PRICING · 2026
The straight answer on cost. No “well, it depends.”
Almost nobody in this industry publishes numbers. Here they are anyway.
Fractional CFO retainers
$3,000–$15,000/mo
Most real engagements land in the middle.
Full-time CFO, all-in
$250K–$450K+/yr
Once you load in bonus, benefits, equity, and the recruiter's fee.
THE VARIABLES
What moves the number
- Scope
- Strategic-only sits low. Add the monthly close and fixing the systems underneath, and it climbs.
- Complexity
- Multiple entities, international operations, and field-dispatch models add real hours.
- A raise in scope
- M&A execution and fundraising are the highest-leverage work a CFO does.
- Industry
- Heavy industrial, data center construction, and public-company SEC reporting carry a premium.
- Who does the work
- A senior practitioner with six public-company tenures is judgment, not just labor.
ENGAGEMENT TIERS
Three ways to structure it
Advisory
$3–5K/mo
Strategic counsel, monthly working session, board-meeting prep, on-call judgment.
Growth Partner
$6–10K/mo
Everything in Advisory plus owning the close calendar, 13-week cash forecasting, KPI narrative, lender/bonding relationships.
Transaction & Scale
$10–15K+/mo
Everything in Growth plus M&A execution, raise preparation, QoE readiness, integration, international structuring.
The most expensive finance mistake is not overpaying for help. It is walking into a raise or a sale with numbers that do not hold up. Deals rarely die on a bad pitch — they die in diligence, at the finish line, when the data room does not match the story on slide nine. Do not optimize for the lowest number. Optimize for the value the number buys.