Why this is such a hard question to answer
Search for the cost of IT support and you will find page after page explaining that it depends, followed by a contact form. That is not entirely bad faith — the scope really does vary enormously — but the effect is that a small business owner cannot form even a rough expectation without booking meetings with three salespeople.
So this guide does the thing the industry avoids. It gives the actual market bands, explains what pushes a quote up or down, and finishes with our own numbers. You may well conclude that somebody else suits you better, and that is a perfectly good outcome for a guide like this.
The UK market rates, in plain numbers
For ongoing managed IT support billed per user, the honest UK range is roughly £40 to £150 per user, per month. That is a wide band because it covers very different products, but within it the distribution is fairly predictable:
- £40–£55 per user — a lean offer. Usually remote support only, standard business hours, limited or no proactive monitoring. Fine for a business whose systems are simple and whose tolerance for a slow fix is reasonable.
- £60–£80 per user — where most UK small and medium businesses actually land. Remote support plus patching, monitoring, antivirus management and some backup oversight. This is the mainstream number.
- £90–£150 per user — richer scope. Faster contractual response times, security tooling, compliance support, sometimes an allowance of onsite time, sometimes licences bundled in.
London adds roughly 15 to 25 per cent to the national figure, for the unremarkable reason that salaries and premises cost more here. A £70 per user quote in the Midlands is not directly comparable to a £70 quote in Zone 2.
For ad-hoc work rather than a contract, hourly rates for UK business IT support typically run £60 to £120 per hour, with London at the upper end and call-out or minimum-charge arrangements common on top.
Per user or per device — and why it matters
Two pricing models dominate, and comparing quotes across them is where most people go wrong.
Per user pricing charges for each person, however many devices they use. If your team members each have a laptop, a desktop at home and a phone, this is usually the better deal — and it is now the more common model.
Per device pricing charges for each machine. It can work out cheaper for a business where several people share a small number of computers — a shop floor, a workshop, a practice with two shared terminals. It gets expensive quickly the moment people start working across multiple devices.
Neither is a trick. But a per-device quote of £45 and a per-user quote of £65 are not the £20 apart they appear to be, and the only way to compare is to count your actual users and your actual machines and do both sums.
What actually drives the price up
Once you strip away the marketing, quotes vary for a handful of concrete reasons:
- Response commitments. A contractual one-hour response costs more than a best-efforts one, because it requires bench depth on the provider’s side. Note that response is not resolution — an acknowledgement within an hour is not a fix within an hour, and some agreements are careful about that distinction in ways buyers are not.
- Cover outside working hours. Extended or round-the-clock desks are a genuine cost and are usually charged as such. Plenty of small businesses do not need it and pay for it anyway.
- Proactive work. Patching, monitoring, backup verification and security maintenance take time whether or not anything breaks. This is the main difference between a support desk and a managed service, and it is most of the price gap between the tiers above.
- Security and compliance. Multi-factor rollouts, endpoint security tooling, Cyber Essentials readiness and evidence for client questionnaires all add scope. If a tender has asked you for something specific, say so early — it changes the quote materially.
- Onsite time. Almost always charged separately, or capped at an allowance. Very few plans include unlimited visits, and any that appear to are worth reading twice.
- Licences. Microsoft 365, antivirus and backup licensing may be inside the per-user figure or on top of it. This alone can account for £10–£25 per user of apparent difference between two quotes.
What “unlimited” usually excludes
“Unlimited support” is a standard phrase and it is not dishonest, but it is rarely as broad as it reads. In most UK agreements it means unlimited remote support during business hours. Commonly outside it:
- onsite visits, or anything beyond a small monthly allowance
- project work — migrations, office moves, server replacements, new site setups
- hardware, parts and consumables
- third-party software licences and their renewals
- anything caused by kit the provider advised against supporting
None of that makes the offer bad. It makes the headline incomparable across two providers unless you read what each one defines the word to mean. If you only read one section of a proposal, read that one.
The seat minimum problem
Here is the part that catches small firms out, and it is worth stating bluntly: a large share of UK IT providers will not take you on at all below a certain headcount.
Look at how established London and South East providers describe their target client and you find the pattern repeated. One sets a floor of ten users. Another states plainly that it works with businesses of ten to a hundred and twenty employees. A third pitches at organisations of twenty or more staff. A fourth is sized for fifty-plus. The numbers differ; the shape does not.
The logic is sound from the provider’s side. Onboarding a client — documenting the setup, deploying tooling, learning how the business works — costs roughly the same whether the client has four users or forty. Under a per-user model, only one of those covers the effort.
The consequence, though, is that an enormous slice of genuinely viable British business is priced out of the market entirely. The three-person architecture studio, the six-person accountancy, the two-person consultancy holding client data that would be a serious problem if it leaked — none of them are too small to need professional IT support. They are simply too small to be profitable under the dominant model. So they end up relying on whoever in the office is best with computers, which works right up until the day it does not.
If you have rung round and been politely turned away, that was the reason. It was not you.
Ad-hoc, hourly and per-job pricing
For businesses that do not want a contract, the alternatives are hourly billing or per-job pricing. Both are legitimate, and the trade-off is straightforward.
Per-job work suits genuinely occasional needs — a few incidents a year, no one depending on the systems being actively maintained. You pay only when you call, and nothing sits on the direct debit between times. The real cost is invisible: nobody is watching your patching or your backups, so problems tend to be discovered after they bite rather than before.
A monthly plan suits businesses calling most months, or those that want the maintenance done whether or not anything is currently broken. The rough tipping point, in our experience, is around one call a month. Below that, per-job billing is usually cheaper. Above it, a plan generally wins — and that is before you count the working hours lost waiting for an available slot instead of having a standing arrangement.
The most useful exercise is unglamorous: pull last year’s IT invoices, add them up, and compare the total against twelve months of a plan. Most people are surprised in one direction or the other.
What we charge
It would be poor form to write all of the above and then hide our own numbers, so:
- Remote support: typically £40–£90 per issue
- In-store diagnostics and troubleshooting: typically £40–£80
- Onsite visit: typically £80–£150, depending on time and complexity
- Support plan: £55 per user, per month for unlimited remote support, monthly rolling, with no minimum number of users
Parts are quoted separately and confirmed before anything is ordered. Repairs carry a 90-day warranty. Onsite visits are charged at our normal rates whether or not you are on the plan — we would rather say that plainly than call something unlimited and define the word narrowly later.
Two things about the plan are deliberate. It is monthly rolling, so you can stop at the end of any month rather than being tied in for a year. And there is no seat minimum — one user is a normal order, which given everything above is the point.
The full ranges, including repairs and specialist work, are set out on our pricing page. If your needs are occasional, pay as you go IT support has no monthly cost at all; if you want a fixed monthly figure for the team, that is the remote IT support plan; and if you want the proactive maintenance, security and backup side looked after as well, that is managed IT support.
We should also be straight about what we are not. We work business hours — Monday to Friday 10:00 to 18:00, Saturday 10:00 to 17:00, closed Sundays — rather than pretending to a round-the-clock desk. If your business genuinely needs cover at three in the morning, you need a different kind of provider, and we would tell you so.
How to compare two quotes properly
If you take nothing else from this, take the checklist:
- Normalise the model. Count your users and your devices, and work out the annual cost of every quote under both.
- Find the definition of “unlimited”. It is in the schedule, not the headline.
- Separate response from resolution. Ask what each is, in writing.
- Ask what is excluded. Onsite, projects, licences, hardware, out-of-hours. Get the list.
- Check the term. Twelve months with automatic renewal is very different from monthly rolling, and the difference is worth real money if the relationship sours.
- Ask who actually answers. A named local team and an offshore triage queue can carry identical prices.
- Ask what happens when you leave. Who holds the passwords, the documentation, the domain. A confident provider answers this cheerfully.
Price is the easiest thing to compare and the least informative. Two quotes twenty pounds apart per user can represent completely different products, and the cheaper one is sometimes the more expensive decision.
A last thought on being small
If you run a small team, the useful conclusion is not that IT support is unaffordable. It is that the dominant model is not built for you — and that model is not the only one available. Look for providers who will quote you honestly at your actual size, who publish something rather than nothing, and who do not require a year’s commitment before they have proved anything.
If you would like a straightforward conversation about what your business actually needs, call PC Macgicians on 020 7610 0500, drop into the workshop at 66 Lower Richmond Road in Putney, or use the contact form. We will tell you honestly which of the options above fits — including when the answer is that you do not need a plan at all.
