Managed IT for a construction company starts around $995 a month and usually lands higher than an office-only business of the same headcount, because every active job site carries its own connectivity, devices, and support load.
Most IT quotes price a company by seat count. That works when everyone sits in one building. It stops working the moment half your people are somewhere that had no internet three weeks ago.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics describes the industry this way in its own construction sector definition: activities “generally are managed at a fixed place of business, but they usually perform construction activities at multiple project sites.” That sentence explains your entire pricing problem. You are one company with one office and an unpredictable number of temporary branch locations.
Nobody prices you that way. Almost nobody, anyway. So the number either looks too high on paper or turns up with surprise line items in month four. Here is how it actually breaks down for construction IT in Rockland, Westchester, and Bergen.
The Base Is the Same Floor Everyone Else Gets
Start with what does not change. A construction company with fifteen people in an office pays roughly what a fifteen-person insurance agency pays for the same office. Our published starting point is $995 a month, and most small businesses in this region land somewhere between that and about $2,800 depending on server count, device count, and how much security is bundled in. We wrote the general version of that math up separately in what managed IT costs across Rockland, Westchester, and Bergen.
That band is not a construction number. It is the office part of a construction number.
| What the base layer covers | Why it scales with headcount, not sites |
|---|---|
| Microsoft 365 licensing and administration | Per person, whether that person is at a desk or in a truck |
| Endpoint protection and patching | Follows the device, and devices follow people |
| Help desk and response | Ticket volume tracks headcount fairly closely |
| Backup for office systems and accounting | Sized on data volume, which grows slowly |
| Email security and identity | Per mailbox, flat and predictable |
The Line Nobody Quotes You
Then there is the other layer. Call it the site layer. Two contractors with identical payroll get quotes a thousand dollars apart because of it, and almost nobody itemizes it anywhere you can see.
A job site is a branch office that exists for nine months and then stops existing. Somebody has to switch it on. Switching it on means a connectivity circuit or a cellular failover, a way to move plans and daily reports, devices that survive a trailer, printing that works out there, and a support path for people who cannot walk away from a pour to troubleshoot anything. All of it recurs.
Ask what happens on mobilization day. That question separates providers who have done this from providers who have read about it.
The honest way to price it is per active site, starting when the trailer lands and ending at closeout. Two sites cost less than five. A firm that runs three concurrent projects year-round has a genuinely different monthly number than one that runs one big job at a time, even at identical headcount. Any quote that ignores that distinction is either padding for the worst case or about to surprise you.
What to get itemized before you sign:
- Per-site setup, and whether mobilization is billed as a project or absorbed into the monthly.
- Whether the connectivity circuit is on your bill or theirs, and who owns the contract when the job ends.
- What happens to the monthly number at closeout. It should go down.
- Hardware. Trailer equipment lives a hard life and a three-year refresh assumption is optimistic.
- Whether field users count as full seats. Usually yes, and that is defensible, but you should know.
Heavy Files Change the Storage Math
Plans, models, submittals, photo documentation. A single project generates more data than a professional services firm produces in a year. Nothing gets deleted either, because you may need the 2019 revision during a dispute in 2031.
That lands on the bill in two places. Backup sizing, which is priced on volume and grows with every job you win. And bandwidth at both ends, because a model that opens instantly at the office can be unusable over a site connection.
We covered the technical side of this in detail in what BIM and large CAD files do to a network, so the short version here is the budgeting one. Ask any provider how they size backup for a company whose data only ever grows, and whether the quote assumes today’s volume or three years of it. A number built on today’s volume is a number that gets revised.
What Should Already Be in the Number
Some things get presented as upgrades that are not upgrades. Watch for these three. If a quote treats any of them as optional, the base price is not really the base price.
Multi-factor authentication on email and remote access belongs in the monthly, not in a security add-on tier. So does patching, so does backup monitoring with an actual restore test, and so does documentation of your own environment that you are allowed to keep. A provider who charges extra to tell you what you own is telling you something.
Onboarding is the other one. Standing up a construction firm across an office and several live sites is genuinely real work, and it is reasonable for that to carry a project cost rather than disappearing into a monthly fee. Surprises are the problem, not the charge.
Reading Two Quotes That Are a Thousand Dollars Apart
Line them up on four things. Not the total.
Sites, not seats. Does either quote name a number of active job sites, or do both price your headcount and hope? A quote with no site assumption in it will be renegotiated.
Response, in writing. Fifteen minutes and same business day are very different products. Ours is a 15-minute business-hours response standard from someone who already knows the environment. Ask what the remedy is when it is missed, because a commitment with no consequence is a preference.
The exit. Can you leave with your documentation, your admin credentials, and your data, without a fee? If that is not written down, the cheaper quote is not cheaper.
What is excluded. Read that section first. It runs shorter than the inclusions and usually hides the difference.
One more piece of arithmetic worth doing before you optimize for the lowest monthly. BLS puts the mean hourly wage for construction managers at $58.31 in 2025, and average hourly earnings across the sector at roughly $41 as of mid-2026, per its occupational wage data. Idle a six-person crew and a super for a morning because the site connection is down and nobody can pull the current drawing. That is most of a month’s IT bill, gone, in one morning, on one site.
BLS establishment counts put close to 957,000 private construction establishments in the country as of late 2025, the overwhelming majority of them small. Almost none have anyone whose actual job is to think about this before mobilization day.
What Contractors Ask About IT Pricing
We have twelve in the office and about forty in the field. What are we actually looking at?
Does the monthly go down when a job finishes?
Is satellite or cellular the answer for a site with no service?
Our project management software is cloud-based. Doesn’t that make IT cheaper?
Can we keep our current guy and just add coverage for the sites?
What is not in the monthly number?
How fast can you actually tell us a real number?
The pricing conversation is easier when both sides are describing the same company. If you want the number for yours, start with a free IT assessment and we will tell you where you actually land, including the parts of your current setup that are fine and do not need touching. Full managed IT services details are on the service page.
A free IT assessment prices the office layer and the job-site layer separately, so you can see which one is driving your bill. You keep the breakdown whether you hire us or not.