IT Support

How Much Should a Small Business Budget for IT? A Practical Framework

“What should we be spending on IT?” deserves a better answer than a shrug or a scary percentage. Here's the practical framework we walk owners through — built for businesses under ~50 people.

The benchmark, loosely held

Small businesses commonly land somewhere around 2–6% of revenue on technology all-in — heavier when technology is the product or during infrastructure years (move, build-out, system replacement), lighter in steady-state years on healthy foundations. The percentage matters less than whether the pieces below are funded on purpose.

What belongs in the budget

• Connectivity: business internet sized honestly, plus failover — the cheapest insurance in this list.
• Communications: phone seats, texting, and the support behind them.
• Foundation refresh: firewalls, switches, access points, and servers age out on 5–7 year cycles; divide replacement cost by lifespan and fund it annually instead of being surprised.
• Security and continuity: backups (automated, tested), MFA, patching discipline — small line items that cap catastrophic ones.
• Support: help desk coverage, monitoring, maintenance — whether by hire or partner (run the in-house vs. outsourced math honestly; a fraction of a loaded salary typically buys full coverage at this scale).
• Workstations and software: the visible spending everyone already counts.

Where corner-cutting compounds

Skipped backups, consumer network gear, unmanaged updates, and “we'll fix WiFi later” don't reduce cost — they defer it with interest, payable during an outage or a breach. Every expensive emergency we respond to was a budget line someone deleted.

Turn the framework into your number

Our free assessment doubles as a budgeting exercise: current-state map, refresh timeline, risk gaps ranked by cost-to-fix, and a monthly number that makes technology a planned expense instead of a recurring surprise. Bring last year's IT receipts; the comparison is usually illuminating.