What Does SOC 2 Cost? A Breakdown of Audit and Readiness Expenses

Budget the full project, not just the report

The external examination fee is only one part of SOC 2 cost. Your business may also need staff time, specialist support, system changes, evidence administration and ongoing control operation. A cheap headline quote can therefore coexist with substantial total effort.

Schellman's own pricing explanation identifies scope and timing as important cost drivers and describes obtaining details through a scoping exercise.¹ That is useful primary-provider evidence about how quotes are formed, not an independent market survey or a price that applies to every firm.

This article does not assert an unsupported industry price range. It gives you a practical budget method and a fictional calculation you can replace with actual quotes and internal estimates.

Establish what you are buying

SOC 2 is a CPA examination and reporting service.² Confirm the proposed system, categories, report type, date or period and deliverables in the engagement terms. Readiness support and the examination are distinct services; a subscription to a platform does not automatically include a CPA report.

Type 1 and Type 2 have different evidence and reporting boundaries.³ Do not compare their fees as if they were identical products. Likewise, quotes covering different environments, service commitments or categories are not directly comparable.

Ask who performs the professional work, which entity signs the engagement and how independence and applicable quality requirements are addressed. A sales package that names several partners should still make responsibilities clear.

The five budget buckets

1. External examination

Obtain a written fee for the agreed scope and output. Ask what is included in planning, fieldwork, communication and reporting. Clarify whether additional work, expanded scope, delays, travel or reassessment have separate fees.

Record assumptions beside the price. A quote may assume that management has already implemented controls and can supply complete evidence. If that assumption is false, the project plan and fee may change.

2. Internal preparation and coordination

Estimate time for the business sponsor, technical owners, people operations, finance and whoever manages evidence. Include scoping, policy decisions, process documentation, control operation and responses to examination requests.

Do not count only the project coordinator. A short request may require several teams to find records, explain scope and verify a population. Track those dependencies early so the budget does not hide their time.

3. Remediation and technical change

Use a readiness checklist to identify work before estimating its cost. List gaps that require actual changes: access processes, recovery capability, monitoring, supplier reviews or another scoped issue. Estimate implementation and verification separately. A configuration change may be quick while proving the process operates takes longer.

Keep unresolved estimates visible. An unknown recovery gap should be a budget uncertainty with an owner, rather than a zero-cost line item.

4. Tools and specialist advice

Tools may help manage records or collect evidence, but evaluate their recurring price, permitted access, export options and the work still done manually. Do not assume every integration is needed or safe for your environment.

Specialist advice may be useful for scoping, legal commitments, security testing or a difficult control gap. Clarify the distinct output and avoid buying overlapping services without an explicit reason.

5. Continuing operation and subsequent cycles

Controls need owners after the first report. Budget ongoing reviews, evidence retention, incident exercises and future examinations. Changes to systems, suppliers or commitments may also require renewed scope discussions.

Ask providers about the next cycle, not just the initial fee. Compare total responsibility over a useful planning period, with renewal and scope assumptions stated explicitly.

A fictional internal-cost calculation

This example is invented solely to demonstrate arithmetic. The hours and rates are not market benchmarks, quotations or recommendations.

The calculation shows why an external fee alone is incomplete. Replace every row with your own expected work and finance-approved cost basis. Avoid mixing employee salary, contractor price and opportunity cost without explaining what each number means.

The full worksheet could be expressed as:

Total planned cost = scoped external fees + internal effort + remediation + tools and specialist work + ongoing operation.

Add a separate uncertainty provision based on identified risks, not an arbitrary claim that a particular percentage is always sufficient. Keep one-time and recurring amounts distinct, and confirm currency and tax treatment with the provider rather than guess.

Normalize two quotes before comparing them

Create one scoping brief and send it to appropriate firms through your approved purchasing process. The brief should include the service, environment, report need, proposed period, current readiness and known dependencies. Do not disclose sensitive data in an initial inquiry unnecessarily.

If the columns differ, reconcile the scope before choosing the lower amount. A low price for a different output is not evidence of savings.

Where businesses underestimate effort

Evidence is often fragmented across ticket systems, cloud consoles and personal files. A team may have controls but no complete occurrence list. Recovering that history can be harder than implementing a new checklist.

Another source of underestimation is overlapping deadlines. The same technical owner may be expected to remediate gaps, launch a product and respond to examination requests. Include that capacity constraint in the plan; buying software does not create staff availability.

Finally, a late scope change can invalidate assumptions. Adding a region, changing providers or promising a new service level may alter the work. Set a process for evaluating those changes before the team commits to them.

When to challenge a sales promise

Ask how a promised timetable accounts for the actual system, evidence and professional work. Be cautious about guaranteed outcomes or claims that the report is available merely after payment. The professional standards and evidence requirements remain relevant regardless of the package price.

Ask for deliverables, qualifications, exclusions and responsibilities in writing. Evaluate provider suitability and report usefulness as well as cost. A report that does not meet your customer's scoped need may create delay even if its fee looked attractive.

A useful next step

Build a one-page scope brief, inventory the largest gaps and estimate owner time. Then obtain comparable quotes and review the full budget with finance and technical leadership. The result should explain what is known, what is provisional and which decisions must happen before expenditure is approved.

Sources and references

1. Schellman. How Much Does an Audit Cost?. Primary audit-provider explanation of scoping and scheduling cost drivers; not an independent market-price benchmark. ↩

2. AICPA & CIMA. System and Organization Controls: SOC Suite of Services. Identifies the CPA SOC reporting services and directs readers to the applicable professional resources. ↩

3. AICPA. 2017 Trust Services Criteria, including March 2020 updates (2020-03). Public historical edition explains Type 1/Type 2 and readiness versus examination. Use the current 2022 revised-points-of-focus resource for an engagement. ↩