How much does IT support cost per user in London?

Most London managed service providers quote per user, per month. In 2026 that is roughly £40-60 for basic helpdesk and monitoring, £65-100 for a standard service with security and backup, and £100-175 for premium cover with compliance support and strategic advice. Financial services firms needing 24/7 support and compliance frameworks typically pay £150-250.

What should be included in the monthly IT support fee?

At any price you should expect unlimited helpdesk during business hours, remote monitoring and management, patching, anti-malware (realistically EDR), onboarding and offboarding, vendor management and regular reporting. A mid-tier London quote should add email security, MFA management, tested cloud backup, Microsoft 365 administration and quarterly reviews.

How Much Does IT Support Cost in London? (2026 Guide)

A published price for IT support in London is a hard thing to find.

The reason is that quotes are not comparable. Two providers can quote £60 and £100 per user for what looks like the same service, and the cheaper one can still cost you more by March. Bundles differ. Exclusions differ. What counts as a “project” differs.

So here is our own view of the London market in 2026: the going rates, what should already be in the price, and the six questions that make competing quotes comparable.

Three ways London MSPs price IT support

Almost every quote you receive will use one of these.

Per user, per month: what most London MSPs quote

You pay a fixed monthly fee per person. It covers helpdesk, monitoring, management, and a defined set of security and productivity tools.

Here is what we see quoted across the London market in 2026:

Basic (helpdesk and monitoring): £40-60 per user per month
Standard (helpdesk, monitoring, security, backup): £65-100 per user per month
Premium (advanced security, compliance support, strategic advice): £100-175 per user per month
Financial services (24/7 support, compliance frameworks, named account management): £150-250 per user per month

For a 30-person London business on a standard plan, budget roughly £2,000-3,000 a month, or £24,000-36,000 a year. We price our own London IT support the same way — one fixed fee per user, per month — and that page sets out what each level of cover includes, so you can see which of these bands your requirements sit in before anyone quotes you.

Whether per-device pricing suits your team

Less common, still offered. You pay per managed device — laptop, desktop, server, network appliance. Typical rates run £20-50 per workstation per month and £100-300 per server.

It works out cheaper if your people have one device each. It gets expensive fast once they have a laptop, a desktop, and a tablet.

Break-fix, and when it still makes sense

You pay only when something breaks, at £80-150 an hour. No monthly fee, which looks appealing and rarely is:

Nothing is monitored, so problems surface when they hurt
Emergencies attract emergency rates
Nobody is being paid to prevent problems, only to fix them
You cannot budget

Break-fix suits a business under five people with simple IT and a high tolerance for risk. If your work stops when your technology stops, managed services will cost you less over a year.

What 24/7 IT support costs in London

Most London plans cover business hours, usually 8am to 6pm on weekdays. Round-the-clock cover is normally priced as an addition to that plan rather than as a separate service, and UK pricing guides published this year put the addition at around £15-30 per user per month. Without a 24/7 contract, out-of-hours call-outs are commonly billed at £100-200 an hour or more, often with a minimum charge.

Before comparing 24/7 prices, find out what the words actually cover. They can mean quite different things:

Monitoring only. Systems are watched around the clock and alerts are raised, but nobody acts on them until the morning.
Critical incidents only. An engineer responds out of hours to outages and security incidents, but routine requests wait for the working day.
Full cover. Anyone on your team can reach an engineer at any hour, for anything.

The first is usually part of the remote monitoring a standard plan already includes. The third is what firms with overnight trading, international offices or shift workers usually need. Most businesses sit in the middle: routine support in the day, and a guaranteed response when something serious breaks at 2am. Ask for the out-of-hours response time in writing, and whether it applies to every request or only to incidents the provider classes as critical.

What your IT support cost should already include

This is where comparison gets difficult, and where the money hides.

Expect these as standard at any price

Unlimited helpdesk by phone, email, and chat, at minimum 8am-6pm Monday to Friday
Remote monitoring and management across every endpoint and server
Patching for operating systems and common applications
Antivirus or anti-malware, though EDR is now the realistic baseline
Onboarding and offboarding for your people
Vendor management — they deal with your ISP, phone provider, and software vendors so you do not
Regular reporting on tickets, response times, and system health

Expect these on a mid-tier London quote

Endpoint detection and response, which does far more than antivirus
Multi-factor authentication management
Email security, including anti-phishing and DMARC configuration
Cloud backup with defined retention and tested recovery
Microsoft 365 administration — licences, users, security settings
Quarterly business reviews with someone who knows your account

Expect to pay extra for these

24/7 or out-of-hours support
Cyber Essentials certification support
Compliance frameworks — FCA, DORA, ISO 27001 preparation
vCTO and strategic advisory
Security awareness training and phishing simulations
Dark web monitoring
Privileged access management
On-site support, which some include up to a number of visits and others bill separately

Spot the hidden costs before you sign

Pin down what counts as a project

Most MSPs separate day-to-day support from project work, and charge for the second. That is fair. What varies is the boundary. An office move is clearly a project. A new printer is not. A meeting room fit-out sits somewhere in between, and you want it defined in the contract rather than debated in an invoice.

Per-ticket charges

Some cheaper providers include a set number of tickets per user and bill for the rest. That teaches your team to stop reporting problems, which is the opposite of what preventive maintenance needs.

Contract term

Many MSPs want 12 to 36 months. Longer terms buy a lower rate and cost you your exit if the service slips. Ask what the term buys you, and make sure there is a sensible way out if the service does not hold up.

What your Microsoft licences really cost

Some providers add a significant margin to Microsoft 365 and security licences. Ask for a breakdown showing vendor list price against what you pay. Five to fifteen per cent is reasonable. Above that, ask why.

The price of getting someone on site

If on-site support is not included, find the rate. A callout fee plus hourly charges adds up quickly, particularly if your office is not where your provider is.

Comparing London MSP quotes fairly, in six steps

Write one requirements list and make every provider quote against it. Without this, you are comparing marketing.
Read the exclusions. The cheapest quote usually wins on price by leaving something out that the others included.
Ask about the team. How many engineers? What certifications? What is their staff turnover? Junior engineers on high churn cost you in service quality, not on the invoice.
Get SLAs in the contract, with response and resolution times you could enforce. A commitment that appears only in the brochure is not one you can rely on.
Call the references — from firms your size, in your sector. Ask how year two went, not how onboarding felt.
Trace the escalation path. When first-line cannot fix it, who gets it, and how fast?

What the cheapest London quote leaves out

In almost every case, the cheapest London quote we see has cut one or more of these:

Security, with basic antivirus standing in for EDR
Backup, either absent or configured and never tested
Monitoring, so support is reactive only
Response times, with no SLA or one generous enough to be meaningless
Account management, so nobody is thinking about your IT between tickets

One security incident, one data loss, or one long outage costs more than a year of the difference. Price is a real factor. Just make sure you are comparing the same thing.

Where your own firm lands

Use the ranges above as your yardstick, then place yourself on them. A growing team on business-hours cover sits near the bottom. An established firm that needs Cyber Essentials Plus support, extended hours and vCIO input sits in the middle. A regulated firm needing 24/7 cover, managed detection and response, and support with its compliance obligations sits at the top. That holds whatever the obligations are: FCA operational resilience, CQC requirements, ISO 27001, or DORA for firms that serve EU financial clients.

We price the same way: one fixed fee per person, per month, quoted for your environment rather than picked off a shelf. Three things move it — headcount, the depth of security and compliance you need, and the hours you want covered. The security essentials are in every level of cover, not only the top one. The London IT support page linked above sets out what each level includes.

If you would like a clear picture of what IT support should cost your business specifically, book a free IT assessment with Nerdster. We will look at your current setup, talk through what it needs, and put a costed proposal in writing.