What Should a 25, 50, or 100 Employee Company Budget for IT?

A complete IT budget has five lines, not one: support, software licensing, hardware refresh, connectivity, and a project reserve. For most 25 to 100 employee companies that totals roughly $200 to $350 per employee per month across all five lines, with managed support the largest single line. Companies that budget only the support fee rediscover the other four lines as surprises.

Ask what IT costs and you’ll get a support quote. Budget only that number and the rest of real IT spending, licensing, aging hardware, the server that’s out of runway, arrives anyway, unbudgeted, one surprise at a time. The companies that feel in control of IT spending aren’t spending less. They’re budgeting all five lines instead of one.

Here are the five lines, and what they look like at 25, 50, and 100 employees.

Line 1: Managed support

The largest single line, and the one quotes are written about. Braintek prices by device and mailbox: about $150 to $250 per device per month plus $15 to $35 per mailbox, shared mailboxes free, Microsoft licensing billed separately. Companies usually run 1.1 to 1.3 devices per employee once laptops, a server or two, and shared workstations are counted.

What that rate should include, at minimum: help desk by phone and email, monitoring and patching on every device, endpoint and email security, backup management, Microsoft 365 administration, network and firewall management, and vendor coordination for your line-of-business software. The full scope is on our managed IT services page, and the structure is on our pricing page. Two identically priced quotes can include very different lists, which is why the agreement behind the quote matters more than the quote.

Line 2: Software licensing

Microsoft 365 is the anchor: business-grade licenses run roughly $15 to $35 per user per month depending on tier, and it should be billed separately from support so it can’t hide there. Then the rest of the stack, your industry software, accounting platform, document storage, e-signature, and the subscriptions departments quietly added. For most companies this line lands between $40 and $80 per employee per month all-in, and it only goes up, which is exactly why it deserves an annual review to cancel what nobody uses anymore.

Line 3: Hardware refresh

The line most budgets skip, which is why “our computers are all dying at once” is such a common opening problem. The math is simple: business workstations have a useful life of about 4 to 5 years, so a healthy budget replaces roughly 20 to 25 percent of the fleet every year. At a typical $1,200 to $1,800 per business-grade workstation, that’s about $25 to $45 per employee per month, flat and predictable, instead of a five-figure spike in whatever year the fleet ages out. Servers, firewalls, and network gear ride the same logic on a 5 to 7 year cycle.

Line 4: Connectivity and infrastructure

Internet service, a backup circuit if downtime is expensive for you, phone service, and any cloud infrastructure you run. Wildly variable by business, but rarely under $15 to $30 per employee per month once a real business circuit and phones are counted. The budget question here isn’t the amount, it’s whether a single circuit failure stops the whole company, and what a second circuit costs against a day of everyone idle.

Line 5: The project reserve

Every year has projects: the server reaching end of life, the office move, the Wi-Fi that was never right, the compliance push a customer questionnaire triggers. Reserving 10 to 20 percent of total annual IT spend turns them into planned work. This is also where good providers earn their keep, flagging in January what will need replacing by fall, so the reserve gets spent on schedule instead of on emergencies.

What the totals look like

Bringing the five lines together, at typical device ratios and mid-range rates:

Budget line	25 employees	50 employees	100 employees
Managed support (devices + mailboxes)	$5,000 to $8,300	$10,000 to $16,500	co-managed, see below
Software licensing (M365 + stack)	$1,000 to $2,000	$2,000 to $4,000	$4,000 to $8,000
Hardware refresh	$650 to $1,100	$1,300 to $2,300	$2,500 to $4,500
Connectivity	$400 to $750	$750 to $1,500	$1,500 to $3,000
Project reserve (annualized)	$700 to $1,200	$1,400 to $2,400	$2,000 to $4,000
Rough monthly total	$7,750 to $13,350	$15,450 to $26,700	varies with model

Per employee, both fully managed columns land around $300 to $530 per employee per month across all five lines. Your real number depends on your device counts, your software stack, and how much of your business stops when systems do.

The 100 employee column changes shape rather than just size. At that scale most companies hire internal IT for daily presence and pair it with an outside provider for security, projects, escalations, and after-hours coverage. That co-managed split usually beats both alternatives: cheaper than building a full internal team, deeper than any one or two hires can be alone.

The two most expensive budget lines are the missing ones

Companies that overspend on IT rarely do it by paying too much per device. They do it by skipping lines: no refresh budget, so hardware failures set the schedule. No project reserve, so every project is an emergency priced like one. And if the current provider’s number looks attractive mostly because half of this list isn’t in it, that’s worth a closer look at what the agreement actually includes, and possibly at what switching would involve.

Want the real version of this table?

Braintek has supported Houston and DFW businesses since 2002. Send us your headcount, device count, and what you run, and we’ll build the five lines with your numbers: support, licensing, a refresh schedule for your actual fleet, and the projects we’d flag in year one. Book a discovery call and bring last year’s IT invoices if you want the before-and-after.

Want your five lines filled in with real numbers?

Tell us your headcount, device count, and what you run, and we'll build the actual budget: support, licensing, refresh schedule, and the projects we'd see coming in your first year. A real plan, not a quote range.

FAQs

What percentage of revenue should a company spend on IT?

Industry surveys usually land small and mid-sized businesses somewhere between 2 and 6 percent of revenue, but the percentage is a sanity check, not a plan. Budgeting works better bottom-up from the five lines: support, licensing, hardware refresh, connectivity, and projects, because those are the numbers you actually pay.

What does managed IT support itself cost?

As a reference point, Braintek's managed support runs about $150 to $250 per device per month plus $15 to $35 per mailbox, with shared mailboxes free and Microsoft licensing billed separately. Device counts usually land at 1.1 to 1.3 times headcount once laptops and servers are counted.

Why budget hardware as a monthly line instead of buying when things die?

Because a workstation fleet ages as a group. A company that buys 30 computers in a good year replaces 30 computers in some future year, usually an inconvenient one. Dividing the fleet by a 4 to 5 year lifespan turns that spike into a flat, predictable line and means nobody is nursing a nine year old machine that costs more in lost time than a new one would.

Where does cybersecurity fit in the budget?

The core controls, endpoint protection, email security, MFA, patching, monitoring, should be inside a competent managed support rate, not sold as add-ons. What sits outside it: cyber insurance premiums, security awareness training if you add it, and remediation projects an insurer or a customer questionnaire forces. Ask any provider exactly which controls their rate includes in writing.

When does a 100 employee company need co-managed IT instead?

Around the point where same-day, on-site presence and internal knowledge start to matter daily, many companies hire one or two internal IT staff. Co-managed IT pairs that hire with an outside provider covering security, projects, escalations, and after-hours, so you're not asking one person to be a help desk, security team, and CIO at once. It usually costs less than staffing all of that internally.

What belongs in the project reserve?

The work that isn't monthly support: server replacements or cloud migrations, office moves and buildouts, Wi-Fi overhauls, phone system changes, and compliance pushes. For most companies, reserving roughly 10 to 20 percent of annual IT spend covers the typical year. The reserve isn't a guess about whether projects will happen. They will. It's a decision about whether they'll be planned.