How Busy Is an IT Support Company? Industry Benchmarks for MSPs With 60 to 100 Clients

If you have never worked inside an IT support company, it is hard to picture what one actually does all day. Clients see the odd password reset and a monthly invoice. Behind that sits a steady stream of requests, alerts, patches, backups and security incidents across every business the provider looks after. So we pulled together the published industry benchmarks and worked out what they mean for a typical managed service provider (MSP) looking after 60 to 100 small business clients.

The short version

• 650 to 2,760 support tickets a month. That is roughly 30 to 130 every working day, or 7,800 to 33,000 a year.
• 5 to 22 technicians to handle that volume at normal industry staffing levels.
• 25 to 46 clients a year will identify a cyber breach or attack, based on UK government figures for small businesses.
• Winning clients is the industry's biggest problem. 71% of MSPs say acquiring new customers is their top business issue, and most new clients are switching from another provider.

The assumptions

There is no published survey that reports figures for MSPs with exactly 60 to 100 clients, so we have applied the per-user benchmarks to a provider of that size. We assume each client has around 20 staff, which is typical of the small businesses MSPs serve. That gives a provider looking after 1,200 to 2,000 users in total. Every figure below is either quoted directly from the sources listed at the end or calculated from them, and we show the working.

How many tickets does an IT support company handle?

Service desk benchmarking firm MetricNet found that monthly ticket volumes range from 0.54 tickets per user per month in equipment manufacturing to 1.38 per user per month in high-tech businesses.

	Low (0.54 per user)	High (1.38 per user)
60 clients, 1,200 users	648 a month	1,656 a month
100 clients, 2,000 users	1,080 a month	2,760 a month

Over a year, that is between roughly 7,800 and 33,000 tickets. On a typical working day, the service desk is taking somewhere between 30 and 130 new requests.

That number only counts requests from people. A well-run MSP also generates its own work: monitoring alerts when a server goes offline or a disk fills up, patch cycles, backup checks and security alerts.

How many engineers does that take?

MetricNet's benchmarks put service desk staffing at between 3.9 and 11.2 technicians per 1,000 users, depending on industry and complexity. For 1,200 to 2,000 users, that works out at between 5 and 22 technicians.

Finding those people is getting harder. In Kaseya's 2026 State of the MSP report, the share of MSPs naming difficulty finding and hiring skilled technicians as a problem affecting daily workload rose from 9% to 16% in a year, and the share reporting challenges with training and upskilling staff more than doubled.

How much of the work is security?

A growing share. The UK government's Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025/26 found that 46% of small businesses (10 to 49 staff) and 42% of micro businesses (1 to 9 staff) identified a cyber security breach or attack in the previous 12 months. Phishing was by far the most common, experienced by 38% of businesses.

Applied to 60 to 100 clients, that means an MSP of this size should expect somewhere between 25 and 46 clients a year to identify a breach or attack. Each one means investigation, clean-up, password resets and often a conversation with an insurer.

MSPs see the same picture from their side. In Kaseya's 2026 report, 44% of MSPs said at least 10% of their clients experienced a cyberattack in 2025, and 61% said most or all of their clients turn to them for cyber security advice.

What the market looks like for MSPs

Kaseya surveyed 1,061 MSPs worldwide for its 2026 report. A few findings stand out for anyone choosing a provider:

• 71% said acquiring new customers is their top business issue, ahead of cyber security, revenue growth and profitability.
• 33% said new clients are mostly switching from another MSP, and 49% see a mix of switchers and first-time users. Only 12% said most new clients are outsourcing IT for the first time.
• 30% of MSPs said their average monthly recurring revenue per client is $1,000 or less, the largest single group, as clients commit more cautiously to smaller contracts.

In other words, most businesses looking for IT support already have a provider and are unhappy enough to move, which puts the emphasis on service quality rather than price alone.

What this means if you are choosing an IT provider

1. Ask how many users each engineer supports. Compare the answer to the benchmark of 3.9 to 11.2 technicians per 1,000 users. A provider stretched well beyond that will be slow when it matters.
2. Ask what happens without a ticket. Monitoring, patching and backup checks should run whether or not anyone calls. If the answer is vague, the work probably isn't being done.
3. Ask about their last security incident. With nearly half of small businesses identifying a breach or attack each year, a good provider will have handled plenty and should be able to describe how.
4. Look at response, not just price. At 30 to 130 new requests a day across a client base, how a provider triages its queue decides how long you wait.

Thinking about switching?

Our free 15-minute IT health check looks at your Microsoft 365 setup, backups, security and devices, and tells you in plain English what we would fix first, whether or not you work with us. Book a free IT health check or call us on 0207 112 4812. Ad-hoc support is £65 per hour + VAT with no contract, and you can see what our managed IT support includes.

Sources

• MetricNet, What is Tickets per User per Month and How do I Calculate it? (2019). Ticket volume and technician staffing ranges by industry.
• Kaseya, 2026 State of the MSP Report. Survey of 1,061 MSPs, 76% in North America and 14% in EMEA.
• Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025/2026 (published 30 April 2026, fieldwork August to December 2025).

Figures marked as calculations apply these benchmarks to a provider with 60 to 100 clients of around 20 staff each. MetricNet's ranges come mainly from in-house service desks, and Kaseya's survey is weighted towards North America, so treat the results as an informed estimate rather than a measurement of any single company.