Published: January 16, 2026Table of Contents
IT Pricing Guide Executive Summary
When I first started researching managed IT services pricing (and what other companies charge), what surprised me most was not the range of numbers. It was how many business leaders make decisions about IT without really understanding what they were paying for.
Managed IT pricing in 2026 is not about finding the lowest monthly number; it is about understanding how risk, security, and service design shape your real total cost of ownership. Leaders who evaluate what is included, what is excluded, and how their provider is incentivized consistently make better IT decisions and avoid the hidden costs that derail budgets and operations.
What Is Included vs. Excluded
Low pricing often hides critical gaps, especially in cybersecurity, backups, after-hours support, and compliance coverage.
Incentive Alignment
Per-user pricing usually aligns the MSP’s incentives with your success, since fewer problems reduce their cost instead of increasing their revenue.
Security and Compliance Depth
Make sure the package meaningfully addresses modern threats and regulatory requirements, not just basic antivirus and monitoring.
Service Level Commitments
Response times, escalation paths, and after-hours availability materially affect both risk and real operating cost.
Total Cost of Ownership
Look beyond the monthly fee to include professional services, project work, emergency rates, and productivity disruption.
Provider Maturity
More mature MSPs invest in proactive systems and processes that keep environments stable and quiet, which is where the real value is created.
Estimated Monthly IT Cost Benchmarks (Per User)
Across the US in 2026, managed IT services typically range from $110 to $400 per user per month. Where you land within the range depends on your environment, risk profile, compliance obligations, and the industry your business operates in.
What Are Managed IT Services
Think of a managed IT service provider like a fractional IT team. Instead of hiring a helpdesk specialist, a network analyst, and a cybersecurity expert, you can hire a managed IT service provider and get an entire IT department for one predictable monthly cost. In practice, if something breaks, you can simply call your MSP, and they will handle it for you.
What Is Typically Included
In our research, we found that there is a very large variety of services that can be included in a managed IT contract. By far, this was the single biggest “level” that influences pricing. Here’s a list of the services that are included in a managed IT contract, starting with the ones that are the most common to the least:
- Help desk and end-user support
- Network monitoring and management
- Cybersecurity protection, from basic antivirus through advanced threat detection
- Backup and disaster recovery
- Cloud management and administration
- Compliance and risk management for frameworks such as HIPAA, CMMC, and SOC 2
The exact combination varies widely by provider, which explains much of the pricing spread.
How Managed IT Differs from Break-Fix
IT support can be categorized into two different buckets: break-fix and managed IT. Break-fix is reactive. Something breaks, you call a technician, and you pay an hourly rate for the work to be provided. This can be anywhere from $100/hour to $400/hour in emergency scenarios.
Fun fact: the highest hourly rate we found in our research was $500/hour from a company based in Australia.
Managed IT, unlike break-fix, takes a proactive approach to IT (or at least it should). Systems are monitored continuously, risks are addressed before they escalate, and costs are often fixed and predictable. Managed IT has a number of different pricing methods, which we will address later.
Why Companies Are Shifting to Managed IT in 2026
We’ve been in the managed IT business for over 30 years. During our time we’ve seen a steady increase in companies transitioning from break-fix contracts to managed IT. Here are a few of the top reasons that come up during our client engagements.
Security and Compliance Pressure
Chances are you probably know of one or two businesses that were hacked in 2025. You aren’t alone. Cyberattacks increase significantly in 2025, with some organizations experiencing nearly 1,925 attacks per week. That’s a whopping 47 percent year-over-year increase. This leap in cyberattacks (thanks to AI) has caused more organizations to take a proactive approach to security.
Predictable IT Spending
Monthly flat predictable pricing is a trend that permeates not just managed IT. Organizations have grown accustomed to predictable pricing, which makes cost easier to project and cash flow easier to manage. Break-fix causes lumpy expenses, which can be hard, especially for smaller businesses, to properly plan for.
Its important to note as well that there is a psychological component to break-fix. Paying $400/hour for IT support hurts, regardless of the size of your business.
Hybrid Work and Cloud Complexity
22 percent of employees worked at least part of the time remotely. At the same time, cloud adoption accelerated across nearly every industry. Supporting distributed teams and complex cloud platforms requires proactive thinking, which is not in line with break-fix pricing.
How Managed IT Pricing Really Works
Why Pricing Varies So Much
“Managed IT” covers hundreds of service combinations. One provider may include only monitoring. Another might bundle advanced cybersecurity, backup, compliance support, and strategic planning. In addition, your service level agreement (SLA), which states expectations for response times, can greatly vary from one provider to the next.
As mentioned earlier, this is one of the biggest factors to consider when choosing an IT service provider. Unfortunately, most buyers are not “IT savvy” and it can be hard to know what questions to ask during the interviewing process.
Check out our 2026 Managed IT Buyers Guide for an actionable process you can take to evaluate MSPs.
What You Are Actually Paying For
In your monthly invoice for managed IT there are five main items that you are (likely) paying for:
- Reactive support when issues occur
- Proactive management that prevents many issues from occurring
- Security tools and software administration
- Strategic guidance, often through a virtual CIO or technical advisor
- Software licensing, such as Microsoft 365
Tip: Double-check that you are not paying for software licenses directly as well through your MSP. Often, MSPs can get discounted rates so it might make sense to purchase this directly through them.
Cost vs Value and the Importance of Total Cost of Ownership
Like all service-based businesses, the cheapest provider is rarely the best. A low-cost plan that omits cybersecurity can expose you to breach costs that dwarf any monthly savings. Similarly, a provider may advertise low per-seat pricing but charge $200 per hour for tickets that are submitted after normal business hours.
When evaluating managed IT service plans, consider the total cost of ownership (TCO) for the service. What support requirements do you expect to incur in a given year, which of those requirements are out of scope, and what will it cost to address them. In addition, make sure to consider the hourly rate your MSP charges for professional services such as installing new hardware or migrating systems.
Common Managed IT Pricing Models
Per User Pricing
Based on our research, per-user pricing is by far the most common model. You pay a flat monthly fee for each employee, which includes all of that employee’s devices. This is our favorite pricing structure as an unlimited number of devices can be included in a single flat fee.
Service packages using per-user pricing typically vary depending on the cybersecurity services included.
- Standard packages: $110 to $175 per user
- Advanced security packages: $175 to $400 per user
Per Device Pricing
Per-device pricing is based on the number of devices being managed. A device could mean a laptop, server, or wifi circuit. Per-device pricing is typically accompanied by additional fees that vary depending on the level of support required (urgent tickets are billed at a higher rate, etc).
Flat Rate Pricing
Flat-rate pricing was the least common pricing strategy identified in our research. With flat-rate pricing, a single fixed monthly fee covers everything.
Our Recommendation
Based on our experience, per-user pricing is the best option. The beauty of per-user pricing is that it completely aligns the incentives of the business and the MSP. For the MSP, each additional ticket issued by the client is a cost center, NOT a revenue center, unlike the other pricing options. As a result, MSPs that use this pricing model are highly incentivized to invest time and resources in proactive measures to keep their clients’ IT environments quiet.
During our research, several other IT providers noted that this is a primary pillar in their service strategy. As a general statement, typically more mature MSPs use this form of pricing. If you think about it, there’s another level of “skill” required of the MSP to create an environment that is quiet and free of IT interruptions.
Smaller MSPs just starting out typically lack the expertise to create such environments at scale.
Typical Managed IT Costs in 2026
Managed IT services costs also vary by company size. Larger organizations that require more seats have more purchasing power and can often negotiate lower per-user pricing. Additionally, it is very common for MSPs to have a minimum number of seats a client must purchase to access their services. For most MSPs that threshold is 5+ seats. The highest threshold we found was 10+ seats.
Estimated monthly costs based on MSP pricing across the US collected as of January 16, 2026.
How to Estimate Your Managed IT Services Pricing
To estimate your IT budget in 2026, start by doing a quick assessment of your business. Here’s a short assessment you can ask yourself to get started:
1. Is your business in a regulated industry, or do you work closely with other businesses in a regulated industry?
2. Is cybersecurity a top concern for your clients?
If you answered yes to either question, then you likely will need an advanced cybersecurity package.
3. In the last 90 days, did your business experience an IT issue that caused employees to be unable to work for over 1 hour?
4. In the last 90 days, did your business experience an IT issue that required after-hours IT support?
5. Does your business have over 20 employees?
If you answered yes to two of the three questions, then you likely need Tier 3 support (after-hours) to be included in your plan or at a manageable hourly rate.
Understanding the Real ROI
Calculating the return on investment for managed IT services is more nuanced than simply comparing monthly costs. In addition to direct financial metrics, there are several important intangible benefits that significantly influence business performance, including employee morale, staff retention, customer experience, and the overall quality and reliability of the services your organization can deliver.
A well-designed IT environment does not just support operations; it amplifies them.
Measuring the Impact of Productivity Disruption
To understand the operational cost of technology issues, start by reviewing the past 90 days and identifying every incident that disrupted normal workplace productivity. This includes system outages, application failures, network slowdowns, security events, and extended support delays.
For each incident, calculate the impact using the following formula:
Number of affected employees × Duration of the disruption in hours
Add the results of all incidents together.
The final number represents your Total Productivity Disruption Hours over the last 90 days.
This figure provides a clear, measurable view of how much productive capacity has been lost and helps quantify the real operational cost of ongoing IT problems
ROI for Organizations with an Existing IT Department
For organizations that already maintain an internal IT team, the ROI of moving to a managed service provider is typically measured by comparing total current IT operating costs against the cost of the proposed MSP engagement.
This comparison should include not only salaries and benefits, but also recruiting costs, training, turnover, software licensing, infrastructure maintenance, security investments, and the productivity losses associated with system instability or limited internal coverage.
The resulting difference reflects the financial impact of the transition, while the operational improvements often deliver additional value well beyond the numbers on a spreadsheet.
Final Thought