There is a reason this question is asked twenty different ways and answered almost nowhere. Managed IT is priced after a discovery call in most of the market, so the figure a buyer wants before they take that call is precisely the figure the trade has decided not to publish. This record measures how often that is true rather than asserting it: 29 providers were read on 10 September 2026, chosen because they rank for the queries a business actually types, and seven of them publish a per-seat figure anywhere on their own site.
What the published figures say
The seven providers that publish anything run from $10 to $125 a seat a month at their lowest advertised rate, with a median of $99.50. Two of them publish a band rather than a rate, and the band is the more honest shape: $100 to $250 a user per month, and $125 to $300. The low end of a band is a modern estate with no compliance regime and the high end is the opposite, so a business asking which end it lands on is asking the only question that moves the number.
Why a calculator cannot answer this
Every calculator in this market multiplies a seat count by a rate you supply, which means it computes the one number you already knew and hides the three you did not: the seat minimum, what falls outside the contract, and the onboarding fee. A rate of $110 a seat with a twenty-five seat floor bills a fifteen-person firm for twenty-five seats. None of the seven providers publishing a figure in this record states its minimum, so no calculator built on those figures can be right for a small business.
What sits outside the monthly number
Almost every contract quotes the running of the estate and bills the changing of it separately. Onboarding and documentation at the start, migrations, new offices, hardware and licences, after-hours and weekend work, and project work of any size are commonly excluded. A low monthly rate beside a heavy project pipeline is not the cheaper deal, and the only way to compare two quotes is to write the same year of expected work into both and ask each provider to price it.
Putting it in a budget
For planning before quotes arrive, the defensible approach is a band rather than a point: take the published range, apply it to your seat count, and add a separate line for projects rather than folding them in. Reductions, when they come, come from consolidating licences, retiring the machines that generate most of the tickets and moving off the servers that need patching, not from negotiating the seat rate, which is the least movable part of the number.
Questions people ask about it support cost
What is a typical IT support cost per user?
In this record the seven providers that publish a figure sit between $10 and $125 a seat a month at their lowest advertised rate, median $99.50. Two publish bands topping out at $250 and $300.
Why will providers not publish a price?
Because the number depends on the estate, and because publishing invites comparison. Thirteen of the 29 providers here were read in full and state no figure at all.
Is IT support priced per user or per device?
Per user on five of the seven providers that publish anything, per workstation on one. The two are close and not the same, so ask which unit a quote is written in before comparing.
What is not included in the monthly fee?
Typically onboarding, projects, migrations, hardware, licences and after-hours work. Ask for each of those to be priced against a written year of expected work.