How Much Does IT Support Cost in the UK? Real Prices for 2026

Ask most IT companies what they charge and you will get "it depends" followed by a request for a meeting. That is frustrating when you are simply trying to budget. So here are real numbers for the UK market in 2026, what sits behind them, and where the traps are.

The short answer

For a small UK business, expect one of these three models:

• Per user, per month: typically £25 to £75 per user per month for fully managed IT support.
• Per device, per month: typically £15 to £45 per device, used where staff share machines.
• Pay as you go: typically £50 to £120 per hour, with no monthly commitment.

For context, our own pay-as-you-go rate is £50 per hour plus VAT, bought in blocks of 1, 3, 5 or 10 hours with no contract.

What changes the price

The spread above is wide because "IT support" covers very different things. The four factors that move the number most:

1. Whether it is reactive or managed

Reactive support means you call when something breaks. Managed support means someone is monitoring, patching and hardening your systems so that fewer things break in the first place. Managed costs more per month and usually costs less per year, because the expensive failures are the ones nobody saw coming.

2. What is bundled in

A £25 per user quote and a £70 per user quote are rarely the same service. Ask specifically whether the price includes Microsoft 365 licences, antivirus and endpoint protection, backup, patch management, security monitoring, and onsite visits. Licences alone can be £10 to £20 per user per month, so a cheap headline rate often means licences are billed separately.

3. Your setup

An office where everyone uses Microsoft 365 and laptops is straightforward. An office with an ageing on-premise server, a line-of-business application from 2011, and a mix of Macs and PCs is not. Servers in particular add cost, because they need patching, monitoring and a backup strategy of their own.

4. Response times

A one-hour response guarantee costs more than a next-business-day one, because it requires more engineers on hand. Be honest about what you actually need. Most businesses do not need one hour for everything, they need it for the things that stop work.

What you should get for the money

At the £25 to £75 per user range, a reasonable expectation is:

• Unlimited remote support during business hours
• Monitoring and patching of every machine
• Endpoint protection managed and actually checked, not just installed
• Backup with tested restores, not just a green tick on a dashboard
• Microsoft 365 administration, including starters and leavers
• A named point of contact who knows your setup

If onsite visits are excluded, ask what they cost. If backup is included, ask when a restore was last tested. Both answers are revealing.

The pricing traps

Per-user pricing when you have shared machines

A warehouse with 30 staff sharing 4 terminals should not be paying for 30 users. Per-device pricing exists for exactly this case, and some providers will quote per user regardless because it is the bigger number.

Onboarding fees that appear late

A setup or onboarding fee is legitimate. Discovering it after you have agreed a monthly rate is not. Ask up front.

"Unlimited" support with a fair use clause

Read the clause. If it caps tickets per user per month, it is not unlimited, and the cap is usually set just below what a business with real problems would use.

Project work priced as support

A server migration or an office move is a project, not support. It should be quoted separately with a scope. If a provider absorbs all project work into the monthly fee, either the fee is high or the project will be rushed.

The exit

Ask what happens if you leave. Who holds your domain, your Microsoft tenant, your backups, and your documentation? The answer should be "you do". A provider who owns your Microsoft 365 tenant has you locked in regardless of what the contract says about notice periods.

Is managed support worth it over pay as you go?

Roughly, if you have fewer than about five staff and simple needs, pay as you go often works out cheaper. Above that, the maths usually flips, for two reasons. First, the volume of small requests rises faster than headcount. Second, the cost of an unplanned outage rises with the number of people it stops.

A useful test: add up what you spent on reactive IT over the last twelve months, including the hours your own staff lost to problems. Compare that to twelve months of a managed fee. Most businesses are surprised which way it lands.

What to ask for in a quote

Ask every provider to put these in writing, and compare like for like:

• Price per user or per device, and which one applies to you
• Exactly which licences are included
• Response time targets, split by severity
• Whether onsite visits are included, and if not, the rate
• What backup covers and how often restores are tested
• Contract length, notice period, and what happens to your data if you leave

Any provider unwilling to put those in writing has told you something useful.

A note on the cheapest quote

IT support is a people business. The cost is engineers' time. A quote significantly below the market is not a cleverer business model, it is fewer engineers, slower responses, or work pushed to people who are learning on your systems. That can be an acceptable trade if you go in with your eyes open. It is a bad surprise if you do not.

Talk to us

If you want a straight answer on what your setup would cost, call 0207 112 4812 or use the contact form. We will tell you the number, and we will tell you if you do not need us.