How Much Does Cyber Essentials Certification Cost?

The fee is not the budget

Every Cyber Essentials pricing conversation should start with this distinction: the certification fee is fixed and small; the remediation is variable and usually bigger. The IASME assessment fee for basic certification tiers by organisation size — from around £300+VAT for micro organisations (1–9 employees) up to around £500+VAT for large ones (2026 fees, set by IASME) — and includes cyber liability insurance for eligible UK organisations with under £20 million turnover. Cyber Essentials Plus adds an independent audit priced by the certification body performing it, typically from around £1,500+VAT.

Where first-year budgets actually go

For a typical SME, the spend that matters is closing the gap between current practice and the five controls: retiring end-of-support software (often the expensive one — licence upgrades or replacements), rolling out MFA properly, separating admin accounts, and getting patching onto a managed cadence. A business already running disciplined managed IT may spend nothing beyond the fee; one with years of drift can spend several times the fee putting the basics right. That's not a scheme problem — it's the scheme doing its job.

How to spend less on this

Two moves. First, gap-analyse before you apply — knowing exactly what will fail turns remediation into a planned project instead of an audit-day surprise, and at the Plus tier it avoids paying for a re-test. Second, make the controls somebody's day job: the five controls are precisely what a managed security service runs continuously — managed cybersecurity covers endpoint protection, patching and access control as operations, which makes annual recertification an evidence-gathering exercise rather than a scramble. AMVIA holds Cyber Essentials Plus ourselves; we prepare clients the same way we passed it. Start with what Cyber Essentials involves or talk to the team about a readiness assessment.

What does AMVIA’s Cyber Essentials service cost? £250/month, all-in

AMVIA sells Cyber Essentials as a monthly service rather than a one-off project, because certification isn’t a one-off: the certificate renews every 12 months, and the controls drift unless someone owns them. Cyber Essentials is £250 + VAT per month, all-in for standard scope: gap analysis, the remediation work itself, questionnaire submission (official assessment fees included), and annual re-certification — with initial certification typically inside 30–45 days. Cyber Essentials Plus is £400 + VAT per month, adding the independent technical audit with evidence collected by our attack-surface tooling — typically 45–60 days to initial certification. Larger or more complex organisations are tiered from those floors, quoted before you commit. The service is delivered in partnership with an IASME-accredited certification body.

Why monthly beats a project quote, honestly: a one-off certification engagement leaves you owning the drift — twelve months later the renewal is a project again. The monthly service keeps the five controls continuously in the state the assessment expects, so year two’s certification is a formality instead of a scramble, and the evidence trail insurers and supply chains ask for stays current all year. It’s also why most of our certification customers broaden into managed detection and response, Microsoft 365 security management and vulnerability management — the controls are already being run; extending them is the natural next step. To size your own gaps before talking to anyone, the free readiness assessment shows which of the five themes need work.

Whoever you certify with, verify the certificate afterwards: any supplier’s certification — including ours — can be checked against the official register with our Cyber Essentials certificate checker.