How much does IT support cost for a small business in the UK?

Short answer. A UK business with 5 to 50 staff should expect fully managed IT support to cost between £40 and £100 per user per month, or a flat retainer starting around £300 a month at the small end. Ad hoc break-fix support runs £60 to £110 an hour. Microsoft 365 licences, hardware and big projects are nearly always charged separately. The monthly figure matters less than the terms wrapped around it.

That is the answer most providers won’t put on their website. I do, because I would rather you self-select before a call than sit through one wondering what the number is. The rest of this post explains where those ranges come from and how to read a quote.

The three ways IT support is priced

Per user, per month. The most common model for managed IT. You pay for each member of staff who needs support, and the price covers their devices, accounts and day-to-day help. It scales cleanly as you hire.

Flat monthly retainer. A fixed fee for the whole business, scoped to your setup. This suits businesses under about 15 staff where per-user maths gets silly, and it is how I price the smallest engagements.

Break-fix, by the hour. No contract. You ring when something is broken and pay for the time. It looks cheap right up until a server dies or a mailbox is compromised, at which point you are paying a premium rate to someone who has never seen your network before.

There is a fourth, which is project pricing: a fixed fee for a bounded piece of work such as a migration to SharePoint or an office move. That sits alongside any of the three above.

Typical UK prices in 2026

These are ranges I see across the North West and in national quotes clients show me. London prices sit 20 to 30 percent higher. Anything well below the bottom of a range is worth a hard look at the exclusions.

What is normally included

A proper managed IT agreement should cover:

• Unlimited remote support for the people and devices in scope, during business hours.
• Monitoring and patching of laptops, desktops and any servers.
• Microsoft 365 administration: users, mailboxes, licences, SharePoint and Teams settings.
• Endpoint security software and its management.
• Backup of Microsoft 365 data, or at least a clear statement of who is responsible for it.
• A documented record of your setup and passwords, held somewhere you can reach.
• Some form of regular review, ideally quarterly.

If any of those are missing from a quote, ask. “Unlimited support” that excludes anything touching a server, or charges for onsite visits at £90 an hour on top, is not unlimited.

What is usually extra

• Microsoft 365 licences. A pass-through cost. Business Basic, Standard and Premium sit at roughly £5, £10 and £18 per user per month on annual terms at the time of writing. Check the current Microsoft price list; they move.
• Hardware. Laptops, switches, firewalls, screens. A good provider specifies and sources them at cost or a small margin and says which.
• Projects. Anything with a start and an end: migrations, new offices, phone systems.
• Out of hours. Some providers include it, most charge. Ask what “emergency” means in the contract.
• Compliance work. Cyber Essentials certification, insurer questionnaires, audits for a regulator.

What actually drives the price

Two businesses with 20 staff can get very different quotes, and the differences are usually legitimate:

1. Complexity. Twenty people on Microsoft 365 with laptops is simple. Twenty people with a line-of-business application on an old server, three sites and a warehouse of scanners is not.
2. Security requirements. Law firms, accountants and anyone handling client money need more controls, more monitoring and more evidence. That costs more to run.
3. Onsite expectation. Remote-first support is cheaper. If you want someone in the building weekly, pay for it explicitly rather than hoping it is included.
4. Response times. A contractual one-hour response costs more than “best endeavours”. Be honest about what you need.
5. Contract length. Longer terms often buy a lower monthly rate. They also buy you a problem if the service turns out to be poor.

Red flags in a quote

I have read a lot of other providers’ contracts on behalf of businesses switching to me. The things that cost people real money are rarely the headline price:

• Three-year terms with automatic renewal and a notice window you have to hit precisely.
• Per-ticket or per-incident fees layered on top of a “managed” fee.
• Licence markups. Microsoft 365 at £14 a user when Microsoft’s price is £10 is a 40 percent margin hidden in plain sight.
• Exit and offboarding charges, or clauses that let the provider keep your documentation and admin credentials until the final invoice is paid.
• Vague scope. “Support for your IT systems” with no list of what those systems are.
• Minimum user counts that mean you keep paying for people who have left.

A quote should be boring: a scope list, a price per unit, the term, the notice period, and what happens when you leave.

How I price it

Managed IT with Initiate IT starts from around £300 a month, scoped to the business after a 30-minute call. The number goes up with user count, complexity and any sector-specific requirements, and I will give you a straight figure in writing rather than a “from” price that turns out to be for two users and a printer.

IT leadership is priced separately: the Fractional Head of IT retainer runs from £650 a month for half a day, and Head of IT plus managed IT together typically lands around £3,000 a month for a firm of 30 to 50 people, against roughly £85,000 a year to employ one.

Terms are deliberately light: a 90-day minimum, then rolling monthly with 30 days’ notice, the same terms as the Head of IT retainer. No multi-year tie-ins, no renewal traps, and your documentation and admin access stay in your name from day one. If you leave, you take everything with you. How engagements work covers the three shapes in more detail.

Working out your own number

A quick way to sanity-check any quote: take the monthly total, add the licences and any hardware lease, multiply by 12, then add what you spent last year on ad hoc fixes and lost time. Compare that against the quote’s annual cost. If the managed option is within 20 percent of what you already spend, you are being offered a much better service for roughly the same money. That is the usual outcome for businesses moving off break-fix.

If you would like that comparison done for your setup, the fastest route is a 30-minute call. No prep, no pitch, and a written figure afterwards.