There’s no single accurate number for what IT support costs in the UK. Providers commonly quote between £40 and £150 per user per month, but what you’ll actually pay depends far more on your setup than on any headline figure.
There’s no single honest number here, and any provider who gives you one without asking a single question about your business is guessing, or worse, quoting a number they know they’ll change once they’ve actually seen your setup. What follows is a genuine market range, an explanation of why that range is so wide, and the questions worth asking so you can work out where you’d actually sit within it.
We know this looks a bit rich
Only yesterday we published an article arguing that comparing IT support prices is largely pointless, because two quotes rarely describe the same thing. So it’s fair to ask why an article titled "how much does it cost" exists at all. The honest answer: people search for this number whether or not it’s genuinely useful on its own, and refusing to engage with it doesn’t help anyone. What we can do is give you the range honestly, and be upfront about how little a single figure actually tells you.
Why most of what you’ll find online is a guess
Search for IT support pricing and you’ll find plenty of confident-sounding numbers. Almost none of them come from published rate cards, most IT support companies don’t publish pricing at all, hiding instead behind a "request a quote" form. That’s worth noticing on its own. It means the ranges circulating online, including the one below, are drawn from providers’ own marketing content rather than any independent survey, everyone quoting everyone else, essentially. Nobody’s lying exactly, but nobody’s citing real data either.
The market range, for what it’s worth
With that caveat firmly in place: providers across the UK commonly quote somewhere between £40 and £150 per user, per month, with £60 to £90 coming up most often as the "standard" tier covering monitoring, helpdesk and basic security. Treat this as a planning figure, not a quote. Your own number could reasonably sit outside it in either direction depending on your setup.
What actually moves your number up or down
Rather than chase a more precise figure that does not exist, it is more useful to understand what genuinely changes the price for a specific business:
How many users and devices you actually have. Not the same number for every business, a company with more shared devices than staff prices differently to one with a laptop per person.
How much infrastructure you are running, not just how many people. Servers, networking equipment (switches, firewalls, wireless access points), and anything supporting remote offices or remote workers all add real complexity beyond a simple device count.
Whether you already have IT people in-house. Some businesses run their own 1st line, or 1st and 2nd line, support and only need an external provider for 3rd line escalation. That is a genuinely different pricing model, often called co-managed IT, to a business with no IT staff at all, and it is worth knowing which one you are actually asking for a quote on.
How old and how complicated your existing setup is. A clean, modern estate costs less to support than one held together with ageing hardware and inconsistent software versions.
What compliance or industry-specific requirements you carry. Regulated sectors, or anyone handling sensitive client data, typically needs a higher level of security and documentation than a business that does not.
How fast you need a response. A guaranteed fifteen-minute response costs more to deliver than a next-business-day one, regardless of how busy any given month turns out to be.
What is actually bundled in. Cybersecurity tools, backup, and Microsoft licensing are sometimes included in the headline figure and sometimes billed separately, which alone can explain a large chunk of the gap between two quotes.
Why more devices does not automatically mean a cheaper rate
There is a common assumption that per-device pricing should fall as a business grows, buy more, pay less, the way it tends to work with most bulk purchases. IT support often works the other way round. Most of the ongoing admin, adding and removing users, managing permissions and groups, setting up and retiring shared mailboxes, scales with headcount, not with how many devices are plugged in. A business with fifty users generates meaningfully more of that administrative load than one with five, even when the underlying technical work per device is similar. So per-device pricing can hold steady, or even creep up, as a company grows, right up until it is large enough to justify bringing that administrative layer in-house instead.
Questions worth asking before you get quotes, not just after
Do you publish pricing anywhere, or is everything quote-only?
Is pricing per user or per device, and which would suit our setup better?
What is included as standard, and what is a chargeable extra?
What response time is actually guaranteed, in writing, not just implied?
Is the contract genuinely rolling, or does leaving early cost us?
Most providers quote somewhere between £40 and £150 per user per month, with £60 to £90 most common for standard cover. Treat this as a market range rather than a quote, your actual number depends on your setup.
Most do not, and it is worth noticing. It means most of the figures found online come from providers own marketing rather than any independent data, which is exactly why a genuine quote needs a proper conversation about your setup first.
Not necessarily, and often the opposite. Most of the ongoing work scales with headcount, not device count, adding and removing users, managing permissions, handling shared mailboxes, so per-device pricing can hold steady or rise as a business grows, right up until it is large enough to bring that work in-house.
Fully outsourced means an external provider handles everything. Co-managed means a business already has some IT staff in-house, often 1st or 1st and 2nd line, and only needs an external provider for 3rd line escalation. It is a genuinely different pricing model, worth clarifying before comparing quotes.
Whether pricing is per user or per device, what is included versus billed separately, what response time is actually guaranteed, and whether the contract is genuinely rolling or penalises you for leaving early.
Quick recap
There is no single accurate answer to what IT support costs, only a market range and the factors that move you within it.
Most providers do not publish pricing at all, which is part of why online figures are largely guesswork dressed up as data.
UK providers commonly quote £40 to £150 per user per month, with £60 to £90 most typical for standard cover, treat this as a planning figure, not a quote.
Real drivers include user and device count, infrastructure beyond devices, whether you already have in-house IT, the state of your existing setup, compliance needs, response time, and what is bundled in.
Growing headcount can hold per-device pricing flat or push it up, not down, because admin overhead scales with people, not devices.
Ask about pricing transparency and contract terms before you are mid-negotiation, not after.
Want a plain-English answer on where your own IT costs actually go? Get in touch and we will walk you through it, no obligation, no jargon.