How Much Does Managed IT Cost for a CPA Firm? (2026 Pricing Guide)

Per-user pricing with the monthly math by firm size.

Managed IT for a CPA firm costs $100 to $250 per user per month. At 10 users that is $1,000 to $2,500 monthly. At 25 users, $2,500 to $6,250. At 50 users, $5,000 to $12,500. At 100 users, $10,000 to $25,000.

Those are straight multiplications on purpose. Firms hear about volume discounts constantly, and the honest answer is that the per-user rate does not drop much with size, because the per-user work does not drop much with size. A 50th user needs the same endpoint protection, the same license, the same onboarding, and the same monitoring as the fifth.

Where a firm lands inside the band is the real question, and it is answerable. Read the next section as a scoring exercise on your own practice.

Five factors account for most of the spread.

Compliance scope, cybersecurity depth, Microsoft 365 footprint, remote-work load, and tax-season coverage are what separate a $100 per user firm from a $250 per user firm.

• Compliance scope. A firm that needs FTC Safeguards Rule work, a Written Information Security Plan, documented risk assessments, and annual policy review sits high in the range. A firm that already has those and needs them maintained sits lower.
• Cybersecurity depth. Endpoint detection and response, enforced MFA, email security, and security awareness training are baseline. Add dark web monitoring, phishing simulation, and formal incident response planning and the number climbs.
• Microsoft 365 footprint. Firms running Exchange Online, SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive, Entra ID, Intune, and Defender need all of it configured and watched. Licensing may or may not be inside the fee, which is the single most common apples-to-oranges error when comparing quotes.
• Remote and seasonal staff. Hybrid work is standard in accounting now. Secure identity, device management, and conditional access for people working from three counties add real cost.
• Tax-season coverage. Extended hours between January and April are not free. Ask whether they are included or billed as overtime, because the answer differs sharply between providers.

The services that should already be inside the monthly fee.

A managed IT agreement for an accounting firm should include unlimited help desk, endpoint protection, patch management, Microsoft 365 administration, backup monitoring, onboarding and offboarding, vendor coordination, and documented strategic planning.

• Unlimited help desk. Per-ticket billing during tax season is a bad trade for an accounting firm and a good trade for the provider. Watch for it.
• Endpoint detection and response. Not antivirus. EDR watches behavior and can isolate a machine mid-incident.
• Microsoft 365 administration. Identity, permissions, mail flow, and Defender policy, actively managed rather than set once at onboarding.
• Backup monitoring and restore testing. A backup nobody has restored is a theory. Ask for the date of the last successful test restore.
• Onboarding and offboarding. Seasonal staff make this a real workload for accounting firms in a way it is not for most businesses.
• Vendor coordination. Your provider should be the one on the phone with the tax software vendor, not your office manager.
• Strategic planning. A named review cadence with the firm's leadership, not an annual sales call.

Managed IT Cost for a CPA Firm Open Full Size

The project work that sits outside the monthly agreement.

Most managed IT agreements price cloud migrations, office moves, server deployments, cabling, hardware purchases, formal compliance audits, and AI implementation as separate projects rather than including them in the monthly fee.

None of that is unreasonable. What is unreasonable is finding out in month four. Read the exclusions section of the agreement before the pricing section, because the exclusions are where two quotes that look 20 percent apart turn out to be identical, or where the lower-priced one turns out to cost more.

The item most often missed on CPA quotes is Microsoft 365 licensing. Some providers fold it into the per-user rate and some bill it straight through. On a 40-person firm that difference is thousands of dollars a year, and it is invisible unless you ask directly.

The pattern behind most accounting-firm switching conversations.

Accounting firms rarely change IT providers over price. They change after a tax season where the response times did not hold, or after a compliance question nobody could answer.

The calls cluster into a handful of shapes. A partner asks for the firm's Written Information Security Plan and discovers there is not one. Someone finally checks whether the backups restore and finds out they have not been tested. MFA is on for most people but not for the two who complained loudest. The provider does not know what CCH Axcess, UltraTax CS, Lacerte, or Drake Tax actually do, so every application question turns into a three-way call. Nobody has drawn a technology roadmap past this quarter.

Our own scanning data lines up with that. The CinchOps Houston Area Security Scorecard scanned 487 CPA firms across the Houston metro and found 208 of them, 42.7 percent, scoring a D or an F on external security posture. Exactly one firm out of 487 earned an A. These are practices holding tax returns and Social Security numbers.

In 30 years of doing this, the thing that separates firms that come through a bad February from firms that do not is boring: someone tested the restore, someone enforced MFA on everyone, and someone wrote down what happens when the internet drops on April 12.

Seven questions that separate providers faster than a price sheet.

Ask what cybersecurity is included in the base fee, how the provider supports FTC Safeguards Rule compliance, when backups were last restore-tested, and what happens during a tax-season emergency.

• What security is in the base fee? If EDR, MFA, and email security are add-ons, the headline price is not the price.
• How do you support FTC Safeguards Rule work? They should be able to describe the technical controls without reaching for a brochure.
• Have you built a WISP before? A provider who has never seen a Written Information Security Plan will not help you maintain one.
• When did you last test a restore for a client our size? A date, not a policy.
• What is your response commitment, and is it different in March? Get it in writing.
• Is Microsoft 365 licensing inside this number? The single biggest source of quote confusion.
• Who do we actually reach? Ask whether messages route to a queue or to someone accountable.

CinchOps is a managed IT services provider based in Katy, Texas, serving small and mid-sized businesses across the Houston metro area. CinchOps specializes in cybersecurity, network security, managed IT support, VoIP, and SD-WAN for businesses with 10 to 200 employees.

• Through managed IT support, accounting firms get unlimited help desk with responses in under 15 minutes, plus the Microsoft 365 administration that most firms are quietly doing themselves.
• Our cybersecurity services cover the controls the FTC Safeguards Rule expects: enforced MFA, endpoint detection and response, email security, encryption, and security awareness training.
• Business continuity and disaster recovery includes geo-redundant backups held outside the Gulf Coast flood zone, which matters more here than it does most places.
• Our CPA firm IT services are built around accounting workflows, tax-season load, and the applications firms actually run.
• We support firms across Houston, Katy, and Sugar Land.

If your current agreement is at the bottom of the range, that is worth understanding rather than celebrating. Low cost usually means security is an add-on you have not bought yet, and for a firm holding several thousand taxpayer records that is a strange place to economize. Get a real number, understand what it covers, then decide. If you want a second read on what you are paying for now, talk to CinchOps.