What managed IT actually costs around Puget Sound
Answer eight questions and you get a range, not a quote, along with the reasons the number lands where it does. If two proposals on your desk disagree by $80 a user, the answer is almost always somewhere in the scope, and this shows you where to look.
Billed seats are counted as at least 10, so a six-person firm is billed as ten. Everyone quotes it this way; we would rather say so than have you find it in a footnote.
Regulated work costs more because the evidence and the controls are the product, not because the helpdesk is different.
Asked as a fact rather than a self-assessment, because nobody describes their own environment as a mess. Not sure is a real answer and is priced as typical.
Billed per server, not per user. A fully cloud environment with no on-premise servers is meaningfully cheaper to manage, which is a real finding rather than a sales line.
Estimated monthly cost, all in, for the scope you picked
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What is driving this number
One-time costs, kept separate on purpose
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Rates reviewed September 2026.
Your estimate is on the screen either way. The box under the form below decides whether your answers and email address are sent to us; untick it and nothing leaves this browser.
Reading a proposal you already have
Three figures do most of the damage, and none of them are usually on the first page.
The onboarding fee
Typically $50 to $250 per user, one-time. On a 40-person company that is a $2,000 to $10,000 difference between two otherwise identical proposals. It is the single most common omission in a first conversation.
The out-of-scope hourly rate
Every flat-rate agreement has a boundary, and the rate outside it is the number that decides what a bad year costs. Regional break-fix work runs $130 to $215 an hour. If the proposal does not name the rate, it is not a flat-rate agreement yet.
The true all-in per-user cost
A $125 per user base quote routinely becomes about $195 once the recommended stack is added: endpoint detection at $15 to $25 per endpoint, email security at $5 to $10 per user, dark web monitoring at $3 to $8 per user. None of those are unreasonable. They are just frequently quoted separately, and compared against someone else's all-in number.
Where these numbers come from
Worth saying plainly, because if you later discover the sourcing was oversold you would be right to discount everything else here.
The ranges are synthesized from published 2026 managed-services pricing guides, regional provider data for the Seattle market, and industry benchmark commentary. Most public pricing data comes from providers' own marketing pages rather than independent surveys, which is a real weakness in all of it. Kaseya's MSP Benchmark Survey is the closest thing to a neutral source, and it covers pricing models more than price points.
The model was calibrated against these reference points: Seattle fully managed IT at $120 to $210 per user for most businesses, and $170 to $310 for regulated healthcare and CMMC-driven aerospace work; Washington State small business at $100 to $300 per user; a national average of $150 to $200 for a standard tier; regulated verticals running $40 to $100 per user above standard bands; and industry-specialist providers pricing 20 to 40 percent above generalist peers.
The sources disagree with each other. The HIPAA uplift alone is reported anywhere from $15 to $30 per user by some publishers and $30 to $50 by others. That spread is not a rounding error and it is not something to hide: it is precisely why this page outputs a range instead of a number.
Why Puget Sound runs above the national average
Two reasons, and neither is regional pride. The cost of doing business here is higher, and the market for IT talent is competitive enough that the people doing the work cost more. A provider paying Seattle salaries cannot price against a national average and stay solvent.
It is not uniform across the region either. Businesses in Snohomish, Skagit and Whatcom counties generally see more moderate rates than downtown Seattle or the Eastside. If you are comparing a Bellingham proposal against a Bellevue one, some of that gap is geography rather than scope.
One honest limitation. The environment question above is the largest single swing in this model, and it is the one nobody answers accurately about their own business. The phrasing asks about observable facts for that reason, but it does not solve it. For a genuinely neglected environment, expect real proposals to land above what this page tells you.
If you want the number checked against your actual environment
What happens on the call: we go through the same inputs you just used, against what you actually run, and you get a written range with the assumptions named. No demo, no slides. If the answer is that your current provider is priced fairly, that is a useful result and we will say so.
If a written breakdown would help you compare the proposals on your desk, leave your email below and someone here will follow up with one, along with a scope checklist. Your estimate is already on the screen either way - nothing here is behind a form. The tick box under the form controls what happens next: leave it ticked and your answers and address come to us, untick it and nothing leaves your browser.