Try to find out what IT support actually costs in London and you'll hit the same wall everywhere: "book a discovery call". Almost nobody publishes prices.
We do — they're on our services page — and we'd rather you saw the whole market than just our corner of it. So here's what London businesses are actually paying in 2026, where the hidden costs sit, and where we fit into the picture. If you're comparing quotes right now, this should save you a few of those discovery calls.
The short answer
In 2026, a London business typically pays:
- £50–£150 per user, per month for fully managed IT support
- £75–£150 per hour for ad-hoc, pay-as-you-go help
- A fixed quote for defined projects — migrations, office moves, security work
London sits roughly 15–25% above the UK average, which is £65–£75 per user per month for standard managed support. For a 10-person business, managed support works out at roughly £6,000–£18,000 a year depending on the tier.
Those are the honest ranges we see across publicly listed UK provider price lists, reviewed in July 2026. Everything below unpacks what moves you up or down within them.
If the question behind the question is whether to hire instead, we ran that comparison separately: in-house IT vs outsourcing, with the full employment costs.
Why most providers won't tell you this
Two reasons, and only one of them is respectable.
The respectable one: requirements genuinely vary. A 15-person, cloud-only business in a serviced office is a different job from a 40-person firm with an on-site server and compliance obligations. A single number without context can mislead.
The less respectable one: quote-only pricing lets a provider price each deal individually — and you can't compare what you can't see. The ranges are perfectly knowable; the market clusters tightly enough that any provider could publish them. Most choose not to.
Our view: if a provider won't give you even a range before a sales call, that tells you something about how the rest of the relationship will run.
The three ways you'll be charged
1. Pay-as-you-go (hourly)
You call when something breaks, you pay for the time it takes. London rates run £75–£150 per hour in 2026, with some providers selling pre-paid blocks of 10, 20 or 50 hours at a slight discount.
When it makes sense: small teams with simple, mostly cloud-based setups and infrequent problems. If you're calling someone twice a quarter, a monthly plan is money down the drain.
The catch: costs are unpredictable, nobody is watching your systems between calls, and — worth saying plainly — the provider earns more when things go wrong. That's not an accusation, it's an incentive structure. Know it's there.
2. Fixed price per job
A defined scope, a fixed quote: an office relocation, a migration to Microsoft 365, a security remediation project. This is the fairest model for project work because the risk of overruns sits with the provider, not you. Get the scope in writing and ask what's explicitly excluded.
3. Monthly per-user subscription
The dominant model for ongoing support, and for good reason: predictable cost, and the provider's incentive flips — they now make money when things don't break. What you get for the money splits into three broad tiers across the London market:
- £30–£50 per user: reactive-only. A helpdesk to call, not much more. Cheap for a reason.
- £50–£85 per user: proactive. Monitoring, patching, endpoint protection, backups — problems get caught before you notice them.
- £85–£150+ per user: the full security and compliance layer. Advanced threat detection, compliance support, strategic reviews, faster response guarantees.
What the advertised price doesn't include
This is where comparisons fall apart. Two quotes at £65 per user can be £3,000 a year apart once you count the extras. The usual ones:
- Onboarding and setup fees — commonly £1,500–£5,000 for a small business, sometimes waived on longer contracts
- Out-of-hours support — often a surcharge of £10–£25 per user per month, or a premium hourly rate
- On-site visits — some "fully managed" plans still charge £95–£175 per visit
- Project work — anything beyond day-to-day support billed separately, typically £100–£150 per hour
- Software licences — Microsoft 365, security tooling and backup storage are usually on top of the support fee
None of these are scams — they're real costs. The problem is only when they surface after you've signed. Ask for all of them in writing before comparing anything.
What's pushing prices up in 2026
If you got quotes two years ago and the same shortlist now comes back higher, there are concrete reasons.
Security stopped being optional. According to the government's own data, 43% of UK businesses reported a cyber breach or attack in the past twelve months. Insurers have responded: cyber insurance questionnaires now routinely require MFA, managed endpoint protection and tested backups as a condition of cover. That security stack has become part of the baseline price rather than an optional extra.
Compliance tightened. Cyber Essentials v3.3 took effect in April 2026 and made MFA on cloud services mandatory — a fail if it's off. The government's Cyber Security and Resilience Bill is pulling in the same direction. Providers are doing more per client than they were, and pricing it in.
The Windows 10 hangover. Support ended in October 2025, and a lot of businesses are still paying for it — either in Extended Security Updates or in hardware refreshes that landed in this year's budget. Not a support fee as such, but it's in plenty of 2026 IT budgets. Worth being sceptical about the refresh half: we set out when a working computer is genuinely worth replacing, because a lot of that spend isn't necessary.
AI is in the service desk now. Most providers, us included, use AI tooling to speed up first-line diagnosis and routine fixes. Honest observation: it's making support faster, but it hasn't made it cheaper yet — the savings are currently being absorbed by the rising security workload. If a provider pitches "AI-powered support" as a reason to charge more for the same service, push back.
Our prices
Here's ours, in the open. All prices exclude VAT.
- Pay-as-you-go: £85 per hour. No minimum contract, 2-hour response during working hours (Mon–Fri, 9:00–18:00).
- Fixed quotes for defined projects — scoped in writing before we start.
- Monthly plans, per user: Core from £39, Professional from £69, Complete from £99, and Dedicated — custom, for businesses that need something built around them.
Against the market ranges above: our hourly rate sits at the lower end of the London band, Core starts below the typical managed entry point, and Complete sits right at the threshold of the premium tier. If you want to see what those numbers buy in practice, we've written up a month on a managed plan as four ordinary weeks — new starter, routine fixes, one on-site visit, one report. The full breakdown of what each plan includes is on our services page — and if you want a number for your actual situation, tell us about your setup and you'll get one without a sales pitch attached.
How to compare quotes — including ours
Whatever shortlist you end up with, put the same six questions to everyone on it:
- What's excluded? Get the extras list — onboarding, out-of-hours, on-site visits, projects, licences — in writing.
- Is the response time a promise or an aspiration? Ask for the contractual response time, and whether it means "we reply" or "we fix". Those are different things.
- Who actually turns up? Some providers are remote-only in practice. If on-site matters to you, ask how site visits work and what they cost.
- What's the contract term — and the exit? Twelve months is standard. Watch for auto-renewal clauses and 90-day notice periods buried in the terms.
- What security is included at my tier? If the answer at a £40 price point sounds like the answer at a £95 price point, one of them isn't telling the whole story.
- What happens in month one? A provider with a real onboarding process — audit, documentation, quick wins — is planning to keep you. One who just hands you a phone number is planning to bill you.
And one red flag worth naming: in 2026, a suspiciously cheap quote almost always means the security layer is thin. Given what breaches cost, cheap can get very expensive.
Our take
The cheapest quote and the most expensive quote are both usually wrong. The bottom of the market is reactive-only support dressed up in managed-service language, and the top of the market is often enterprise process sold to businesses that don't need it. For most London businesses between 5 and 50 people, the honest answer sits in the £50–£95 band — where monitoring, patching and security are real, and you're not paying for a vCIO you'll never meet.
And if you're under ten people with a simple cloud setup: you may not need a managed plan yet at all. Pay-as-you-go until the problems become regular, then switch. That advice costs us money, which is rather the point of giving it.
Sources
- DSIT: Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025/2026
- NCSC: Cyber Essentials scheme overview
- Microsoft: Windows 10 Extended Security Updates
- Market price ranges: Evolfe review of publicly listed UK IT support provider pricing, July 2026
