Do IT support companies charge for on-site visits?

Yes, most of them do. The standard UK structure is a monthly per-user fee covering remote support, with on-site visits charged separately at £75 to £150 an hour plus travel. A minority include visits within a defined coverage area, and that difference is frequently worth more than the headline price gap between two quotes.

The reason it is so often unclear is that "on-site support included" appears in a great many proposals without a definition attached. It can mean genuinely included, included up to a capped number of hours per quarter, included only for faults classified as critical by the provider, or included for the first visit and chargeable after that.

There is a straightforward way to find out. Ask three questions in writing: what is the call-out charge, what is the hourly on-site rate, and where does the included area end. A provider who includes visits will answer with a radius or a postcode list. A provider who does not will answer with a rate card. Both are legitimate; only one of them is what you thought you were buying.

The second question worth asking is how many visits a client of your size had last year. Providers know this number, and it converts an abstract policy into an actual annual cost you can add to the comparison.

The reason it matters beyond the money is behavioural. A call-out charge does not really cost you the charge. It costs you by making you hesitate. Businesses with chargeable visits reliably accumulate a list of small unresolved faults, because no individual item ever feels worth the fee. Six months later the printer still does not scan to email, one machine still takes four minutes to boot, and nobody has raised any of it.

Our own position, for comparison: on-site visits are included on the Support and Complete plans within about 15 miles of Mansfield, with visits scheduled and travel quoted before we set off beyond that. Pay-as-you-go work is £85 an hour. Those numbers are published because you should be able to do the comparison without booking a call.

One more question worth putting in writing: what counts as a visit. Some providers treat an engineer attending for a scheduled project as a chargeable visit and a reactive fault as included; others do the reverse. Neither is unreasonable, and finding out which applies to you after an office move is expensive.

It is also worth asking what happens when a visit turns into a project halfway through. An engineer arriving to fix a printer and finding a failed switch is a common enough scenario, and the good answer is that they stop, tell you what it is and what it will cost, and get a decision, rather than either doing it and invoicing, or leaving you with a dead network and a note.

If you are comparing quotes and only have time for one question, make it this one. The gap between an included-visits plan and a chargeable-visits plan is typically worth more over a year than the entire headline price difference between two providers, and it is the variable most likely to be glossed over in a proposal.

• Monthly Support Plans, Three plans with published prices, on-site included from £70 per user, and a coverage area measured in miles.
• On-Site & Remote, Same-day engineer visits included in the plan, plus remote sessions that resolve most faults within the hour.