Managed IT services pricing: what UK businesses actually pay

Managed IT services pricing in the UK sits between £40 and £150 per user, per month, and most small and medium-sized businesses land between £60 and £80. That is the answer, and it is deliberately at the top of the page rather than behind a form.

The more useful question is what sits underneath the number. Two providers can quote the same figure and be selling substantially different things, and a business that compares only the headline price will usually pick the one that costs more over three years. This guide sets out the four ways UK providers charge, what each one typically costs, what is normally included, what is normally extra, and how to put two differently structured quotes on the same footing.

A note on the figures below. They are published market ranges drawn from UK provider pricing guides, not Lanmark’s rates. Lanmark does not publish a rate card, for the same reason most providers who take the work seriously do not: a number without a scope attached is not a comparison, it is a guess.

The short answer

Model	Typical UK range, 2026	Charged
Fully managed, basic (helpdesk and monitoring)	£40 to £55	per user, per month
Fully managed, standard (adds cyber security and proactive management)	£55 to £90	per user, per month
Fully managed, premium (adds compliance, advanced security, account management)	£100 to £150	per user, per month
Per device	£20 to £50	per device, per month
Block hours, prepaid	£50 to £125	per hour, varying with block size
Ad hoc, no contract	£80 to £150	per hour

Sources: published 2026 UK pricing guides from Connection Technologies, IT Support Helpdesk and Server Consultancy.

A quote outside these ranges is not automatically wrong. A 15-user business with a complex regulated estate will sit above them and a 300-user business with a standardised Microsoft 365 estate may sit below. Ranges are a starting point for a conversation, not a verdict.

The four ways UK providers charge

Per user, per month

You pay a fixed monthly fee for each person in the business, and that fee covers their support regardless of how many devices they use or how many times they call.

This is now the default model for fully managed support in the UK, and it is the one most SMBs should want, for a simple reason: it is the only common model where the provider has no financial incentive for your technology to keep breaking. If they are paid the same whether you call twice a month or twenty times, fixing the underlying cause is in their interest as well as yours.

It also budgets cleanly. Your IT cost becomes a known figure that moves when headcount moves, which is a number the finance team already forecasts.

Suits: almost any business of 20 users or more that wants a predictable monthly figure. Watch for: what “unlimited” actually covers. See the fair use question in the FAQ below.

Per device, per month

You pay for each supported item: laptops, desktops, servers, sometimes mobiles and network equipment.

This looks cheaper on the first line of a spreadsheet, because £30 a device against £70 a user reads well. It rarely stays cheaper. Most knowledge workers now use two or three devices, so a 50-person business can easily be paying for 120 supported items. It is worst for organisations with shared equipment: reception terminals, tills, kiosks, meeting-room devices and shop-floor tablets all attract a fee while belonging to no one in particular.

Suits: device-heavy, people-light operations. Server rooms, manufacturing lines, unusual estates. Watch for: the definition of a device, and what happens when you add one mid-term.

There is a variant worth knowing about, because it takes the device count out of the argument altogether. Under PC as a Service the hardware itself is supplied, supported, secured and refreshed on one monthly per-user fee, so a laptop stops being a capital purchase and stops appearing as a separate support line.

Block hours

You buy a block of support time up front, typically 10 or 20 hours, and draw it down. UK rates run around £50 to £100 per hour for a 10-hour block and £100 to £125 for a 20-hour block, depending on the work.

Block hours are the middle ground between having no contract and having a real one. The problem is behavioural rather than financial: when every ticket visibly depletes a balance, people stop raising tickets. Small faults get tolerated, workarounds become permanent, and the first thing the provider hears about is the failure rather than the warning sign.

Suits: very small businesses, or a specific project with a defined end. Watch for: expiry dates on unused hours, and whether monitoring and patching are included at all. Usually they are not.

Where block hours genuinely do fit, that last gap is the one worth closing. Lanmark’s IT support packs are pre-paid blocks of engineer time that include proactive monitoring and patch management as standard, which is the part most block-hour arrangements leave out and the part that stops a small fault becoming an outage.

Ad hoc, pay as you go

No contract. You call when something breaks and pay £80 to £150 an hour, plus travel.

For a business of fewer than about ten people with simple, cloud-based IT, this can be entirely rational. Above that, it stops being a pricing model and becomes a risk position. Nobody is monitoring anything, nobody is patching anything, and the provider has no obligation to answer the phone on the morning your email stops working, because you are not a client, you are a caller.

Suits: micro-businesses and sole traders. Watch for: response times, which are typically best-efforts, and out-of-hours rates.

Why the pricing model matters more than the price

Here is the comparison most buyers never make. Take a 50-user business.

At £70 per user, per month, fully managed, the annual cost is £42,000 and it is knowable in advance. At £30 per device across 120 devices, it is £43,200 and it rises every time somebody is issued a second laptop. At £100 an hour ad hoc, the annual cost is whatever the year happens to hand you: three quiet months and one ransomware incident is not a budget, it is a hope.

The models are not simply different prices for the same thing. They create different incentives, and the incentive is what you actually live with. Fixed per-user pricing makes prevention profitable for the provider. Hourly pricing makes failure profitable. That is not an accusation against anyone selling hourly support, it is just arithmetic, and it is worth being clear-eyed about it when you sign a three-year agreement.

What actually moves the number in a quote

Five things legitimately explain why one provider quotes £55 and another quotes £95 for what sounds like the same service.

Headcount. Larger contracts cost less per user. A 100-user agreement will carry a lower unit price than a 15-user one for equivalent service, because the fixed cost of running the account is spread further.

Whether security is inside the price. This is the largest single variable and the most common source of misleading comparisons. Basic antivirus and a spam filter are cheap. Genuine 24x7x365 monitored detection and response, with a security operations centre and humans reading the alerts at three in the morning, is not. If one quote includes it and the other does not, you are not comparing the same product.

Complexity of the estate. On-premises servers, legacy line-of-business applications, unusual hardware and multiple sites all cost more to support than a standardised cloud estate.

Compliance obligations. Regulated sectors need evidence, documentation and audit support. Cyber Essentials, and the sector overlays that apply to legal and financial services firms, create real work.

Out-of-hours cover. A nine-to-five contract and a genuine 24×7 contract are different services. For any business trading at evenings or weekends, this one matters more than the headline rate.

What should be included, and what usually is not

A standard UK managed contract at the £55 to £90 band typically includes remote helpdesk support, monitoring of devices and network, patch management, endpoint protection, Microsoft 365 administration, email security, backup, and periodic account reviews.

Commonly charged separately, and worth asking about explicitly:

Microsoft 365 licences. Almost always billed on top of the support fee, and reasonably so, since Microsoft sets the price. What is not reasonable is nobody ever checking that you are on the right ones.
24×7 managed detection and response. Frequently a premium add-on.
Project work. New sites, migrations, replacement infrastructure. Usually quoted separately and effort-based.
Hardware. Sometimes marked up substantially. Ask.
On-site visits. Some contracts include a set number, some charge per visit.
Out-of-hours support. Check whether it is included, chargeable, or simply unavailable.

How to compare two quotes properly

Do this before the second meeting and it will take twenty minutes.

Convert everything to cost per user, per month. Divide device-based and hourly quotes by your actual headcount. This alone resolves most confusion.
Write down what each includes for that figure, line by line, using the list above. Gaps will be obvious.
Add the excluded items back in at the provider’s stated rate. A £55 quote with security at £15 extra is a £70 quote.
Multiply by 36 and add the exit terms. Contract length and notice period belong in the comparison, not in the small print.
Ask each provider for two clients who have renewed, not two clients who have signed. Anyone can win business. Retention is the number that predicts your experience.

Where unlimited per-user pricing fits

Lanmark prices managed IT services on the per-user model: one monthly fee per person, covering unlimited support for all their devices and infrastructure, with no per-device charge and no per-incident billing. Enterprise-grade managed detection and response, delivered from a 24x7x365 security operations centre, is part of the proposition rather than a premium tier.

On licensing, Lanmark is a Microsoft Direct Cloud Solution Provider and holds Microsoft’s Support Service Designation, an accreditation held by only a handful of partners worldwide. That matters here for a practical reason rather than a badge one: licensing is where most SMBs are quietly overspending, and a Microsoft 365 licence review frequently pays for a meaningful share of the support fee before anything else changes. If you want the detail behind that, the Microsoft 365 licensing guide for finance directors covers where the money usually leaks.

What Lanmark does not do is publish a per-user figure, because a price without a scope attached would tell you nothing you could act on. What we will do is tell you what your current arrangement should be costing, whether or not you move.

Frequently asked questions

How much does IT support cost per user in the UK?

Between £40 and £150 per user, per month in 2026, depending on scope. Most UK SMBs buying a standard fully managed service pay £60 to £80 per user, per month. Basic helpdesk and monitoring starts around £40, and premium contracts with compliance support and advanced security run to £150.

Is unlimited IT support genuinely unlimited?

It should be for day-to-day support, and it is the point of the model: if raising a ticket costs nothing extra, people report problems early. What “unlimited” does not usually cover is project work, new infrastructure, migrations and hardware, which are quoted separately because they are one-off pieces of work rather than support. Ask any provider to define the boundary in writing before signing. A reasonable one will do it without hesitating.

Is per-user or per-device pricing better?

Per user, for most businesses. Per-device pricing looks cheaper per line but multiplies with the estate rather than the workforce, and it penalises organisations with shared equipment such as reception terminals, tills and kiosks. Per-device can work for device-heavy, people-light operations. Convert both to cost per user before deciding.

Are Microsoft 365 licences included in the support fee?

Usually not, and that is normal, since Microsoft sets the licence price. What you should expect is that your provider reviews your licence position rather than letting it roll forward untouched. As a Microsoft Direct CSP, Lanmark offers a licence review at no cost, and the common findings are unused licences, duplicated capability and users on a higher plan than their role needs. See Microsoft 365 licence costs.

Should cyber security be included or added on?

Included, if you want the price to mean anything. Basic endpoint protection is inexpensive and most contracts have it. Monitored 24×7 detection and response, with a security operations centre behind it, is the expensive part and is where quotes diverge most. The National Cyber Security Centre’s Cyber Essentials scheme is a reasonable baseline to hold any provider to, and increasingly a requirement for public sector and larger private contracts.

What contract length is normal?

Three years is common in the UK, one and two-year terms are widely available, and shorter terms usually carry a higher unit price. The clause worth reading is not the length, it is the exit: notice period, what happens to your data and licences, and whether the provider will cooperate with a handover. A provider confident in its service does not need a punitive exit to keep you.

We are unhappy with our current provider. Is switching expensive?

The switch itself should not be. Lanmark’s SmoothSwitch programme includes onboarding at no cost, a 30-day dual run alongside the incumbent so nothing is left uncovered, and a no-penalty exit within 30 days of go-live. The real cost of switching is usually the notice period on the existing contract, which is worth checking before you start.

Find out what your IT should cost

If you have a quote you are unsure about, or a renewal coming and no benchmark, we will look at what you have, what you are paying for it, and what a sensible figure looks like for a business your size. No obligation to move, and we will tell you if your current arrangement is already reasonable.

Lanmark supports UK businesses of 20 to 500 users across London, the South East and the wider UK, with unlimited support priced per user, Microsoft Direct CSP licensing and 24x7x365 detection and response.

Get in touch and we will start with the numbers.