How much does SOC 2 cost in 2026?

There is another route, and it does not produce a weaker report. You do the preparation on a platform built for small teams, and the examination comes inside the same printed price instead of on a second contract. This page prices both routes line by line so you can choose. If the auditor half is the part you care about, what a SOC 2 auditor charges covers it on its own.

Route one: a platform, then an auditor

This is the path the large platforms sell. You sign a yearly software contract. A CPA firm is then engaged for the audit. Each has its own invoice, its own negotiation and its own renewal date, and neither number appears on a price page. For a two person startup that is a lot of procurement before a single control is fixed.

The software contract

The subscription is where the sales process lives. We opened each vendor’s pricing page and read it on the date shown:

• Vanta lists four plans on its pricing page and no dollar figure. The call to action is to request personalized pricing. Source, checked 2026-10-02.
• Secureframe lists its Fundamentals plan as starting at $7,500 a year and shows no dollar figure for its other two plans, Complete and Defense. Every plan links to a quote request. Source, checked 2026-09-28.
• Drata lists its plans, Foundation, Advanced and Enterprise, on a plans page with no dollar figure, and each plan button leads to a demo request or a contact-sales form. Source, checked 2026-10-02.
• Suralink publishes no price, stating that every company and team has different needs and inviting prospects to reach out. Source, checked 2026-10-02.

That is why the Vendr medians at the top matter. They come from real purchases rather than list prices. Your own quote may land above or below them. Seats, frameworks and how hard you negotiate all move it. Vanta and Drata do print 12-month software prices on their own AWS Marketplace listings, which Vanta pricing and Drata pricing work through with the audit fee added. The vendor by vendor version is in the Vanta alternative and Drata alternative comparisons, and SOC 2 software that publishes its pricing lists every platform that prints a number.

The audit fee on top

The examination is priced by the firm, one engagement at a time. Here is what vendors and one CPA firm publish about that second bill:

• Drata estimates the audit fee for a SOC 2 Type 1 at $7,500 to $15,000 and for a Type 2 at $12,000 to $20,000 for small to midsize companies, and puts the total first-year cost at $25,000 for a small startup. Source, checked 2026-10-02.
• Vanta states that a SOC 2 audit fee usually runs between $10,000 and $50,000, and that the all-in cost of a first SOC 2 lands somewhere between $10,000 and $80,000 or more. Source, checked 2026-10-02.
• Linford and Company, a CPA firm performing SOC 2 examinations, puts the range at $20,000 to $150,000 with a median around $30,000. Source, checked 2026-10-02.
• LowerPlane publishes three annual plans, Starter at $4,995, Growth at $9,995 and Scale at $15,995 a year, and states that auditor fees are separate and paid directly to your chosen auditor, with no auditor figure given. Source, checked 2026-09-28.

Read the shape of each figure, not only the size. Some are an audit fee alone. One is a full first year. LowerPlane is one of the few platforms that prints its own price, and even there the auditor is paid on a separate invoice.

A consultant, if you hire one

Some teams add a consultant or a fractional CISO to write policies and prepare evidence. That is a third bill:

• Comp AI states that a vCISO or compliance consultant might charge $150 to $400 an hour, which can total $20,000 to $50,000 for a full SOC 2 prep engagement. Source, checked 2026-07-30.

It buys the hours of someone who knows the criteria. It does not buy the report. The auditor still comes after, and still sends an invoice.

What each published figure covers

Most of the disagreement goes away once you ask what each number pays for. Read across first, then compare.

How much SOC 2 costs for a 10-person startup

No vendor we checked prints a figure for exactly ten people. The nearest published total, software and audit together, is a scenario for a company two and a half times that size:

• Drata gives a scenario for a startup of 25 employees with a total cost of about $28,000, covering a boutique audit, a compliance platform and a penetration test. Source, checked 2026-10-02.

Software-only prices get closer on headcount. Vanta’s own AWS Marketplace listing prices its Essentials package for 1 to 20 employees, with the audit on top, and Vanta pricing adds the two together.

Headcount moves the work more than the price. Ten people means fewer accounts to review, fewer laptops to manage and fewer vendors to assess, but the criteria are the same ones a large company answers. SOC 2 for a small team covers the controls that change at that size. Our price does not move with headcount at all, so the totals below apply to a company of two or of fifty.

What SOC 2 Type 1 cost depends on

A Type 1 is the smaller of the two reports. The auditor checks that your controls are designed properly as of one date. Nothing is sampled across months, and sampling is where Type 2 hours go. Fewer hours, smaller fee. In Drata’s published estimate above, the Type 1 range sits below the Type 2 range for exactly that reason.

Three things move a Type 1 fee more than headcount does. None of them is how good your security already is.

• Scope. Security is the only required criterion. Availability, Confidentiality, Processing Integrity and Privacy are optional,³ and each one you add is more testing to pay for.
• Evidence state. Evidence that is dated, named and mapped to a control tests in minutes. A folder of loose screenshots takes hours.
• Response speed. Every request the auditor has to send twice is time on the clock.

A team under twenty people, with one product and one cloud, can keep all three small. Our guide to what Type 1 requires of a small SaaS goes through the scoping choices one at a time.

Route two: one printed price on cybersoftware

The other route puts the preparation in your hands and the examination inside the price. You answer the questionnaire, close the gaps, connect your tools and collect evidence on a full compliance platform. The first year is $9,200 all in: $2,000 onboarding plus twelve months at $600 a month, with the first Type 2 audit by an independent licensed U.S. CPA firm inside the term. The platform fee and the auditor fee arrive as one number, which nothing above offers.

The assessment costs nothing and takes about 15 minutes. It shows your score and every gap before you pay for anything. The auditor fee sits inside the Type 1 figure rather than arriving later on its own invoice, and that is the line most quotes leave out.

The table stops where our pricing stops. Audits after the one inside the term are arranged on request: our team negotiates with independent audit firms on your behalf, and the engagement is quoted before it begins. A printed rate would be a guess at another firm’s fee.

Your first year on each route

On route two, year one is one entry payment, whichever you pick, and nobody pays both. If a customer also needs Type 2, twelve months of the subscription sits on top and the first Type 2 audit comes with it. That gives two honest first years:

The only difference between the two first years is the Type 1 examination, auditor fee included. Neither total is waiting on an auditor invoice, because the Type 1 fee sits in the entry and the first Type 2 audit sits in the term. Route one has no matching total, because the examination stays a separate contract on top of a quote nobody prints. Both totals use the monthly schedule. Pay the term up front and you pay the first 12 months up front and save $600, so either first year lands $600 lower. The SOC 2 cost calculator runs the arithmetic for your path and shows every line.

Why the lower price holds up

A careful reader stops here. Published auditor fees run higher than our $4,000 Type 1 entry, which is onboarding and the examination together. Drata’s own Type 1 audit fee range starts above that whole entry. So something must be missing. People who do this work make that case in public, and it is worth reading in their words:

• One published practitioner breakdown puts a Security-only Type 2 at 60 to 80 auditor hours, at partner rates of $250 to $350 per hour and staff rates of $100 to $175, giving a stated floor near $9,000. Source, checked 2026-07-30.
• Linford and Company warns buyers to be careful when a compliance tool has a partner audit firm with a set fee far below other bids, citing a case where one firm issued the same form report to every client with only the names changed. Source, checked 2026-10-02.

Both points deserve a straight answer. The hour count above describes a Type 2, which tests a period. A Type 1 tests design at a single date, so it starts with fewer hours. On a small engagement a large share of the rest can go to chasing evidence: a request, the wrong screenshot, a second request, a week of silence. Evidence that arrives mapped and dated cuts those round trips, and the hours billed fall with them.

The second point is the real risk. A report copied from a template with the names changed is worthless to your buyer at any price. So check the firm yourself. Ask for its name before you sign the engagement letter, then look it up in the state board register.⁴ Is a low-priced SOC 2 audit legitimate? has the full checklist.

What you can skip, and what you cannot

Keeping SOC 2 affordable is mostly about cutting spend that does not change the report. For a small team, four costs are optional. Each one can be added later if a buyer asks.

• A paid readiness engagement. Firms bill for a gap review. The free readiness assessment does the same first pass at no charge.
• A consultant. Optional if one person on the team can own the work for a few hours a week.
• Extra criteria. Scope Security alone unless a contract names more.
• A Type 2 before anyone asks for one. Start with a Type 1 and let the observation window run afterward.

The examination is the one thing you cannot skip. Software does not produce a SOC 2 report. A licensed CPA firm does, under the AICPA attestation standards,¹ and no platform may sign its own.² Plan for that part, and cut the rest.

Where to start

Start with the number no quote includes: how much work is left at your company. The free readiness assessment scores you and counts every gap in about fifteen minutes. Then see every price on the pricing page. If you want to know what the assessment looks at first, the readiness assessment guide walks through it. No card is needed to begin.