How much should a 10–100 employee Central Texas business budget for managed IT?
For most Central Texas businesses with 10 to 100 employees, the honest answer is $150–$250 per user per month for fully managed IT. That puts your monthly IT line somewhere between $1,500 and $25,000 depending on headcount, compliance load, and how much of your stack already lives in the cloud. Flat-rate beats hourly for almost everyone in that range — but only when the agreement actually covers what it should.
Last updated May 27, 2026
Why the same headcount lands in wildly different price ranges.
A 10-person dental practice and a 10-person construction office have the same employee count and almost nothing else in common. The dental office handles PHI, needs HIPAA-aware backups, runs three specialty applications, and has zero tolerance for a server outage on a Tuesday morning. The construction office has a foreman who emails invoices from his truck.
Both pay per user. They don't pay the same per user.
The factors that move the number, in roughly the order they matter:
- Headcount and total device count — laptops, desktops, servers, mobile
- Compliance you actually have to meet — HIPAA, CJIS, PCI, the Texas Cybersecurity Framework
- How much of your stack is in Microsoft 365 versus still on-prem
- Whether you need someone to drive over when something breaks
- Backup posture, and whether recoveries are tested or just configured
- Server and network complexity
- Whether you want a vCIO planning 12 months ahead or just a help desk to call
Businesses with heavier security obligations sit at the higher end because the security stack costs more — EDR licensing, MFA management, phishing simulations, dark-web monitoring, the documentation a real auditor will ask for. It adds up. It also pays for itself the first time you would have otherwise been the news story.
What that monthly per-user number actually buys.
A flat-rate agreement at $150–$250 per user should include the whole IT department, not just a help desk seat. If a quote in that range is light on any of these, ask why before you sign.
Help desk & user support
Unlimited remote help desk, password resets, printer drama, onboarding, offboarding. Real engineers on the phone, not first-tier scripts.
Cybersecurity stack
EDR on every device, MFA where it counts, email filtering, patching on a schedule, dark-web monitoring. Not sold as an upsell — built into the plan.
24/7 monitoring & patching
Servers, workstations, network gear — watched around the clock as part of managed IT. Most issues get resolved before anyone at your office notices something was off.
Backup & recovery
Encrypted cloud backups running automatically — and recoveries tested every quarter. A backup you've never restored from is a theory, not a backup.
Microsoft 365 & cloud
Microsoft 365 and cloud licensing, Exchange, Teams, SharePoint, conditional access policies. The piece of your stack that touches every user, so it gets specialist attention.
vCIO & strategic planning
Quarterly reviews, hardware lifecycle, budget planning, vendor coordination — the vCIO and IT consulting work that small teams almost always skip.
Realistic monthly IT budgets, by company size.
These ranges assume Central Texas businesses on a fully managed plan — not break/fix, not staff-augmentation. Anything below this is either missing pieces or running on luck.
M365 administration, basic cybersecurity stack, help desk, cloud backup, device management. At this size, you don't have an internal IT person and shouldn't be trying to.
Add real network management, vendor coordination, compliance assistance, and a backup posture that's tested rather than assumed.
Often multiple locations, more demanding security monitoring, strategic IT planning, and onsite support as a line item rather than an occasional favor.
Full compliance management, advanced security stack, vCIO leadership, infrastructure management, and a disaster recovery plan that's been tested — not a Google Doc someone wrote in 2022.
The cheapest quote is almost never the cheapest agreement.
The MSP that comes in $40 per user under everyone else is usually doing one of three things — pricing the security stack out so you'll buy it back separately later, planning to bill hourly for "projects" that should have been managed work, or staffing so thin that your tickets sit in a queue for half a day.
Compare proposals on the things that matter when something actually goes wrong:
- Response time, in writing — not "fast"
- Which security tools are included, by name — EDR, MFA, email filtering, dark-web monitoring
- Whether backups are tested or just configured
- Whether onsite support is included or billed per visit
- After-hours coverage
- Compliance and audit support
- Vendor coordination — CAMA, GIS, line-of-business apps, ISP, phones
Most low-ball quotes win on price by quietly excluding the parts that come up the day you actually need them.
35-employee Central Texas business · hourly → flat-rate
Why Central Texas businesses pick safemode IT.
We run managed IT and cybersecurity for healthcare offices, small businesses, Texas appraisal districts, and housing authorities across the I-35 corridor — Kyle, San Marcos, Bastrop, and Austin.
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