“How much should a 25-person company pay for managed IT?” is one of the first questions we get, and it’s a fair one. You’re trying to budget, you’ve heard wildly different numbers from different providers, and nobody seems willing to give you a straight answer until you sit through a sales call. So let’s give you the honest version up front, then explain what actually moves the number.
For most small and mid-sized businesses, fully managed IT lands somewhere in the range of roughly $100 to $250 per user, per month. That’s a wide band on purpose, because what sits inside that number varies enormously from one provider to the next. A bare-bones help desk plan and a plan that includes real security, backup, and a 24/7 watch on your environment are both called “managed IT,” and they’re not the same product. So before you compare two prices, you have to compare what each price buys.
Why “per user” became the common way to price it
A decade ago, most providers priced by the device. Every server, every workstation, every firewall had a line item. That made sense when one person used one computer and stayed at one desk. It makes less sense now, when a single employee might have a laptop, a phone, a tablet, and a handful of cloud accounts, all of which need to be secured and supported.
Pricing by user matches how people actually work today. You pay for the human being you are protecting and supporting, not the growing pile of hardware they carry. It also makes your bill predictable, which finance teams appreciate. When you hire your tenth employee, you know what your IT cost goes up by. We get into the trade-offs of per-user versus per-device versus flat-fee pricing separately, because the model you pick changes how the math works as you grow.
What’s actually inside the per-user price
This is where the range comes from. A genuinely complete managed IT plan usually covers most or all of the following:
- A help desk your team can call or email when something breaks, with humans who answer.
- Proactive monitoring and patching, so problems get caught and fixed before they interrupt anyone.
- Endpoint protection on every laptop and workstation.
- Email security and multi-factor authentication.
- Backup for your servers, endpoints, and cloud services like Microsoft 365.
- Onboarding and offboarding of staff as people join and leave.
- Regular check-ins where someone who knows your business helps you plan ahead.
Some providers fold most of that into one per-user number. Others quote you a low base price and then charge separately for security, backup, after-hours support, or project work. Neither approach is wrong, but you can’t compare a quote that includes those things to one that doesn’t. The cheaper-looking number is often the one with the most missing from it, which is exactly why a low quote deserves a second look before you sign.
What pushes your number up or down
A handful of real factors explain most of the spread between a $110 user and a $230 user.
Your size and complexity. A 12-person office with cloud-based everything is simpler to support than a 60-person firm with on-prem servers, a line-of-business application that breaks in creative ways, and three locations. More moving parts means more time spent keeping them running.
Your security and compliance needs. A dental practice handling patient records, an accounting firm under the FTC Safeguards Rule, or a defense subcontractor facing CMMC all need controls a general office does not. That work is real, and it shows up in the price.
How much you already have in place. If your equipment is current and your environment is tidy, your ongoing cost is lower. If you are running aging hardware and an operating system that is about to lose support, expect some up-front project work to get to a stable baseline before the steady monthly number settles in.
Where you are. This one matters more in Alaska and Hawaii than most national pricing guides admit. Getting a technician physically on-site, shipping replacement hardware to an island or a road-system town, and the simple cost of living in our two states all factor in. We wrote a full piece on what IT really costs in Alaska or Hawaii because the continental US averages you find online genuinely do not reflect the ground here.
How to sanity-check a number before you commit
When you get a quote, the price is the least useful part on its own. These questions tell you far more than the dollar figure:
- Is security included, or is it a separate line you will be asked to add later?
- Is backup included, and does it cover Microsoft 365, not just your server?
- What happens at 2 a.m. on a Saturday? Is there real monitoring, or does the help desk simply open the next business day?
- Are there setup or onboarding fees, and what do they cover?
- When something needs hands on a machine, does a person come to your office, or is everything remote?
A provider who answers those plainly is one you can trust to be straight with you about cost. A provider who gets vague is telling you something too.
To make budgeting concrete, we built a free IT Budget Builder you can download and use to map your own costs across users, security, backup, and projects for the year ahead. It is the same kind of worksheet we walk clients through, and it works whether or not you ever talk to us.
For the bigger picture, our managed IT pricing and budgeting hub pulls together how all the pieces fit, from monthly fees to one-time projects, so you can put a realistic full-year number on paper.
Where to start
If you want a number you can actually plan around, start by listing what you have: how many people, what equipment, what software they can’t work without, and what would happen to the business if it all went dark for a day. That picture is what turns a vague range into a real figure.
We’re happy to help you build it. A short discovery call is enough for us to understand your environment and give you an honest sense of where your costs will land, with no pressure and no jargon. If we’re a good fit, great. If not, you’ll leave with a clearer picture either way.