US finance postings dated Mar 22, 2026 to Oct 3, 2026, read role by role. The short version: most of them ask for someone in the building, and most of the work in them does not need one.
Across 107,442 postings, 75.4% are on-site, 11.9% hybrid and 12.7% fully remote. Accounting clerk or specialist postings are the most on-site (86%); tax or audit postings are the most remote, and still only 20%.
We read 150 bookkeeper postings line by line. More than half asked for someone on-site. Only 10 listed a duty that actually needs a person in the room: mail, deposits, cash, the front desk. Bank feeds, bills, invoices and the close run from anywhere once someone has access.
Office managers, administrative assistants, receptionists. Of the 11,370 office and admin postings in our pulls, 9,211 put QuickBooks in the job. The bookkeeping seat is often not posted as a bookkeeping seat at all: it is half of somebody's job.
From a second set of 271 finance postings we read in full, with their pay. Half of the bookkeeper postings that stated pay fell between $48,880 and $67,600. Loaded cost adds payroll taxes and benefits to the rounded median.
| Seat | Stated pay / read | 25th percentile | Median | 75th percentile | Loaded, a year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bookkeeper | 101 of 125 | $48,880 | $57,500 | $67,600 | $76,800 |
| Staff accountant | 17 of 21 | $56,160 | $67,500 | $80,000 | $90,300 |
| AP, AR or payroll | 13 of 17 | $42,640 | $57,494 | $83,200 | $76,800 |
| Controller | 73 of 108 | $100,000 | $125,000 | $157,500 | $167,100 |
Pay is the midpoint of each posting's stated band; hourly bands at 2,080 hours a year. Staff accountant (17) and AP, AR or payroll (13) are small samples: read them as a direction, not a benchmark. How the loaded figure is built: what a bookkeeper really costs.
The eight tasks named most often in the 125 bookkeeper postings we read in full. All 8 are work software agents can do or prepare today, with a person checking the result.
A posting counts if it names the task anywhere. Full list and who takes each task: which bookkeeping tasks software can do today.
Sort the duties first. If nothing needs the building, a remote seat fills from everywhere instead of your commute radius.
A $57,500 bookkeeper is about $76,800 a year, and the seat can sit empty for a quarter while you search.
Most of a bookkeeping posting has a right answer. Put the person's hours on the parts that need a person.
| Role family | Postings | On-site | Hybrid | Fully remote |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Accounting clerk or specialist | 6,233 | 86.0% | 7.4% | 6.6% |
| Accounts payable | 8,371 | 83.2% | 9.3% | 7.5% |
| Accounts receivable or billing | 13,896 | 79.6% | 7.8% | 12.6% |
| Bookkeeper | 12,190 | 78.3% | 9.1% | 12.6% |
| Staff accountant | 7,489 | 77.2% | 13.0% | 9.8% |
| Payroll | 7,245 | 75.5% | 10.6% | 13.9% |
| Controller | 8,422 | 74.5% | 13.9% | 11.6% |
| Assistant controller | 1,036 | 74.2% | 14.3% | 11.5% |
| Accountant | 12,140 | 73.9% | 12.7% | 13.4% |
| Accounting manager or director | 9,992 | 71.7% | 15.1% | 13.2% |
| Senior accountant | 6,017 | 69.2% | 16.4% | 14.4% |
| CFO or VP finance | 2,646 | 69.2% | 14.9% | 15.9% |
| Tax or audit | 3,920 | 66.0% | 14.0% | 20.1% |
| FP&A or financial analyst | 7,845 | 64.4% | 16.5% | 19.1% |
We pulled US job postings from TheirStack, a job data provider, for our own outreach, between September 18 and October 10, 2026. After removing duplicates there are 224,740 US postings dated Mar 22, 2026 to Oct 3, 2026; 107,442 are finance roles, grouped into 14 families by job title. The rest are admin, purchasing and operations roles, used here only for finding 3.
Our pulls were filtered by job title, company size and the software a posting names. So this report does not say how big companies are, which software is most common, or how many postings exist in the market. Those would describe our filters, not the market. The pulls never filtered on remote work, which is why the on-site, hybrid and remote split is the headline.
Fewer than 1 in 400 of those postings list a salary in a form we can read, so pay and tasks (findings 4 and 5) come from a second set: 271 bookkeeper, staff accountant, AP, AR, payroll and controller postings bought with their full text from the same provider (September 18 to 26, 2026) and read in full. Pay is the midpoint of each stated band, hourly bands at 2,080 hours a year. That set was also bought for outreach, so its mix of roles reflects what we bought, not the market.
Finding 2 comes from a separate hand-read sample of 150 bookkeeper postings (September 9, 2026). Loaded cost uses the same rule as our seat cost calculator: payroll taxes 10.7% and benefits 23.0% of pay (BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, June 2025, private companies with 1 to 49 workers), each line rounded to $100.
Job postings we pulled from TheirStack, a job data provider, for our own outreach: 224,740 US postings after removing duplicates, 107,442 of them finance roles. Pay and tasks come from a second set read in full. The method section above has the dates and filters.
Because our pulls were filtered by job title, company size and software. Counting companies or estimating the market from them would describe our filters, not the market. The on-site, hybrid and remote split is the headline because the pulls never filtered on it.
No. It is every finance posting in our pulls, dated Mar 22, 2026 to Oct 3, 2026. Read the shares as what US finance postings look like, not as a census.
Yes. Quote any figure with "OpenHeadcount Finance Hiring Report, fall 2026" and a link to this page. For the role-level data, email us.
Quote any figure with "OpenHeadcount Finance Hiring Report, fall 2026" and a link to this page. For the role-level data or a question about method, email us.
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