IT Support Costs for Construction Companies: What to Expect

ACT360 prices managed IT for construction companies per user per month under one agreement. The fee covers help desk support, monitoring, patching, security tools, backup management and planning. Microsoft licences, project and accounting software subscriptions, hardware and projects are billed separately.

Per-user pricing fits how builders work. A project manager might use a laptop in the office, a tablet in the site trailer and a phone that pulls up the latest drawings on the deck. Pricing every device would triple that one person’s cost. Counting the person keeps the bill tied to headcount, which is the number an owner already plans around. How crew members who only carry a phone are counted is settled during the assessment.

Full service includes site visits, and most contractors need them. A network switch that dies in the site trailer, or a plotter that jams the afternoon before a bid closes, isn’t always a remote fix. Remote-only can suit a small estimating office, or a company with someone on staff who handles the hands-on work, which is what our co-managed IT service is built for.

Headcount sets the base. How many active sites you run, how much work happens on phones and tablets in the field, which project and accounting software you depend on, how many offices and yards you have and how much your crew size swings decide where in the range a company lands.

• Active jobsites. Each site trailer needs an internet connection, Wi-Fi and a way back to the office files. A connection that drops every afternoon stops a superintendent from pulling up the current drawings.
• Phones and tablets in the field. Devices that live in trucks get lost, dropped and left on site. Mobile Device Management keeps company data protected and lets a missing device be locked or wiped.
• Project and accounting software. Procore, Buildertrend, Autodesk Build and Bluebeam Revu need users added and removed as people join and leave jobs. Sage or QuickBooks running job costing on an office server adds the server itself to look after.
• Offices and yards. Each location adds network equipment to manage and one standard to keep consistent, so a file opens the same way in the office and the yard.
• Seasonal crews. Headcount that grows in spring and shrinks in winter means more accounts to set up and shut off, and licences to time carefully.
• Owner and insurer questionnaires. When a general contractor, an owner or your cyber insurer asks for proof of MFA, backups and access controls, someone has to produce it.

The first 2 are where a construction company’s quote differs most from an office business with the same headcount.

More than the IT line on the budget. Multiply the people who stop working by their loaded hourly cost and the hours lost, then add rework built from an old drawing, a missed bid deadline and a delayed progress draw. That total is what the monthly fee protects.

For example, if a crew of 8 at a loaded cost of $45 an hour waits 2 hours because the site can’t open the revised drawings, that’s $720 before anyone builds something twice. These are illustration numbers, so put in your own. Then run the same sum for the office on the day the accounting server won’t start and payroll is due.

Outages aren’t only hardware. The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security’s National Cyber Threat Assessment 2025-2026 reports a 133% increase in ransomware incidents affecting Canada’s construction sector from 2022 to 2023. Statistics Canada reports that about 1 in 6 Canadian businesses (16%) were impacted by a cyber security incident in 2023. Our business continuity and disaster recovery page covers how backups are built and tested so project files and job costing come back.

The fee should cover the routine work that keeps the office, the sites and the devices in between running and secure, plus someone planning ahead with you. If a quote sits well below the ranges above, check which of these it leaves out.

• Help desk support from a named contact who knows your sites, your software and who your superintendents are.
• Monitoring and patching for laptops, servers, site equipment and Microsoft 365, scheduled so updates don’t land in the middle of a bid.
• Endpoint detection and response on every managed device. ACT360 uses Huntress EDR, backed by a 24/7 threat operations team.
• Multi-factor authentication on every account, including the shared logins for project platforms and supplier portals.
• Mobile Device Management on every phone and tablet in the field, with remote lock and wipe.
• Backups of project files and accounting data that get test-restored, not only a report saying the job ran.
• Onboarding and offboarding that keep up with seasonal crews, so a new hire has access on day one and a departing one doesn’t keep it.
• Quarterly reviews that tie technology spending to the jobs you’re bidding, new sites and growth.

MFA earns its place on that list. Microsoft reports that MFA plus blocking legacy sign-ins stops more than 99.9% of common identity attacks. When the painting contractor in our case study came on board, identity monitoring flagged account access from 3 countries within weeks, none of which anyone at the company had seen before. Our breakdown of what managed IT actually includes goes line by line.

Microsoft 365 licences, project and accounting software subscriptions, hardware, site connectivity equipment, larger projects and cyber insurance usually sit outside the managed IT fee. Budget for them separately so the monthly number stays easy to compare.

• Microsoft 365 licences, billed per user.
• Procore, Buildertrend, Autodesk Build, Bluebeam and your accounting software, billed by each vendor.
• Laptops, rugged tablets, phones, plotters, servers and network equipment as they reach end of life.
• Internet and Wi-Fi equipment for each site trailer.
• Projects such as replacing the office server, moving accounting to the cloud, or setting up a new office or yard.
• Cyber insurance, which increasingly asks about controls your IT provider manages.

Projects are where the wrong advice costs the most. That same painting contractor’s previous provider quoted $60,000 to replace a failing server, where Sage could take up to 30 minutes to open. ACT360 asked what was coming next, learned the company plans to move its accounting off-premise with a new ERP, and delivered a server sized to bridge to that move for $25,000 including installation and migration. The server right-sizing case study walks through it, and our post on IT for multi-location construction companies covers connecting offices and sites.

Time licence changes carefully when crews grow and shrink with the season. Under Microsoft’s New Commerce Experience policy, most subscriptions can only be cancelled for a prorated refund within 7 days of purchase, so a licence bought for a summer hire can outlast the job.

Compare scope first and price second. Two quotes at the same per-user rate can cover very different work, so hold both against the same short list.

1. Are the sites covered? Or only the office.
2. Who supports the project platform? Adding users, mobile access and calls to the vendor.
3. How are phones and tablets managed? And what happens when one is left on a site.
4. Are site visits included? If not, what does one cost?
5. How are backups proven? A scheduled test restore, or a green checkmark.
6. What does leaving cost? Notice periods, early-termination fees and handover terms.

Some providers discount longer terms. ACT360’s published rate doesn’t change with term length, and every Managed IT agreement includes a 90-day exit clause. Our page on managed IT with no long-term contract explains how it works, and our guide to what it costs to switch IT providers covers the rest of the calculation.