What is a typical monthly cost for a 20-person company?

Published per-user benchmarks at that size land around $200-$400 per user, which puts a fully managed service in the low thousands per month. Our floor is $1,000, and a 20-person estate with business-hours cover and no servers usually sits somewhat above it. The honest answer is that it depends on coverage hours and security depth more than on headcount alone.

Why do you publish a floor instead of a per-user rate?

Because a per-user rate is the number most likely to mislead a small company. Rates fall with scale, so quoting one figure means it is either wrong for a ten-person firm or wrong for a two-hundred-person one. A floor plus the four things that move it is more useful and harder to hide behind.

Is $1,000 a month realistic for full managed IT?

For a small, mostly-cloud estate on business-hours cover, yes, and that is what the floor describes. For 24/7 cover, on-premise servers, several sites or deep security work, no — it will be more, and we will show you which line moved it.

How does this compare to hiring someone internally?

A single internal hire costs more than the floor in salary alone before benefits, tooling or cover for holidays and illness. The genuine argument for internal staff is institutional knowledge, not price, which is why co-managed arrangements are common: internal person for the context, external team for the monitoring, patching and out-of-hours load.

What is not included?

Hardware purchases, third-party software licences, major project work such as a cloud migration or an office build-out, and field engineering. We have no field engineering team in the United States and say so on our USA pages; for physical work we scope it and brief a local provider.

Do you require a long contract?

We prefer twelve months because a managed service takes a quarter to show its value, but we would rather be kept because the service is good than because leaving is painful. Documentation and access handover come with you either way.

Are there onboarding fees?

The first phase is heavier — discovery, documentation, agent deployment, closing whatever is already open. Whether that is a separate fee or absorbed depends on the size of the estate, and it is agreed in writing before anything starts.

Who am I contracting with?

Our US entity in Sheridan, Wyoming. Engineering is delivered from our centre in Tbilisi on a US-hours overlap, which is stated plainly on our USA pages rather than discovered later.

Cost guide · United States

How much do managed IT services cost in the US?

US providers publish more than anyone else, which makes the headline numbers easy to find and easy to misread. Here is what the per-user rates actually mean at your size, and what we charge.

Get a scoped price

The per-user headline is real, and it is not what you will pay

US managed IT is quoted per user per month, and published 2026 benchmarks put the headline band at roughly $75 to $250. That range is genuine, widely cited, and almost useless on its own, because per-user rates fall steeply with scale: the same published sources put a 10-25 person company around $200-$400 per user, a 50-100 person company around $120-$230, and a 250-500 person company around $80-$150.

So a twelve-person firm reading "$100 per user" and multiplying is going to be wrong by a factor of two or more. The rate is not a constant that scales linearly; it is a curve, and small estates sit at the expensive end of it because the fixed cost of running a service does not shrink to nothing just because there are fewer people.

That is the single most useful thing to understand before comparing quotes, and it is why the number we publish below is a monthly floor rather than a per-user rate.

$75-250Published per-user headline band

$200-400Per user at 10-25 staff

$80-150Per user at 250-500 staff

$1,000Our monthly floor

What we charge

Our managed IT starts at $1,000 per month. That is a floor on a defined scope, not a quote and not a teaser rate that a scoping call quietly moves.

At the floor you get a small estate run properly: 24/7 monitoring, a service desk overlapping US business hours, patching reported as a compliance percentage, endpoint detection and response, identity and access management with joiners and leavers evidenced, cloud and Microsoft 365 administration, and backup verified by performing a restore rather than by checking that a job completed.

Four things move it, and between them they explain nearly all the variation in any quote you will receive: headcount, whether you need coverage beyond business hours, whether you have on-premise servers and multiple sites, and how much security sits inside the contract rather than billed alongside it.

What the published per-user rates mean at your size

US managed IT, published 2026 per-user benchmarks by company size
Company size	Published per-user rate	Why it moves
10-25 staff	$200-$400 / user / month	Fixed cost of running a service desk, monitoring and tooling spread over few users
50-100 staff	$120-$230 / user / month	Same fixed cost, more users to carry it
250-500 staff	$80-$150 / user / month	Scale, plus more standardised estates
Headline band	$75-$250 / user / month	The figure most often quoted. True in aggregate, misleading at any single size

Published 2026 US benchmarks, not our rates. Our own floor is $1,000 per month on the scope described above. The point of the table is that a per-user rate is not a constant: a twelve-person firm multiplying a headline figure will be wrong by roughly a factor of two.

What drives a US quote up

Coverage hours

Business-hours cover and genuine 24/7 are different services with different staffing behind them. This is usually the largest single line between two otherwise similar quotes.

Servers and on-premise kit

Cloud-only estates are cheaper to run and cheaper to quote. Physical servers carry their own per-server line almost everywhere.

Security depth

Monitoring plus antivirus is not the same product as managed detection and response with evidence retention. Check which one a number refers to before comparing it.

Compliance and evidence

If you need control evidence for a cyber-insurance renewal, a customer questionnaire or an audit, that is real recurring work and it belongs in the price rather than as a surprise project.

Multiple sites

Each additional location adds network, and usually adds an expectation about someone attending it.

On-site attendance

The line that most often hides a difference in delivery model. Ask explicitly whether on-site is included, scheduled, or billed per visit.

Contract length

Twelve-month commitments price lower than rolling ones almost everywhere. Whether that trade is worth making depends on how confident you are in the provider.

Onboarding

The first sixty days are heavier than a steady month. Some providers separate that as a project fee; ask, so it is not a surprise on the first invoice.

US managed IT cost: frequently asked questions

What is a typical monthly cost for a 20-person company?: Published per-user benchmarks at that size land around $200-$400 per user, which puts a fully managed service in the low thousands per month. Our floor is $1,000, and a 20-person estate with business-hours cover and no servers usually sits somewhat above it. The honest answer is that it depends on coverage hours and security depth more than on headcount alone.
Why do you publish a floor instead of a per-user rate?: Because a per-user rate is the number most likely to mislead a small company. Rates fall with scale, so quoting one figure means it is either wrong for a ten-person firm or wrong for a two-hundred-person one. A floor plus the four things that move it is more useful and harder to hide behind.
Is $1,000 a month realistic for full managed IT?: For a small, mostly-cloud estate on business-hours cover, yes, and that is what the floor describes. For 24/7 cover, on-premise servers, several sites or deep security work, no — it will be more, and we will show you which line moved it.
How does this compare to hiring someone internally?: A single internal hire costs more than the floor in salary alone before benefits, tooling or cover for holidays and illness. The genuine argument for internal staff is institutional knowledge, not price, which is why co-managed arrangements are common: internal person for the context, external team for the monitoring, patching and out-of-hours load.
What is not included?: Hardware purchases, third-party software licences, major project work such as a cloud migration or an office build-out, and field engineering. We have no field engineering team in the United States and say so on our USA pages; for physical work we scope it and brief a local provider.
Do you require a long contract?: We prefer twelve months because a managed service takes a quarter to show its value, but we would rather be kept because the service is good than because leaving is painful. Documentation and access handover come with you either way.
Are there onboarding fees?: The first phase is heavier — discovery, documentation, agent deployment, closing whatever is already open. Whether that is a separate fee or absorbed depends on the size of the estate, and it is agreed in writing before anything starts.
Who am I contracting with?: Our US entity in Sheridan, Wyoming. Engineering is delivered from our centre in Tbilisi on a US-hours overlap, which is stated plainly on our USA pages rather than discovered later.

Get a number that applies to your estate

Tell us headcount, what coverage you need and whether you have servers. You will get a scoped price rather than a range, and the reasoning behind it.

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