Month-End Close Benchmarks 2026: Days to Close by Company Size

The median organization takes 6 calendar days to close the month, measured from the first trial balance to finished consolidated statements, according to APQC's Open Standards Benchmarking measure 100162, which holds 11,223 responses. Top performers close in 5 days and the slowest quarter needs 10. In business days, more than half of finance teams report a close of four to seven.

That makes the APQC median the honest target for a controller in 2026, not the three-day close that software marketing promises, which only 18% of teams in a 2025 survey by Ledge achieve. A team in the bottom quarter has a real gap to work on, while a team already at the median gets more from tightening accuracy than from cutting another day.

Every figure below links to the page it comes from, read on October 21, 2026. The sources count days differently (calendar against business days, trial balance against period end), so each table names its unit.

CFOpresso data: we put the close-time sources on this page on one common scale, and the median of APQC's database equals 4 to 5 business days for any start date, which is the single most common answer band (32%) in Ledge's business-day survey. The two sources describe the same typical team, and a close of more than 7 business days is slower than roughly three quarters of the companies in both.

Five findings

1. The typical close is six calendar days. That is APQC's median from trial balance to consolidated statements, and its published quartiles put top performers one day faster and the bottom quarter four days slower.
2. Half of teams take six business days or more. In Ledge's survey of 100 finance professionals, 50% sit at that length or longer, and 27% need more than seven business days.
3. Mid-market companies are getting faster. Among 102 PE- and VC-backed finance leaders surveyed by Consero, 65% closed the month in under 10 days in 2026, against 62% in 2025 and 8% in 2024.
4. Management reporting lags the books. APQC's median from trial balance to the period-end management report for senior management is 10.0 days, four days later than the median for consolidated statements.
5. Year-end takes three times as long. APQC's median for the annual close at site level is 18.0 days, triple the monthly figure.

How long does the month-end close take?

APQC is the largest open source of close-time data. Its measures are cycle times in calendar days, weekends included, and the median is visible without a license.

APQC measure (calendar days)	Median	Sample	What it times
Monthly consolidated statements (100162)	6.0	11,223	First business entity trial balance to agreed consolidated statements
Flash report to consolidated statements (100597)	5.0	2,174	First monthly flash report for management to consolidated statements
Period-end management reports (100625)	10.0	3,287	First trial balance to the management report for senior management
Annual close at site level (100613)	18.0	2,214	Annual close, trial balance to consolidated statements

The quartiles come from APQC's own summaries rather than the measure pages, which show only the median to non-members. APQC's article on improving the month-end close gives 5 days for top performers, 6 at the median and 10 for bottom performers (n=10,201), and its infographic page dates that cut to 2022. An earlier edition, written by APQC's own CFO for CFO.com in March 2018, reported 4.8, 6.4 and 10 days across 2,300 organizations. The median has moved by less than half a day since 2018, so faster tools have not yet shifted the typical organization.

The gap that matters is the bottom quarter. A bottom-quartile team spends five more days a month closing than a top performer, which adds up to 60 calendar days a year, by our arithmetic on APQC's quartiles. For two months of every year, FP&A and the board work from numbers a month older than they need to be.

Business-day surveys: what teams report

Practitioner surveys ask in business days, which is how most controllers count. Ledge, which sells close automation software, surveyed 100 finance professionals at companies from 51 to more than 10,000 employees, mostly in SaaS, healthcare and manufacturing, and published the results on April 10, 2025.

Close length (Ledge, 2025)	Share of teams
1 to 3 business days	18%
4 to 5 business days	32%
6 to 7 business days	23%
More than 7 business days	27%

The same respondents named 3 to 5 business days as the most common answer for what a good close looks like. Half of them miss that range today, so the target is realistic but not yet typical.

Converting between the two units. Any run of six consecutive calendar days contains one or two weekend days, so APQC's median equals 4 to 5 business days, its bottom quartile 6 to 8 and its top quartile 3 to 5. That is our arithmetic on the calendar, and it explains why the two sources agree once the unit is fixed: a controller who says "we close in five working days" is describing the APQC median, not a top-quartile result.

Ventana Research's Best Practices for a More Effective Close, a 2021 paper sponsored by BlackLine, found that 53% of companies complete their monthly close within six business days and only 40% do so at quarter-end. It is older and vendor-sponsored, but it adds one useful point: 77% of companies that review their close performance periodically manage to shorten it, against 15% of those that do not.

Days to close by company size

No open dataset splits close time cleanly by revenue band. APQC sells peer-group and percentile cuts through a benchmark license, and the surveys below each cover one segment. Read them as markers for your type of company rather than as one ladder.

Company type	Benchmark	Unit	Source and sample
Mixed, all sizes	Median 6, top quartile 5, bottom quartile 10	Calendar days	APQC, 11,223 responses (median); 10,201 (quartiles)
51 to 10,000+ employees	50% at 6 or more; 18% at 3 or fewer	Business days	Ledge, 100 finance professionals, 2025
PE- and VC-backed, $20M to $500M revenue	65% under 10 days	Days	Consero, 102 finance leaders, Q1 2026
Midsize and large, enterprise-weighted	53% within 6	Business days	Ventana Research, 2021
US public, accelerated and large accelerated filers	10-Q due in 40 days	Calendar days after quarter-end	SEC rules
US public, non-accelerated filers	10-Q due in 45 days	Calendar days after quarter-end	SEC rules

Mid-market, investor-backed companies. Consero's 2026 CFO Survey, run with Cascade Insights in Q1 2026, covers finance leaders at PE- and VC-backed companies with $20 million to $500 million in revenue. Its headline close figure is the share closing in under 10 days: 8% in 2024, 62% in 2025 and 65% in 2026. Consero sells outsourced finance and accounting, so treat the trend as its sample's experience rather than the whole market's.

Public companies. The SEC sets the outer limit, not the target. Under the SEC's Financial Reporting Manual, Topic 1, a 10-Q is due 40 days after quarter-end for accelerated and large accelerated filers and 45 days for non-accelerated filers; a 10-K is due in 60, 75 or 90 days. A large filer that closes at the APQC median keeps 34 days for review, the auditor's quarterly review, disclosure drafting and filing, by our arithmetic.

Two SEC proposals could change that calendar. In May 2026 the SEC proposed letting companies file semiannual reports on a new Form 10-S instead of three 10-Qs, due in 40 or 45 days. A June 2026 proposal would give the smallest non-accelerated filers 50 days for a 10-Q and 120 for a 10-K. As of October 2026 both are proposals, and the deadlines in the table are the rules in force.

Small teams. No survey in this set isolates companies with one or two accountants. The month-end tasks are the same, but one person holds every role, so a late invoice or payroll file stalls the whole close instead of one workstream. Our month-end close checklist lays the tasks out by working day for that case.

What slows the close down

The time goes to everything before the final report. Ledge's respondents ranked the most time-consuming tasks as account reconciliations (banks, cards, payment processors), then accruals and provisions, data hygiene such as reclasses and correcting entries, variance analysis, and departmental submissions.

Blocker (Ledge, 2025, select all that apply)	Share of teams
Dependency on other departments and regions	56%
Managing everything in Excel	50%
Legacy systems that do not integrate	40%
High transaction complexity (volume, multiple entities)	39%
Understaffing or capacity gaps	37%

94% of teams use Excel in their close, and half name it as a reason the close is slow. Ledge also reports that teams spend 20 to 50 hours a month on cash reconciliation, usually across three to five systems. At the top of that range, one task takes more than a full working week of one accountant's month.

APQC's data points to structure more than tools. In the 2018 CFO.com piece, APQC found that organizations with wide adoption of a standard chart of accounts complete their monthly consolidated statements about two days faster than those with low adoption. For a multi-entity company, that is a third of the median close.

What close software costs

Close software is mostly sold by quote, which makes it hard to weigh the days saved against the price. We checked five vendors' pricing pages on October 21, 2026.

Vendor	Price printed	What the vendor says
FloQast	No list price	Close Management and Close AI packages; no per-user fees; contact sales
BlackLine	No list price	Sold through a demo request and sales
Numeric	No list price	Close Management and Analytics, Cash Management, and Billing and Revenue modules, or a full ERP replacement
Ledge	No list price	Priced as a platform by the close workflows automated, not by seats
Digits	$65, $100 or $250 a month	Essentials, Core and Pro; no per-seat fees; 30-day free trial; Pro is marked coming soon

Four of the five print no price. Digits is the exception, and it is a different kind of product: an AI accounting ledger with a close checklist and, from the Core plan, automated schedules for recurring entries. It fits a small company replacing its books, not a controller adding a close layer on top of NetSuite or Intacct. Those buyers get a quote from FloQast, BlackLine, Numeric or Ledge.

For the quote-only tools, our pages on FloQast pricing and BlackLine pricing set out what each vendor discloses, and the FloQast vs BlackLine comparison puts the two head to head. The ranked shortlist is in our best close management software guide, with AI-first options in best AI for financial close and single-vendor detail in the Numeric review. Vendor-by-vendor reviews of FloQast and BlackLine sit alongside our CFO software pricing index.

Toolradar data: Toolradar, the software directory we run, evaluated 280 accounting tools for its accounting ranking as of October 21, 2026, with separate profiles for close tools such as FloQast and Numeric.

How to use these benchmarks

Measure in APQC's unit first. Count calendar days from the first trial balance to signed consolidated statements for three months in a row, then place the average against APQC's quartiles. A team that counts business days and compares itself to APQC's calendar-day figures will judge itself faster than it is.

Then fix the biggest dependency, not the slowest task. Ledge's top blocker is waiting on other departments, which no reconciliation tool solves. A cut-off notice before month-end and a dated owner for every task are the cheapest first steps, and they cost nothing to try before a software budget. Teams that also report to a board should track APQC's 10-day management-report median, since that is the date the board actually sees.

Related reading: the AP automation statistics page covers invoice cycle times, a common upstream cause of a late close, and our SOX compliance cost page covers the control work a public-company close carries.

How we compiled this

Close times come from APQC's Open Standards Benchmarking measures 100162, 100597, 100625 and 100613 (medians and sample sizes as shown on each measure page), APQC's month-end close article and 2022 infographic for quartiles, the 2018 APQC column on CFO.com, Ledge's 2025 survey of 100 finance professionals, Consero's 2026 survey of 102 PE- and VC-backed finance leaders, and Ventana Research's 2021 BlackLine-sponsored paper. Filing deadlines come from the SEC's Financial Reporting Manual and its 2026 proposing releases. Software prices come from each vendor's own pricing page. All were read on October 21, 2026; unit conversions, annual day counts and the filing-window figure are our arithmetic. We will refresh this page when APQC's medians move or a new survey edition appears.

FAQ

How many days does the month-end close take in 2026?

The median is 6 calendar days from the first trial balance to consolidated statements, according to APQC's benchmark of 11,223 responses. Top performers close in 5 days and the bottom quarter takes 10 or more. In business days, the most common band in Ledge's 2025 survey is 4 to 5 days.

What is a good month-end close time?

A close of 5 calendar days or fewer puts a team in APQC's top quarter, and 3 to 5 business days is what most finance professionals in Ledge's survey call good. Only 18% of teams in that survey close in 3 business days or fewer, so a 3-day close is a stretch goal rather than the norm.

Is a 10-day close too long?

Ten calendar days is APQC's bottom-quartile mark, so a team at that level is slower than about three quarters of organizations. In business days, a 10-calendar-day close is 6 to 8 working days. The most common causes, per Ledge, are waiting on other departments and spreadsheet-based reconciliations.

Do smaller companies close faster than large ones?

No open dataset proves it either way. APQC's size cuts sit behind a license, and the public surveys each cover one segment. Mid-market data from Consero shows 65% of PE- and VC-backed companies with $20 million to $500 million in revenue closing in under 10 days in 2026.

How long do public companies have to file after the close?

A 10-Q is due 40 days after quarter-end for accelerated and large accelerated filers and 45 days for non-accelerated filers. A 10-K is due in 60, 75 or 90 days depending on filer status. The SEC proposed an optional semiannual report in May 2026, but it was not in force as of October 2026.

How long does the year-end close take?

APQC's median for the annual close at site level is 18 calendar days across 2,214 responses, about three times the monthly median. Audit adjustments, tax provisions and full-year disclosures add work that a monthly close does not carry.

Cite this: CFOpresso, "Month-End Close Benchmarks 2026: Days to Close by Company Size", November 2026.

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