How much should a UK business budget for IT support per user?
How much should a UK SME budget for IT support per user per month?
Most UK managed IT contracts fall between £50 and £150 per user per month in 2026. Below £50 usually means reactive support only. Above £120 typically includes managed security, compliance work and a named team. The figure is meaningless without knowing what sits inside it.
The three bands
£40–£65 per user, per month. Reactive support. A helpdesk, patching, antivirus, basic monitoring. Fine for a stable business with simple needs and low regulatory exposure. Project work is billed separately, and security is largely your responsibility.
£65–£120 per user, per month. Proactive managed IT. Everything above plus device management, identity and access administration, backup with tested restores, structured onboarding and offboarding, monthly reporting, and some included project time. This is where most UK businesses between 50 and 500 staff land.
£120–£200 per user, per month. Managed IT with managed security. Adds managed detection and response, security operations, compliance support, vulnerability management and a named account team. Appropriate where you hold regulated data, or where clients audit you.
Servers, licences and hardware normally sit outside these figures.
What moves the number
Complexity, not headcount. Twenty users across four offices, two operating systems and a legacy line-of-business application cost more than eighty users on one standard build.
Regulatory exposure. Healthcare, finance and anything holding special-category data carry more control work.
Existing state. A neglected estate needs remediation first. Good providers quote that separately rather than absorbing it into a monthly fee that then rises.
Response commitments. Business-hours cover is materially cheaper than 24-hour cover across time zones.
In or out of scope. The same headline figure can include or exclude project work, third-party liaison, onsite visits, and out-of-hours incidents.
The questions that expose the real cost
Ask every provider you shortlist:
What is explicitly out of scope, and how is it billed?
Is project work included, capped, or extra?
What are the response and resolution targets, and what happens when they are missed? See what belongs in a managed IT SLA.
Are onsite visits included, and how many?
Is out-of-hours support included or charged?
What security tooling is included, and what is licensed on top?
What does the price do at renewal?
What is the exit process, and who owns the documentation?
The gap between a cheap quote and an expensive one usually turns out to be questions one and two.
Cheap contracts and where the money goes
A £45 per-user contract is not necessarily poor value. It is honest about being reactive. The problem arises when a business buys reactive support and expects proactive outcomes, then pays the difference in unbilled downtime, repeat incidents and deferred security work.
The cost of an incident does not appear on the IT line. It appears in lost days, professional fees and, increasingly, in a client questionnaire you can no longer answer.
A simple way to sanity-check a quote
Take the annual contract value and divide it by the number of people it supports. Then compare it to one day of lost productivity across the same headcount. For most businesses, a year of proper managed IT costs less than two or three days of disruption.
That is not an argument for spending more. It is an argument for knowing what you have bought.
What NVOY includes
Our managed IT covers service desk, onsite engineers, Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace administration, cloud and infrastructure, and full device lifecycle from onboarding to offboarding. Security sits alongside it rather than being sold as a separate relationship.
See IT Support and IT Security, or read how to choose a provider.
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