Xero & QuickBooks Price Increases: What UK Businesses Actually Pay in 2026
One platform raised prices last September and has already announced the next rise. The other put its most popular plan up 47% in a single move. Here are the numbers, the add-on stack that quietly doubles them, and the maths of the alternative.
Quick answer
Xero raised UK prices on 1 September 2025 — Grow £33→£37, Comprehensive £47→£50, Ultimate £59→£65 — and has announced a further increase from 1 September 2026. QuickBooks raised UK prices in January 2026, with Plus jumping from £34 to £50 per month (about 47%) and long-term subscribers reporting roughly 75% cumulative increases over four years. Add the usual stack (payroll add-ons, receipt capture, reporting tools) and a typical small practice's real per-client software cost is two to three times the headline plan price. The IQ Suite prices the other way: from £5 per month with every capability included on every plan, metered by shared credits — and IQ Books, its native ledger, adds organisations at £2 each.
Every autumn, a particular kind of email lands in UK inboxes. It is warmly written. It mentions "continued investment in your success". Somewhere in the third paragraph, wrapped in softening language, is the actual message: your accounting software now costs more. Again.
Individually, each of these emails is defensible. Collectively, they describe one of the most reliable price escalators in business software — and because the products underneath are genuinely sticky, almost everyone pays. It is worth looking at the actual numbers, because they are larger than most subscribers realise, and the pattern behind them tells you where this is going.
Xero: the September ritual
On 1 September 2025, Xero raised its UK prices. The Grow plan went from £33 to £37 per month — about 12% — while Comprehensive moved from £47 to £50 and Ultimate from £59 to £65. The entry-level Ignite plan held at £16, but Ignite caps you at 20 invoices and 10 bills a month, which for most trading businesses makes it a waiting room rather than a plan.
The headline is only the start, because Xero's UK pricing is modular in the way that matters to real businesses: payroll beyond the plan's included allowance is £1.50 per person per month, expenses £2.50 per user, and CIS returns another £5 per month. A ten-person business on Grow with payroll, expenses for three users and CIS is not paying £37; it is paying north of £60 before it has bought any of the tools that actually automate the bookkeeping.
And the next rise is already scheduled. Xero has announced that subscription prices increase again from 1 September 2026. The precise amounts follow later; the direction never changes.
QuickBooks: the 47% year
Intuit's January 2026 UK repricing was blunter. The Plus plan — the one most established small businesses end up on — went from £34 to £50 per month: a 47% increase in a single change. Other plans rose around 15–17%. On Intuit's own community forum, one charity director worked through their history: £32 a month in 2022, £56 a month in 2026 — a 75% increase in four years, with no legacy pricing and no grandfathering.
To put that escalation in context: UK consumer price inflation over the same four years, painful as it was, totalled roughly half that. Accounting software has been out-inflating inflation, comfortably, while the core product — a ledger, invoicing, VAT — has not fundamentally changed.
The add-on stack is the real bill
Neither headline number is what a working practice actually spends, because the headline product does not do the whole job. The standard UK stack looks something like this:
The real monthly cost of "one" subscription
Ledger (Xero Grow or QBO Plus): £37–£50. Receipt and invoice capture (Dext, Hubdoc, AutoEntry): typically £10–£20 per entity for meaningful volume. Reporting and analytics (Fathom, Syft, Futrli): £15–£40. Payroll, expenses and CIS modules: £5–£25 depending on headcount. Working papers: usually Excel, priced in evenings.
A realistic small-business total lands between £70 and £130 per month, per entity — two to three times the number in the pricing-page hero. Every component renews separately, and every component sends its own version of the autumn email.
The strategic pattern makes the direction clear. When Xero bought Syft Analytics in 2024 and Sage bought Futrli before it, the message was that analytics is core functionality — the acquirers just prefer to monetise it through tier upgrades rather than lose the revenue to independents. What used to be a competitive add-on market consolidates into the platform's pricing power. For subscribers, the add-on you chose becomes the tier you are moved to.
Why everyone pays: the switching tax
Price rises of this size only hold if leaving feels worse than paying. In accounting software it usually does: moving means opening balances, contact re-keying, historic invoices, staff retraining and a nagging fear of the books being wrong at year end. That friction is worth actual money to the incumbents — it is, in effect, an unpriced component of every renewal. We have written separately about why that friction exists and how it collapses to one click, because the fear is much larger than the reality when the conversion is done properly and automatically.
Pricing it like a bookkeeper instead
The IQ Suite was priced by asking a different question: not "how much will the market bear," but "what would I have been happy to pay, per client, when I was doing this work myself?" The answers shaped the model:
One subscription, everything included. Every IQ Suite plan — from £5 per month — includes the entire platform: CodeIQ's AI transaction coding, ReconcileIQ's reconciliation engine, LedgerIQ's forty-plus analysis modules, PrepIQ's working papers. There are no feature gates and no "available on Premium" asterisks. Plans differ only in how many credits they include and, for practices, how many client accounts they can provision.
Credits meter usage, not access. Coding a transaction costs 4 credits, scanning a receipt 10, reconciling a statement line 1. A £5 Starter plan carries 5,000 credits a month — roughly a thousand coded transactions — and unused capability costs nothing, which is the opposite of paying £40 flat for a reporting tool you open quarterly.
Multi-entity that doesn't punish you. In IQ Books, additional organisations are £2 per month each. Compare that with running a second Xero or QuickBooks subscription per entity, and the arithmetic for anyone with a holding company, a side venture or a property SPV does itself.
No autumn email. This is a philosophical point as much as a commercial one. Prices that ratchet annually are a strategy; so are prices that don't. A tool built by a bookkeeper for bookkeepers holds its price the way a good supplier holds theirs — because the relationship is worth more than the ratchet. (The full story of why the software exists at all is its own article.)
What to do with this
If you stay on Xero or QuickBooks, do it deliberately: total your real stack — ledger, capture, reporting, payroll modules, per-entity multiplication — and put the September 2026 rise into next year's budget now, because it is already announced. If the total surprises you, the alternative maths is straightforward to test: the IQ Suite's tools work on top of your existing platform today (coding, reconciliation and analytics for QuickBooks, Xero, Sage and Pandle), so you can measure the value before moving anything. And when you are ready to move the ledger itself, IQ Books — currently in private beta, early access by request — brings your trial balance, contacts and outstanding invoices across in one click.
The autumn email is not a law of nature. It is a bet that you will not do the arithmetic. Do the arithmetic.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much did Xero prices go up in the UK?
On 1 September 2025 Xero raised UK prices: Grow went from £33 to £37 per month (about 12%), Comprehensive from £47 to £50, and Ultimate from £59 to £65 (about 10%). Xero has also announced that subscription prices will rise again from 1 September 2026. Payroll beyond the included allowance costs £1.50 per person, expenses £2.50 per user, and CIS £5 per month on top.
How much did QuickBooks prices go up in the UK?
In January 2026 QuickBooks raised UK prices across the board, with the Plus plan rising from £34 to £50 per month — roughly 47% in a single change — and other plans rising around 15–17%. Long-term subscribers report cumulative increases of about 75% over four years, and there is no grandfathered pricing: the new rates apply to existing customers too.
Why do Xero and QuickBooks keep raising prices?
Both are large public companies with growth expectations to meet, and both have been buying the add-on tools their customers previously paid for separately (Xero acquired Syft Analytics in 2024; Sage acquired Futrli in 2022). Acquisitions and platform investment get funded through subscription rises, and because switching accounting software is perceived as painful, most customers absorb the increase rather than move.
What is the cheapest full-featured alternative for UK small businesses?
The IQ Suite starts at £5 per month, and every plan includes the entire platform — AI transaction coding, reconciliation, ledger analytics and working papers — metered by a shared credit allowance rather than gated by tier. IQ Books, the suite's native bookkeeping ledger, is in private beta with early access by request, and extra organisations cost £2 per month each.