QuickBooks Raised Prices Again in August 2026: What Your Bill Looks Like Now

Intuit raised QuickBooks Online prices on August 1, 2026. If you are on one of the upper tiers, this was not a rounding error: Plus went from $115 to $140 a month, and Advanced from $275 to $340. That is a 22% and a 24% increase respectively, with no new capability attached to either.

It is also the second increase Intuit has made in 2026. This post covers what the new pricing actually is, what the increase costs you over a year at each tier, and the four things worth doing about it — in order of how disruptive they are.

The new QuickBooks Online pricing

*Verified August 2026 against Intuit's product-update announcement and three independent sources. Prices move — re-check before making a decision on them.*

The shape of that table is the part worth noticing. The increase was not applied evenly. A single-user business on Simple Start absorbed $36 a year. A business on Plus — the tier you get moved to for job costing, project tracking, inventory, or budgets — absorbed $300. A business on Advanced absorbed $780.

That is not an accident of rounding. It is the tiers with the least practical ability to leave taking the largest increases.

Why you are probably on a higher tier than you chose

Almost nobody signs up for QuickBooks Plus. They sign up for Simple Start or Essentials, and then one specific need moves them up:

• You wanted to know which jobs made money, and project tracking is Plus-only.
• You wanted a budget versus actual report, and budgets are Plus-only.
• You added a fourth or fifth user, and Essentials caps at three.
• You needed inventory tracking.

One feature, one upgrade, and then that becomes your permanent monthly cost. The August increase applied to wherever that process left you — which is why the owners hit hardest by it are the ones who were upgraded for a single capability years ago and never revisited the decision.

Option 1: Audit your tier before anything else

This is the least disruptive move and the one most likely to pay off immediately. Downgrading from Plus to Simple Start now saves $102/mo — more than $1,200 a year.

The test is not whether the premium features sound useful. It is whether you have genuinely used them in the last 90 days. Go feature by feature:

1. Project or job tracking — have you actually opened a project profitability report this quarter, or did you set projects up and abandon it? This is the most commonly abandoned Plus feature; the tagging discipline is a chore nobody owns.
2. Budgets — is there a live budget in there, or one you built once in January?
3. User count — how many people logged in this month, not how many have accounts?
4. Inventory — are you tracking real inventory quantities, or just buying materials per job?

If three of those four came back "no," you are paying $140 a month for a $38 plan.

The catch, and it is a real one: downgrading can be disruptive. Some features and data become unavailable on lower plans, and you may not get the historical view back if you change your mind. Review what you would lose before you pull the trigger, and do it at a period boundary rather than mid-month.

Option 2: Consolidate the add-ons around it

Software bills rarely stop at the platform. A typical stack ends up looking like this:

Three systems that do not talk to each other, and someone spending hours a month moving data between them. The consolidation win here is usually not the license fee — it is the hours. If one platform covers invoicing, receipts, and reporting, the tools disappear and so does the syncing.

If you are on Plus at $140 primarily for job costing and budgets, the arithmetic changes further, because those capabilities are included in the base price of several alternatives rather than gated behind a tier.

Option 3: Turn on the automation you are already paying for

Before you evaluate anything new, make sure you are using what you have. Most QuickBooks users leave bank rules unconfigured, never set up recurring transactions, and manually categorize things the software could learn. That does not lower your bill, but it changes the value you get for it — and it is a fair test of whether your problem is the price or the workload.

If you do that and the books still take you a weekend a month, the problem was never the price.

Option 4: Compare alternatives — but compare honestly

This is where most comparison articles, including ones written by software companies, quietly cheat.

The trick is to compare an alternative's full price against QuickBooks Simple Start at $38, because it makes any alternative look expensive. But Simple Start is single-user, with no budgets, no team roles, and a fraction of the reporting. If you are reading this because your Plus bill went up, Simple Start is not a plan you could run on. Comparing against it is measuring your alternative against a plan that does not do the job.

The honest comparison is against the tier you would actually need. For most businesses evaluating a switch, that is Plus at $140/mo.

A few reference points at that level, as of August 2026:

I build one of these, so treat that row with appropriate suspicion and check it yourself. What I would say plainly: Poof is not the cheapest option — Wave is free. The claim worth making is that a single plan with no tier to grow into is a different pricing model from one where an ordinary feature moves you up $55 a month, and that difference compounds over the years you own the software.

If you want the feature-level version of that, the Poof vs QuickBooks comparison puts them side by side at the Plus tier and states the date the prices were checked.

What I would actually do

In order:

1. Audit your tier this week. It is free, it takes twenty minutes, and it is the only option that can save you $1,200 a year without changing anything about how you work.
2. Add up your whole stack, not just the QuickBooks line. The add-ons are usually where the waste is.
3. Ask what the software is doing for you. If you are paying $140 a month and still categorizing transactions by hand every weekend, the tier is not really the problem.
4. If you switch, switch at a period boundary — the start of a quarter or fiscal year, when closing balances are clean — and run both systems in parallel for a month before you cancel.

Switching platforms costs real time. A $25 increase alone does not justify it. But an increase is a reasonable prompt to check whether what you are paying for still matches what you need, and most owners have not run that check in years.

For more on cutting the bill without switching, see QuickBooks Too Expensive? 5 Things You Can Do Right Now. For a broader look at the landscape, the best QuickBooks alternatives for small business covers Wave, Xero, FreshBooks, and Poof with pricing and who each one fits.

*Written by Austin Semple, a former controller with 10+ years of audit and controller experience, and the founder of Poof. Poof is one plan at $79/mo with every feature included — see what's in it.*