Dive Brief:

• The Financial Accounting Standards Board’s total 2026 accounting support fees fell 11% from the 2025 ASF of $32.8 million, according to a spokesperson for the Financial Accounting Foundation, an independent organization that oversees the FASB as well as the Governmental Accounting Standards Board. Meanwhile, the accounting support fees for GASB fell 9% year-over-year.
• The companies that pay the FASB’s accounting support fees will be billed in late April or early May, and can expect to see a decline roughly in line with the year-over-year drop in the amount raised by the support fees, the FAF spokesperson said in an email. 
• The accounting support fees partially fund the FASB, while FASB’s total budgeted expenses, including allocations from FAF, ticked down to $55.3 million from just over $56 million in 2025. “The budget is developed using a bottom-up approach based on planned initiatives, standard-setting technical agendas, and strategic and operational goals,” a FAF budget report states. 

Dive Insight:

The Securities and Exchange Commission approved the FASB’s support fees earlier this month, deeming them consistent with relevant provisions in The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. 

The move comes about two months after the SEC cut the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board’s 2026 budget by 9.4% compared to the year-earlier period. The agency also slashed the PCAOB’s accounting support fee by 18.4%, leading some close-watchers of the auditing watchdog to predict that the budget is an effort to squeeze its enforcement efforts, CFO Dive previously reported. 

Asked whether the slightly smaller budget would impact FASB operations or standard setting projects, the FAF spokesperson said in an email that the budget is “appropriate to support the FASB’s operations.” This year’s budget includes an average 3% salary increase for the board and staff, and reflects a reduction of three permanent technical staff, the addition of two fellows, and a cut in paid time off, according to the budget report. 

Jack Castonguay, an associate professor of accounting at Hofstra University in New York, said he sees the smaller trimming of the FASB budget as a less consequential change than of that seen at the PCAOB. “In my opinion I think it’s more a traditional cost-cutting approach where they think the FASB can do more with less,” Castonguay said in an email.”For the PCAOB they want [to] do less with less.”

While the PCAOB cuts can stop the board from inspecting as many engagements and make it harder for the board to pay private sector wages, in contrast he doesn’t expect it to have a material effect on the FASB’s standard setting, especially as they don’t have as many large scale projects presently going on as they have had in recent years, such as finalizing the post-implementation review on lease accounting and the standard for cryptocurrency. 

Francine McKenna, an adjunct professor at Montclair State University and substack author of “The Dig” newsletter, also did not think the small cuts would impact FASB projects. “Standards and projects that they want to go fast like crypto…will go lightning fast and those that are not a priority won't make it to the agenda at all or will take 14 years like ASC 606 that was finally implemented in 2018,” McKenna said in an email. 

The FAF spokesperson declined to give an average value for the ASF paid, noting that the allocation is based on a company’s market capitalization as defined by Sarbanes Oxley. In 2024, 8,706 publicly-traded companies paid ASF totaling $42.9 million, according to FAF.