At a Glance

  • The Financial Accounting Standards Board's (FASB) total accounting support fees for 2026 decreased 11% from $32.8 million in 2025, according to a Financial Accounting Foundation (FAF) spokesperson. FAF is the independent organization that oversees FASB and the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB). Meanwhile, GASB's accounting support fees decreased 9% year over year.
  • Companies that pay FASB accounting support fees will receive invoices in late April or early May, and the decrease in invoice amounts is expected to be roughly proportional to the year-over-year decline in total support fees collected, the FAF spokesperson said in an email.
  • Accounting support fees partially fund FASB, whose total budgeted expenditures, including FAF allocations, decreased slightly to $55.3 million from just over $56 million in 2025. "The budget is developed using a bottom-up approach, based on planned initiatives, the technical agenda for standard setting, and strategic and operational goals," FAF's budget report said.

Deep Dive

The Securities and Exchange Commission approved FASB's support fees earlier this month, determining they comply with relevant provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.

The move comes about two months after the SEC cut the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board's (PCAOB) 2026 budget by 9.4% compared to the prior year. The agency also reduced PCAOB's accounting support fees by 18.4%, leading some close observers of the audit regulator to predict the budget was designed to scale back its enforcement efforts, CFO Dive previously reported.

When asked whether the slightly smaller budget would affect FASB's operations or standard-setting projects, the FAF spokesperson said in an email that the budget "is sufficient to support FASB's operations." According to the budget report, this year's budget includes an average 3% salary increase for board and staff, and reflects changes to reduce three permanent technical staff, add two research fellows, and cut paid time off.

Jack Castonguay, an accounting professor at Hofstra University in New York, said he views the smaller cut to FASB's budget as less impactful than the reduction to PCAOB. "In my mind, this is more of a traditional cost-cutting approach, where they think FASB can do more with less," Castonguay said in an email. "With PCAOB, they want to do less with less."

While the PCAOB cuts may prevent the board from inspecting as many audit engagements and make it harder to pay private-sector salaries, he said he does not expect the FASB reduction to materially affect standard setting by comparison, especially because they do not currently have as many large projects underway as in recent years, such as completing post-implementation reviews of lease accounting and cryptocurrency standards.

Francine McKenna, an adjunct professor at Montclair State University and author of the Substack newsletter "The Dig," also agreed the modest cut would not affect FASB's projects. "The standards and projects they want to move quickly on, like crypto... will move at lightning speed, and the ones that are not priorities won't get on the agenda at all, or will take 14 years like ASC 606, which was finally implemented in 2018," McKenna said in an email.

The FAF spokesperson declined to disclose the average ASF payment amount, noting that allocations are based on a company's market capitalization, as defined by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. According to FAF data, 8,706 public companies paid ASF in 2024, totaling $42.9 million.