“What does it cost?” is the first question every business asks about managed IT — and the answers you find online range so widely they barely help. Here’s a straight explanation of how MSP pricing actually works, the honest ranges, what moves a quote up or down, and how to compare proposals that are deliberately hard to compare.

The short answer

For a fully managed plan in the U.S. — help desk, monitoring, patching, security tooling, backup management, the works — pricing arrives in one of two common units, and both land in similar territory for a typical office. Per device, expect roughly $100–$175 per workstation per month for genuinely full management, with servers priced meaningfully higher (often several hundred dollars each — legitimately, since servers carry most of the risk and work) and network gear sometimes line-itemed too. You’ll find lower per-device numbers published online; read them closely — they’re usually monitoring-only or “RMM-lite” arrangements, which is a different product wearing the same label. Per user, expect roughly $100–$250 per person per month, covering each person and the devices they reasonably use. Lean “essentials” plans can come in under these ranges; regulated industries or plans with rich security stacks and unlimited on-site support can exceed them.

The number that actually matters is the monthly total: a 25-person company with a typical device footprint should expect a fully managed relationship to run somewhere in the ballpark of $2,500–$6,000 per month under either model, depending on what’s included and how complex the environment is. Treat any quote dramatically below that range with curiosity rather than celebration — the money is usually missing from somewhere you’ll notice later.

The four pricing models you’ll encounter

Per device, per month. A price per computer, server, and sometimes firewall — the model where the invoice maps directly onto what’s actually being monitored, patched, and supported. Its virtues are precision and auditability: you pay for the machines that exist (the invoice should reconcile against your inventory, which is a health check in itself), it doesn’t penalize part-timers or shared-workstation setups — the shop floor, the front-desk PC, the exam-room machines — and pruning unused devices visibly lowers the bill. Watch the server line: servers price several times higher than workstations, which is legitimate but changes the math.

Per user, per month. One price covers a person and the devices they reasonably use. It scales cleanly with headcount and budgets simply — and it can overcharge device-light teams and undercharge device-heavy ones, which is why providers using it often add device caps or surcharges in the fine print worth reading.

Tiered plans. Essentials / Standard / Premium bundles at different per-user prices. Perfectly reasonable — just read the tier tables closely. The classic trap is a low headline tier that excludes the things you’ll certainly need (after-hours support, on-site visits, real security tooling), which then arrive as hourly billing.

All-you-can-eat vs. capped. “Unlimited support” plans cost more per user but remove the perverse incentive where staff avoid calling IT to save the company money — which is how small problems ripen into big ones. Capped or block-hour arrangements are cheaper on paper and frequently more expensive in practice.

You’ll also see co-managed pricing — supplementing an internal IT person — which is its own conversation, usually priced per device or as a tailored scope, and typically below fully-managed rates because your team is doing real work.

What actually drives your quote

Two 30-person companies can get quotes 60% apart, and both quotes can be fair. The variables:

  • Infrastructure footprint — counted honestly, cloud included. More systems mean more work wherever they live, and here’s the part the brochures get wrong: moving to Microsoft 365 doesn’t make that work disappear — it relocates it. A modern tenant needs the ongoing care a server used to get (security settings and identity protection, licensing, backup, sharing governance, and a platform Microsoft changes underneath you monthly), which is why per-device providers commonly price the tenant as its own line item — functionally, it is one of your servers now. What genuinely drives quotes up is age and sprawl: out-of-warranty hardware, undocumented systems, and specialty equipment generate tickets wherever the rest of the environment lives.
  • Security and compliance requirements. HIPAA, CMMC, or a serious cyber-insurance posture means more tooling, more documentation, more process — all real costs.
  • The security stack included. The biggest source of quote-to-quote variance in 2026: a plan with managed detection and response, advanced email filtering, Microsoft 365 backup, and security training is materially more expensive to deliver than one with basic antivirus — and materially more valuable.
  • On-site expectations. Regular scheduled on-site time, or a business that genuinely needs hands-on support, costs more than remote-first.
  • Hours of coverage. Business-hours help desk with on-call emergencies vs. true 24/7 staffed response.
  • The state of your environment. Old, undocumented, out-of-warranty environments generate more tickets — expect a higher price, an onboarding cleanup project, or a provider that walks away.

What’s typically not in the monthly fee

Legitimate extras that shouldn’t surprise you if the proposal is honest: onboarding (a one-time setup, often on the order of one month’s fee, to document and clean up), projects (migrations, office moves, server replacements — quoted separately, which is normal), hardware and licenses (usually pass-through, sometimes at better-than-retail pricing), and third-party vendor fees. Where to be wary: proposals that leave support activities out of the base fee — after-hours help, on-site visits, “security incidents” — and bill them hourly. That’s how a cheap plan becomes an expensive one.

Comparing quotes apples to apples

For each quote, confirm in writing:

  1. Exactly which services are in the monthly fee, and the complete list of what’s billed separately — with the hourly rate for anything outside scope
  2. Whether after-hours and on-site support are included, and at what limits
  3. The security stack, item by item: EDR or MDR? Email filtering? M365 backup? Training? Who watches the alerts, and when?
  4. Response-time commitments, in writing, by severity
  5. Onboarding cost and what it includes
  6. Contract term and exit terms — and whether you own your documentation and accounts if you leave
  7. Whether the price assumes your environment as-is, or after a cleanup you’re paying for

And when one proposal prices per device and another per user, don’t compare the unit rates at all — convert both to the total monthly cost for your actual headcount and device count, then compare that total against the ingredient list. With those answers in hand, a $3,800/month quote and a $5,100/month quote often turn out to be different products, not different prices for the same one.

Is it worth it? The comparison that matters

The baselines: a single internal IT hire typically costs well over $80,000/year fully loaded — one person’s skills, one person’s hours, no vacation coverage, no 24/7 anything. For most businesses under ~100–150 employees, a full MSP relationship costs less than that one salary. Break/fix support looks cheap in quiet months and brutal in bad ones — and structurally underinvests in the prevention that determines whether bad months happen. Doing nothing costs whatever your downtime costs; if an outage day exceeds a month of managed services — true for most businesses past a certain size — the math has answered itself.

The bottom line

Expect roughly $100–$250 per user per month for real, fully managed IT in 2026, with your infrastructure, industry, and the included security stack explaining where in that range you land. The cheapest and most expensive quotes usually aren’t the same product — compare the ingredient lists, not the bottom lines, and be most skeptical of the number that seems too good. Portland-metro businesses can also see how these numbers play out locally, including which pricing unit fits which kind of local business.