You asked what IT support costs and got a contact form to fill out. Or you got a proposal with one number on it and no way to tell what it includes, let alone if it is high, low or about right. That is the normal experience when you shop for IT support, and it makes a simple question harder than it should be.

Here is the direct answer. Most Los Angeles providers sell ongoing IT support as managed IT, where a provider monitors, maintains and supports your systems for a flat monthly fee, and they quote roughly $100 to $300 per user per month. That range comes from the cost guides several local providers have put out for 2026. Where a quote lands inside it depends far more on what is included than on how many people you have.

What local providers say they charge

I read the cost guides that Los Angeles providers have published for 2026. These are their claims about their own market, not a survey, and they are marketing pages, so treat them that way.

Two of the three guides quote $100 to $250 per user per month. The third quotes $125 to $300. At $100 to $250, a 25-person office comes to $2,500 to $6,250 a month, and a 50-person office comes to $5,000 to $12,500. One of them also puts the hourly break-fix alternative at $150 to $250 per hour.

The three agree more than they differ. If a quote for your office falls inside $100 to $300 per user, it is in the normal band. If it falls well below, the next sections explain what is usually missing.

I’ll be honest with you about one more thing. We do not publish a price range for Xentric, and I am not going to slip one in here. Our pricing depends on what your business actually needs, which is the point of this article. If you want a ballpark for your own setup, our pricing estimator gives you one based on your selections.

The four ways providers charge

Most quotes fit one of these shapes, and knowing which one you are looking at is half the comparison.

Hourly, sometimes called break-fix, means you call when something breaks and pay for the time. There is no monthly commitment. There is also no reason for the provider to prevent problems, because a problem is how they get paid. It can make sense for a very small office with little dependence on its technology, and it gets expensive fast for anyone else.

Per user is the most common model for managed IT. You pay a flat monthly amount for each employee, and it normally covers monitoring, patching, help desk and backup. It scales with headcount and stays predictable, so a 25-person office at $200 per user pays $5,000 every month. The math works the same at any rate.

Per device is similar, but the fee follows the number of computers and servers instead of the number of people. It suits a business where several people share a workstation, such as a front desk or a shop floor.

Tiered or co-managed arrangements split the work. Your in-house person keeps the day-to-day, and the provider covers what that person cannot, such as after-hours monitoring, security and projects. Pricing here depends on how the work is divided, so there is no standard number to compare against.

What moves the price

Headcount sets your floor. It does not set your price. One of the local guides makes the same point: two 40-person companies in Los Angeles can receive quotes 60% apart, and both can be honest.

The largest driver is security depth. “Includes cybersecurity” can mean antivirus and a firewall, or it can mean 24/7 monitoring by people who respond to threats, enforced multi-factor authentication (MFA, the second sign-in step that stops a stolen password from being enough), email threat protection and security awareness training. That guide estimates the gap between those two at $50 to $100 per user per month. Your cyber insurance carrier can also decide this for you, because carriers commonly ask for specific controls before they write or renew a policy.

Next is coverage hours. Business-hours help desk costs less than 24/7 monitoring, and the right answer depends on whether anything at your company runs at night or on weekends.

Then come compliance requirements. A medical practice, a law firm or an accounting office carries obligations that a general office does not, and the technical side of meeting them adds work. We support businesses across many industries, including medical practices, and the same tools protect every client. For a practice, we configure them to what HIPAA’s technical safeguards call for.

Finally, the condition of what you already have. An environment with no documentation, aging servers and no backup takes more effort to bring under management than a clean one. That effort usually shows up as a one-time onboarding fee.

What a quote leaves out

A rate that looks low can still cost more over a year. These are the exclusions I would ask about before signing anything:

  • Onboarding. One local guide says one-time setup commonly runs $1,000 to $10,000, depending on the state of your environment.
  • Projects. Server replacements, office moves and migrations are usually billed separately. Another guide lists them as a typical extra, along with after-hours and emergency onsite visits.
  • Advanced security and compliance work. Penetration testing, dark web monitoring, HIPAA risk assessments and similar items are often add-ons.
  • Software licensing. Microsoft 365 licenses are frequently billed on their own line.
  • Renewal increases. Get the annual cap in writing before you sign, not after.

For instance, a quote that says “$130 per user” and excludes onboarding, projects and after-hours work is a different product from a $190 quote that includes them. Add up what you will actually pay in the first year, then compare.

How to compare two quotes

Imagine two proposals land on your desk this week. Both cover 25 people. One says $4,000 a month and the other says $5,500. It is tempting to take the lower one and move on.

Before you do, I would put the same set of questions to both providers and write the answers side by side. That is how you get apples to apples.

Ask each one to list what the monthly fee excludes. An honest provider takes a minute to answer, and a vague one tells you something. Ask them to name every security service that is included, one by one.

Ask what onboarding costs and how long it takes. Four to six weeks is a thorough transition, so if you’re quoted one week expect them to be cutting corners. Ask when they last ran a test restore of a client’s backup and how long recovery took. Finish with what the price does at renewal and what happens if you leave.

A lot of owners look at the monthly figure and stop there. I would add one more number: what your current setup costs you in slowdowns and outages. Our unmanaged IT cost calculator gives you a rough figure from your headcount and wages. It is not the same as pricing a managed plan, but it puts a number next to the one on the quote. The monthly bill is the easy number to see. The cost of a bad week is usually larger, and the quote with the higher rate sometimes carries less of it.

Where to start

You do not have to settle on a provider this month, and it does not have to happen all at once. If you already have someone who answers the phone and keeps your systems running, you are probably in good shape, and leaving things alone is a fair choice.

If you are collecting IT support quotes, start with the questions above and your own headcount. Our pricing page has an estimator that takes a few minutes. When you are ready to see what your own setup would cost, tell us what you have today and we’ll take it from there.