Bookkeeper Salary in New York 2026,
$58,160 Median | BLS Data by City

The published New York figure is $58,160 a year, or $27.96 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025 — 14.8% above the national median of $50,670 — with a band from $39,880 at the 10th percentile to $81,990 at the 90th. That band is unusually wide for a clerical occupation, and the reason is that the same job title covers single-function transactional clerks near the bottom and full-charge bookkeepers running an entire company's books near the top.

New York-Newark-Jersey City at $60,640 pays the most, followed by Kiryas Joel-Poughkeepsie-Newburgh $56,130, Kingston $54,510, Albany-Schenectady-Troy $53,540 and Syracuse $52,000. The whole spread is under nine thousand dollars, so for this occupation the choice of metro matters far less than the choice between transactional work and full-charge work.

No. Bookkeeping is unregulated in New York. What the State Education Department's Office of the Professions does license is public accountancy, which means attest and audit work offered to the public is reserved to a licensed CPA — a bookkeeper may prepare the records but may not issue an audit or review opinion on them. Voluntary credentials from the AIPB or NACPB exist and some employers use them as a screen, but no examination or registration is legally required to work as a bookkeeper here.

By taking full-charge responsibility and then multiplying it. The $69,330 seventy-fifth percentile and $81,990 ninetieth are occupied by people who close the month unsupervised, produce statements a CPA can work from directly, and either manage staff or carry several client ledgers at an outsourced-accounting firm. New York payroll competence is a specific part of this: the state's withholding, Paid Family Leave and disability deductions are enough of a nuisance that doing them correctly is a marketable skill.

The contraction is uneven, which changes the answer depending on where you enter. Automation has taken the transactional layer — bank feeds, coding, invoice matching — and that is the part of the band near the $39,880 10th percentile. Judgement-based work has not been taken: reconciling exceptions, closing a period, and being the person a small New York employer trusts with its books. Roughly 10,430 openings a year in this state, pro-rated from the national figure, means entry is available; the question is whether the first job is transactional or full-charge.

Because bookkeeping has a defensible skill floor and general administration does not. A full-charge bookkeeper's output is checkable and its absence is immediately expensive, which gives the role pricing power that reception and calendar work never acquires. New York's employer mix amplifies it: a state full of small professional-services firms, restaurants, contractors and non-profits generates a large volume of employers who need one competent person on the books and cannot justify a controller. That demand meets a supply that a location quotient of 0.98 says is only average.

SOC 43-3031 is an exact match for the occupation, so the figure is not distorted by category breadth — but it is distorted by mode of employment. A substantial share of New York bookkeeping is done part-time, on contract, or through outsourced-accounting firms billing several clients, and OEWS annualises wage-and-salary employment. Self-employed bookkeepers running their own client books are outside the survey entirely, and at the top end of the New York market that is a meaningful population.

Scope of the close. A bookkeeper who hands a shoebox to an accountant and one who delivers a reconciled trial balance are separated by most of the distance from the $47,400 twenty-fifth percentile to the $69,330 seventy-fifth. After that: number of entities handled, which is what makes outsourced-accounting firms the highest-paying employer type in the New York data; industry, with construction, real estate and professional services paying above retail and hospitality; and payroll complexity, since a New York employer with union agreements or multi-state staff needs someone who can handle it.