The Fee Conversation Nobody Starts
Your fees are behind your costs, and some part of you already knows it. Wages have climbed hard through the staffing crunch, your good people cost more than they did 2 years ago, and the fee on your steadiest clients has moved up by a polite cost-of-living bump, if it moved at all. The math on that only goes one direction.
The frustrating part is that you hold real pricing power and decline to use it. Accounting is one of the stickiest relationships in professional services. Clients stay for years, the cost of switching feels high to them, and they'd rather not reopen a decision they made a long time ago. That's leverage. Yet the same firms holding it price like they're afraid of losing accounts that have no intention of leaving. Sticky clients, soft prices. It's a strange pairing, and it's expensive.
What a real raise looks like
The profession has started to move, at least on paper. More than half of firms said they planned to raise fees in 2025, most in the 5 to 10 percent range, according to a survey covered by CPA Practice Advisor. And the number that gets quoted at conferences is real. The national average base fee for a 1040 with Schedules 1 through 3 rose better than 45 percent between 2023 and 2025 in the Cornerstone data. So fees are rising.
Here's the trap inside that. A 5 percent increase that only matches wage inflation is not a raise. It's staying in place while telling yourself you moved. If your labor cost went up 6 or 7 percent and your fee went up 5, your margin got thinner during a year you felt like you were finally being assertive. The question was never whether you raised fees. It's whether you raised them past your costs, and most firms are pricing to catch up rather than to get ahead.
What makes this worth the discomfort is where the money lands. A price increase that holds drops almost straight to the bottom line, because you incur no new cost to deliver work you were already doing. The Journal of Accountancy made the same point plainly in its case for reviewing pricing. Selling more hours means hiring, training, and delivery risk. Raising a fee you've been underpricing means sending a different number and holding your nerve when it arrives. One of those is a project. The other is a decision you can make this week.
The conversation is smaller than the story you tell about it
The reason the fee stays soft is rarely analysis. It's the conversation. You've built the client into a friend, you know their business and their kids' names, and raising their fee feels like it puts all of that at risk over a few points of margin. So the increase gets deferred another year, and another, and the account drifts further below where it should sit.
Play out the actual downside. On a sticky client, a well-explained single-digit increase almost never triggers an exit, because leaving you costs them time, disruption, and the risk of someone who doesn't know their file. The realistic worst case is mild grumbling. The realistic best case, repeated across a book of clients, is a margin repair you've postponed for years. You have been protecting yourself from a discomfort that lasts one phone call and paying for that protection every single month.
Pick the number and send it
Skip the firm-wide policy. Take your standard engagement, the one you sell most, and raise it. Not by the cost-of-living reflex. By enough to get ahead of where your costs have gone, which for most underpriced firms means a double-digit move, not a token one. Put that number on the next several proposals and renewals and watch the response.
If nobody walks, and on sticky clients they usually won't, you just found margin that was always yours and keep going until someone actually pushes back. That's the floor you've been looking for, and it's higher than your nerve has been telling you. The fee conversation nobody wants to start is the fastest money in the firm. It's sitting in your client list right now, waiting on the one thing it needs from you, which is that you say the number out loud.