Guide
How much does IT support cost in the UK? A 2026 guide with real numbers
Managed IT support in the UK costs between £40 and £150 per user per month, with most small businesses paying £60 to £85 for a plan that includes security, backup and a response commitment. Break-fix work is charged at £75 to £150 an hour. This guide explains what moves that number, what the cheap quotes leave out, and how to compare two proposals that have been deliberately structured to be incomparable.
By James 11 min read
The short answer
The cost of managed IT support in the UK is £40 to £150 per user per month. Within that range, a small business with between five and fifty staff typically pays £60 to £85 per user per month for a plan that genuinely includes endpoint security, backup, patching and a documented response commitment.
Below £40 you are almost always buying monitoring software with a helpdesk attached, not a service. Above £120 you are usually buying either 24/7 cover, a compliance-heavy sector specialism, or a provider with a sales team you are helping to pay for.
Servers are priced separately, typically at £60 to £100 per server per month. Pay-as-you-go and break-fix work runs at £75 to £150 an hour, with £85 to £95 being common for small business work outside London.
The reason so few providers publish these numbers is not that the numbers are embarrassing. It is that a published price can be compared, and comparison is easier to win when the buyer has to ask.
UK IT support pricing at a glance, 2026
| What you are buying | Typical UK price | What it usually includes |
|---|---|---|
| Remote-only managed support | £35–£55 per user / month | Helpdesk, monitoring, patching, antivirus |
| Managed support with on-site | £60–£95 per user / month | The above plus engineer visits, often capped or charged |
| Compliance-led or 24/7 support | £100–£150 per user / month | The above plus out-of-hours, audit support, formal SLAs |
| Server cover | £60–£100 per server / month | Monitoring, patching, backup verification, restore testing |
| Break-fix / pay-as-you-go | £75–£150 per hour | Reactive work only, no monitoring or prevention |
| Project work | £600–£1,200 per day | Migrations, office moves, installations |
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What actually moves the price
Five things account for nearly all the variation between quotes, and only one of them is the provider’s margin.
The first is user count. Per-user pricing has a floor built into it, a provider still has to hold the documentation, the monitoring and the relationship whether you have four users or forty, so very small businesses often see a higher per-head figure or a minimum monthly fee. Five users is roughly where the maths starts working normally.
The second is servers. A business with three servers has a materially different support burden to one that runs entirely in Microsoft 365, and any quote that does not distinguish between them has not been thought about.
The third is on-site. This is the big one, and it is the number most often hidden. A £55 per user quote with visits charged at £95 an hour plus travel is not cheaper than a £70 quote with visits included; it is more expensive for most businesses, and it is more expensive in a way that only becomes visible in month four.
The fourth is what "included" covers. Some providers include Microsoft 365 licences in the per-user figure; most do not. Some include backup; some charge per device or per gigabyte. A quote of £45 that excludes backup and licensing sits above a £75 quote that includes both.
The fifth is response commitment. A one-hour response for a trade-stopping fault costs a provider real money in capacity, and a provider offering it at the bottom of the market is either not going to meet it or is subsidising it from somewhere else.
Managed support versus break-fix: the arithmetic
Break-fix means you pay when something goes wrong, at an hourly rate. Managed support means you pay a fixed monthly fee whether anything goes wrong or not. The choice between them is usually presented as a philosophical one and it is really just arithmetic.
Take ten users at £70 a month: £700 a month, £8,400 a year. At a break-fix rate of £85 an hour, that is about 99 hours, call it two hours a week. If your business genuinely consumes less than two hours of IT attention a week, including everything nobody currently gets round to doing, break-fix is cheaper.
The catch is what is not in that two hours. Break-fix does not include patching, monitoring, backup verification, licence management or anything preventative, because none of those generate a call. So the honest comparison is not "two hours of fixing" against "£700 of fixing". It is two hours of fixing against a service that also stops a proportion of the faults happening.
For businesses under about five users, break-fix usually still wins. Between five and ten it depends on how much kit you have and how much it matters. Above ten, managed support is almost always cheaper in practice, and the difference widens every time an unpatched machine causes a problem nobody would have counted as an IT cost.
The costs providers leave out of the headline
Six things routinely sit outside the headline per-user figure. None of them is dishonest on its own; the problem is comparing a quote that includes three of them with one that includes none.
On-site visits and travel. The single biggest variable, and the one worth pinning down in writing before anything else. Ask for the call-out charge, the hourly on-site rate, the travel policy and the coverage area, and ask what happened last year for a client of your size.
Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace licensing. Usually excluded, and at £10 to £20 per user per month it materially changes the total.
Backup. Sometimes included per user, sometimes charged per device or per terabyte. Server backup is almost always separate.
Projects. Migrations, office moves, new site installations and hardware refreshes are normally quoted separately at a day rate, which is reasonable, but the definition of "project" versus "support" is worth agreeing in advance.
Out-of-hours. If your business trades at weekends, ask explicitly. Standard plans are business hours, and discovering that on a Saturday is expensive.
Hardware and software procurement. Some providers add a margin, some pass through at cost, some charge a handling fee. All three are defensible; not knowing which one applies is not.
What we charge, for comparison
Our plans are £40, £70 and £100 per user per month, with on-site visits included from the £70 plan upwards inside about 15 miles of Mansfield. Servers are £60 to £100 per server per month. Pay-as-you-go is £85 an hour. Those numbers are on the site because you should be able to work out your monthly cost before speaking to anyone.
How to compare two quotes properly
Providers structure proposals differently, and often deliberately, because a proposal that cannot be compared cannot be beaten on price. The way through it is to normalise everything to an annual total for your actual business rather than a per-user headline.
Start by writing down your real numbers: users, servers, sites, and how many on-site visits you had last year. If you do not know the last one, count the times somebody came out. Most businesses are surprised, in both directions.
Then, for each quote, calculate twelve months of the per-user fee, plus twelve months of server fees, plus last year’s visit count at their on-site rate including travel, plus licensing if it is not included, plus backup if it is charged separately. That number is comparable. The per-user headline is not.
Finally, ask each provider the same three questions in writing: what is your response commitment for a fault that stops us trading, what does it cost us if an engineer has to come out, and what is not covered by the monthly fee. The answers are more revealing than the price.
What you should expect for the money
At £60 to £85 per user per month in 2026, a plan should include: an unlimited helpdesk during business hours, monitoring and patching on every managed machine, managed endpoint protection, backup with restores that get tested rather than assumed, Microsoft 365 user administration including starters and leavers, and a stated response time for faults that stop you working.
It should also include documentation. A provider who cannot hand you a current asset list, network diagram and account inventory is holding your business in somebody’s head, and that is a risk you are paying for rather than being protected from.
What it should not include is a per-ticket charge, a call-out fee that makes you hesitate, or a multi-year contract with an exit fee. All three exist to make leaving expensive rather than to make the service good.
Is cheaper support a false economy?
Sometimes, and not always. A genuinely small business with laptops, Microsoft 365 and no server does not need a £100 per user plan, and a provider selling one is not doing them a favour. The false economy is narrower than the industry likes to claim.
Where cheap does reliably fail is on the preventative half. Monitoring that nobody watches, patching that runs but is never verified, and backups that report success without ever being restored are all cheap to provide and worthless at the moment they matter. Those are the parts to interrogate, because they are also the parts you cannot see working.
The other reliable failure is the call-out charge, which does not cost you money directly. It costs you by making you leave things broken. A business that has stopped calling its IT provider is not saving money; it is accumulating a list.
Frequently asked questions
If the answer is not here, ask us. You will get a straight one, from someone who does the work.
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How much does IT support cost per user per month in the UK?
Between £40 and £150 per user per month, with most small businesses paying £60 to £85 for a plan that includes endpoint security, backup, patching and a response commitment. Below £40 you are usually buying monitoring software with a helpdesk attached rather than a managed service.
How much does IT support cost per hour?
Break-fix and pay-as-you-go work is charged at £75 to £150 an hour in the UK, with £85 to £95 typical for small business work outside London. Project work is usually quoted at a day rate of £600 to £1,200 instead.
Do IT support companies charge for on-site visits?
Most do. The common structure is a monthly per-user fee for remote support with on-site charged separately at an hourly rate plus travel. A minority include visits within a defined coverage area, and that difference is usually worth more than the headline price gap between two quotes.
How much should a small business spend on IT overall?
A frequently quoted benchmark is 3 to 6 per cent of turnover across all technology: support, licensing, hardware and software. For a business with no unusual requirements, support alone typically accounts for a quarter to a third of that.
Is managed IT support cheaper than break-fix?
Above about ten users, almost always. Ten users at £70 a month is £8,400 a year, which is roughly 99 hours at £85, about two hours a week. Most businesses that size consume more than that once patching, monitoring and backup verification are counted, and those are the tasks break-fix never covers.
Why do most IT companies not publish their prices?
Because a published price can be compared. There is no technical reason a per-user managed service cannot carry a rate card, and the providers who publish one are generally the ones confident that the comparison goes their way.
What is not included in a typical monthly IT support fee?
Usually Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace licensing, hardware and software purchases, project work such as migrations and office moves, out-of-hours cover, and, most importantly, on-site visits and travel. Normalise all of those into an annual total before comparing two quotes.
Does IT support get cheaper as we add staff?
Per head, usually yes, though the discount is smaller than buyers expect. The per-user model has a genuine floor built into it because documentation, monitoring and the relationship cost the same whether you have eight users or eighteen. Expect volume pricing to start mattering somewhere above twenty-five users rather than at ten.
Should we pay for IT support monthly or annually?
Monthly in advance is standard and it is the arrangement that keeps both sides honest. An annual prepayment discount is fine if the term is genuinely rolling underneath it, and a warning sign if it comes attached to a long notice period, at that point you are buying a lock-in rather than a discount.
