to plan for: state the rate before the meeting starts, every time, so the price was never a surprise to negotiate away afterward.

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