Why Belfast audit fees are the lowest in the UK
The median audit fee in Belfast is £9,270, against £15,000 across the UK, which makes it the cheapest of the fifteen cities with the most audited companies. The discount is real at the volume end of the local market, where the two busiest firms sit at £7,500 and £6,300, but the top of the city prices like the mainland at £19,000 to £21,000.
The cheapest of the fifteen largest audit cities
Every UK company that files audited accounts discloses what it paid its auditor. auditor.ltd reads that line from every filing it can find at Companies House, cleans it and groups the fees by size, sector and the town in the auditor’s address. As of 10 September 2026 there are 31,677 clean fees on file across 2,249 audit firms, and the national median audit fee is £15,000.
Belfast, the largest city in Northern Ireland, is the lowest of the fifteen cities with the most audited companies. The median fee on 208 Belfast filings is £9,270, which is £5,730 below the national median and 38.2% below it. The next cheapest city is Edinburgh at £11,158, so Belfast sits 16.9% below even that. At the other end, Reading is £18,850 and Cambridge £18,300, and Reading alone is 2.03 times Belfast.
The scale of the local market is modest but not thin. Belfast has 1,444 audited companies on file and 57 audit firms with at least one of them, against 61 firms in Edinburgh and 826 in London. There is enough choice for a tender, and enough fees on file for the median to mean something.
Where Belfast sits among the fifteen
| City | Fees on file | Median fee |
|---|---|---|
| Reading | 125 | £18,850 |
| Leeds | 396 | £17,590 |
| Manchester | 578 | £16,000 |
| London | 6,814 | £15,710 |
| Bristol | 379 | £15,000 |
| Birmingham | 295 | £12,490 |
| Edinburgh | 240 | £11,158 |
| Belfast | 208 | £9,270 |
The Belfast figure is not a rounding artefact of a small sample. Birmingham, with 295 fees, sits at £12,490, and Edinburgh, with 240, at £11,158. Belfast is below both by a clear margin, and the ordering has held across cities of very different sizes.
It is not one cheap firm holding the median down
A city median can be dragged by a single high-volume practice with a low rate card. In Nottingham, for instance, UHY Hacker Young accounts for 41.1% of the fees on file at a median of £13,675, which anchors the city at £15,000. Belfast is more distributed than that, and the low fees are not confined to one office.
| Belfast firm | Audits | Median fee |
|---|---|---|
| GMcG Belfast | 24 | £7,500 |
| HM | 19 | £6,300 |
| Grant Thornton (NI) LLP | 15 | £19,000 |
| Maneely Mc Cann | 9 | £20,000 |
| Moore (N.I.) LLP | 8 | £6,000 |
| GMcG Lisburn | 8 | £5,400 |
| Aubrey Campbell & Company | 8 | £16,730 |
| Miscampbell & Co | 7 | £8,466 |
| Hill Vellacott | 7 | £21,000 |
| Sumer Auditco NI Limited | 7 | £9,300 |
The two largest firms by volume both price at half the national median or below: GMcG Belfast at £7,500 is 50.0% of £15,000, and HM at £6,300 is 42.0% of it. Moore (N.I.) at £6,000 and GMcG Lisburn at £5,400 are lower still. Between them those four firms account for 59 of the 208 fees on file.
The top of the local market prices like the mainland. Hill Vellacott’s median is £21,000, Maneely Mc Cann’s £20,000 and Grant Thornton (NI)’s £19,000. Grant Thornton (NI) alone is 2.05 times the city median and £4,000 above the national one. So Belfast is not a cheap city in the sense that every firm charges less. It has a large, genuinely low tier that most other cities do not have, sitting underneath a normal upper tier.
Two explanations, and how to tell them apart
The first explanation is price. Charge-out rates track local salary costs, and a firm with a Belfast cost base can staff an audit for less than a firm in Reading or Cambridge. On that reading a Belfast company is simply paying less for the same work.
The second explanation is mix. The median reflects the companies that happen to be audited in the city, not a standard engagement. Fee scales with size sharply: the median is £11,350 for companies with £1–5m of revenue, £14,500 at £5–10m, £15,750 at £10–25m and £28,730 above £100m. A city whose audited population sits mostly in the lower bands will show a low median whatever the local rates are, because the £6,000 to £9,000 fees in the table are the fees a smaller, simpler company attracts anywhere.
The two are separable on your own numbers. Take your revenue band from the fee bands by size and compare your fee with that band rather than with the city. If you have £10–25m of revenue, the relevant comparison is the £15,750 band median, the £10,500 lower quartile and the £23,400 upper quartile, not the £9,270 Belfast figure. If your fee is near the band median while your neighbours pay Belfast rates, the difference is probably mix. If it is near the £4,700 fifth percentile for that band, the local price effect is real and you are getting the benefit of it.
When a company outgrows the £6,000 to £9,000 tier
The lower tier of the Belfast market is not built for every company. A fee of £6,300 buys a certain quantity of hours, and the point at which that stops being enough is usually visible in the accounts before it is visible in the audit.
Three markers tend to move a company out of that tier. Crossing a revenue band is the plainest: the step from the £5–10m median of £14,500 to the £25–50m median of £19,500 is £5,000, or 34.5%, and it arrives in a single year if the revenue does. Consolidation is the second, because a group audit with subsidiaries and intercompany elimination is a different engagement from a single company. External requirements are the third: a lender, an overseas parent or a prospective buyer will often want a firm with a name it recognises, and the local upper tier at £19,000 to £21,000 is where that ends up.
Grant Thornton Northern Ireland describes its work as “tailored, risk-focused audit solutions”, which is the language of the upper tier, and its £19,000 median is 3.0 times the £6,300 median at HM. That is the size of the decision. It is worth taking deliberately rather than absorbing it as an annual increase.
What to do with this
If you are audited in Belfast and paying between £6,000 and £9,000, the useful conclusion is that you are near the middle of your local market rather than at a bargain. The city median is £9,270 and the two highest-volume firms sit at £7,500 and £6,300. There is little room below that, and the question is not whether you can pay less but whether the engagement still matches the company.
If you are paying more than £15,000 in Belfast, you are above the national median in the cheapest of the fifteen cities, and the reason should be a specific one: group structure, a regulated activity, a reporting deadline that compresses the fieldwork. Ask the partner to price the same engagement as if it were the £10–25m band standard of £15,750 and to explain the difference from there.
In both cases the next step is the same, and it is not the city figure. Put your own filed fee against companies of your size and sector on the benchmark; that is the comparison a partner has to answer. Once you know where you sit, audit in Belfast lists the 57 local firms and their medians, which run from £5,400 to £21,000 among the ten largest by volume, and the data is downloadable as CSV if you want to run the comparison yourself.
Questions this article answers
What is the average audit fee in Belfast?
On the fees filed with Companies House and read by auditor.ltd as of 10 September 2026, the median audit fee across 208 Belfast filings is £9,270. That is £5,730 below the UK median of £15,000, or 38.2% lower. It is the lowest median of the fifteen cities with the most audited companies, with Edinburgh next at £11,158.
Why are Northern Irish audit fees lower than the rest of the UK?
Two things are in play and the filings separate them only partly. Local rates are genuinely lower at the volume end: GMcG Belfast's median is £7,500 across 24 audits and HM's is £6,300 across 19, against a UK median of £15,000. But the upper tier of the city prices normally, with Hill Vellacott at £21,000 and Grant Thornton (NI) at £19,000, which suggests the low city median also reflects a mix of smaller and simpler companies.
Is a small Belfast firm enough for my audit?
It depends on the band your company sits in rather than on the city. The UK median is £11,350 for £1–5m of revenue and £15,750 at £10–25m, and the lower tier of the Belfast market clusters between £5,400 and £9,300. If your revenue, group structure or lender requirements have moved you past that, the local upper tier at £19,000 to £21,000 is the comparison to make, not the £9,270 city median.
