Guide
Forensic accountant hourly rates: why no reliable list exists
Updated
The most honest answer to what the hourly rate is happens to be the most useful one: it varies by practice and by who does the work, and the rate matters less than the hours.
Why we do not print a rate
No regulator, professional body or statistical authority publishes forensic accounting rates in the UK, and none sets them. Rates differ between practices, between regions, and above all between the grades of staff doing the work, since a substantial part of most instructions is performed by more junior members of a team under supervision. Printing a figure here would give it an authority it does not have and would set your expectations against a number nobody measured. What can be said with confidence is what determines the total, which is set out in the cost driver table.
The rate is not the number that matters
Two practices quoting different hourly rates can produce very different totals, and not in the direction the rates suggest. A senior practitioner who has done fifty comparable instructions may reach a defensible conclusion in a fraction of the hours a cheaper team needs, and a lower blended rate applied to an unbounded scope is not a saving. Compare estimated totals for a defined scope, then look at the rates behind them.
How estimates are normally structured
- Scoping
- A short review of what actually exists before anyone commits to an estimate. Where the records are unknown or contested, this is money well spent and it should be priced separately.
- The main work and the report
- The substantive analysis and the preparation of a report that complies with the rules. Usually the largest stage, and the one the estimate should be most precise about.
- Written questions
- Under CPR rule 35.6 a party may put written questions to an expert. Answering them is further work and is normally estimated separately.
- Experts' discussion
- Where the court directs a discussion under rule 35.12, the expert prepares for it, attends it and contributes to a joint statement of what is agreed and what is not.
- Attendance to give evidence
- Preparation and attendance at a hearing, commonly charged as a day rate with preparation on top.
Questions that make quotes comparable
- Ask for the estimate broken into those stages, with the assumptions stated.
- Ask who will actually do the work, at what grade, and who reviews it.
- Ask what happens if disclosure turns out to be twice the assumed volume, and how you will be told before the cost is incurred.
- Ask whether the estimate is in a form that can be put before the court under rule 35.4(2), which requires an estimate of the costs of the proposed expert evidence when permission is sought.
- Ask for the hearing attendance rate separately, even if you hope not to need it.
This page describes how forensic accounting instructions are billed. It contains no rate figures because no authoritative source publishes them, and an invented figure would be worse than none. Obtain written estimates for your own matter.