What to charge for website maintenance

What should you charge for website maintenance?

Published UK care plans run from about £20 a month for updates and backups to £550 or more for ecommerce. Set your own price from the time each tier really takes, your target hourly rate and your tooling costs, then check it against those ranges. Price the attention, not the hosting.

Last reviewed 7 October 2026

Search for website maintenance pricing and you will find page after page written for the business buying it. Useful if you are a client. Useless if you are the one who has to put a number on the work by Friday.

This is the other side of it: how to build a maintenance price from your own costs, where the published UK ranges actually sit, and what to do about the clients you already underpriced.

The published UK ranges, so you know the shape of the market

Start here, but do not finish here. These are the ranges UK agencies and studios publish on their own pricing pages. They tell you what a client has probably already seen before they speak to you, which is worth knowing before you say a number.

Published monthly website maintenance ranges, UK, as at October 2026

Tier	Published monthly range	What it usually buys
Basic maintenance	£20 to £75	Updates, backups, monitoring. Effectively no time for changes.
SME care plan	£75 to £200	The above plus a small, named amount of time for edits and support.
Ecommerce or premium	£200 to £550	More time, quicker response, and the larger surface area a shop brings.
Growth retainer	£700 and up	Marketing delivery. A different product that happens to include upkeep.

Two details change every comparison. Most published plans exclude hosting and bill it separately, and most agency prices are quoted excluding VAT. A £95 plan excluding VAT with hosting on top is not competing with a £95 plan that includes both.

Where these figures come from

Published ranges from UK agencies and studios, read at the date shown at the top of this page. They are market context, not our prices, and not a quote. We price each job on its scope.

How do you work out the number from your own costs?

Price from the bottom up once, properly, and you will never have to guess again. There are only four inputs, and three of them you already know.

Add the time each tier genuinely takes in a month, multiply by the rate you need to earn, add the tools you pay for per site, then add a margin for the months that go wrong. That is your floor. The market ranges above tell you whether your floor is sellable.

Servicing time — be honest. Fifteen minutes of updates plus the email about the update is forty minutes, not fifteen.
Your target rate — what you need per hour across a realistic billable week, not your dream day rate.
Per-site tooling — hosting, backups, uptime monitoring, any licence you pay for on their behalf.
A margin for variance — one bad month a year, where something breaks and you fix it inside the plan.

Where this goes wrong: Pricing from the time the work takes when everything goes right. The plan has to be profitable in the month the host has an outage and the client rings twice, because that is the month that decides whether you resent the plan.

Should hosting be inside the plan or billed separately?

Both work. What matters is that you pick one and that your document says which, because this is the single most common source of a confused client comparing you to somebody cheaper.

Including it is simpler to sell and simpler to explain, and on a modern static build it costs you very little. Separating it makes you look cheaper in a list and gives the client an itemised cost they can question. If you include it, say so loudly, because most of the market does not.

Included — one number, nothing for the client to arrange, and you keep control of where the site lives.
Separate — a lower headline price, an extra line on the invoice, and a conversation every renewal.

Where this goes wrong: Including hosting but never saying so. You pay for it, the client assumes it is extra, and your plan looks more expensive than one that is actually dearer.

What do you do about clients you have already underpriced?

Almost everyone has two or three. The instinct is to leave them alone and resent them. The better move is a single, dated, unapologetic change, applied to everyone at once rather than quietly to the ones you like least.

Give plenty of notice, say what the new price is and when it starts, and say what has changed on your side. Do not apologise, do not explain your costs at length, and do not offer a discount in the same email. Some will leave. The ones who leave over a maintenance increase were usually the ones generating the support.

Pick a date at least a full billing cycle out, ideally two.
Tell everyone the same thing on the same day. One price change, not a negotiation per client.
State the new price and the date in the first two lines. Reasons after, briefly.
Say what they get that they did not before, if anything genuinely has changed.
Hold the number. A price you discount the first time it is questioned is not a price.

Where this goes wrong: Grandfathering forever. A rate you set three years ago is a rate you are subsidising now, and the longer it runs the harder the conversation gets.

How do you stop a care plan turning into unpaid work?

By writing down what is outside it before you need to point at the writing. The out-of-scope list is the whole defence, and it only works if the client saw it before they signed rather than when they asked.

Then hold it kindly. Most scope creep is not a client trying it on, it is a client who does not know where the edge is. "That one is a project rather than a plan job, I will send you a fixed price for it" is a complete and friendly sentence, and it works nearly every time.

Name new pages, new features and redesigns as out of scope, explicitly.
Name content writing. It is the most common thing assumed to be included.
Name third-party costs, and pass them through rather than absorbing them.
If you do not offer out-of-hours cover, say that too.

Where this goes wrong: Doing the first out-of-scope job for free to be helpful. That job sets the boundary, and you have just set it somewhere expensive.

Does a maintenance plan need a minimum term?

Usually not. A twelve-month tie-in almost never keeps a client who has decided to go, and it is one of the most common reasons a careful client declines in the first place. Rolling monthly with a stated notice period removes the objection entirely.

If you do need commitment — because you are front-loading real work in month one — be specific about why, and price the first month to cover it rather than locking in the eleven that follow.

The document version

Once you have your numbers, you need the document that puts them in front of a client. The care plan template has the tiers, the out-of-scope list and the commercial mechanics already written, with the prices left blank.

Get the care plan template

What this does not cover

This is not advice on your VAT position. Whether you add VAT, and whether you quote inclusive or exclusive, depends on your own registration. Get that right before you publish a price.
No figure here is a forecast. We are not telling you what you will earn, how many plans you will sell, or how quickly. The arithmetic is yours and your market is not ours.
It does not cover employment or capacity planning. A plan promising a response time you cannot staff is a problem a price cannot fix.
It does not cover hosting reseller economics or infrastructure cost at scale. That is a different calculation once you are past a handful of sites.

Nobody has taken an HDC Academy course yet, so there are no student numbers, reviews or results on this page. What is here is the process we use on client work, written out.

Next, from the same library

Website care plan template

The retainer document that turns "we should probably look after it" into a priced, monthly offer the client can say yes to.

Read

How to price a website project

Scope it, estimate it privately, quote one fixed number, and protect that number with a change process. The method, not a rate card.

Read

Where this fits

These documents come out of the library HDC Academy is built from: the standards, checklists and templates we deliver client work to. The Academy is in development and the courses will teach the whole system, not just the paperwork.

See what HDC Academy is

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Questions people ask about this

How much should I charge for website maintenance in the UK?

Published UK plans sit between roughly £20 and £550 a month depending on what is included, with marketing retainers above that as a separate product. Build your own number from the servicing time, your target rate and your per-site tooling, then check it against those ranges rather than copying them.

Is website maintenance usually quoted with or without VAT?

Most UK agency pricing pages quote excluding VAT, and most exclude hosting as well. Both matter when a client compares you to somebody else, so state clearly which yours is. Your own VAT treatment depends on whether you are registered.

How do I raise prices on an existing maintenance client?

One dated increase, announced to everyone at once, at least a full billing cycle ahead. Lead with the new price and the date, keep the reasons short, and do not offer a discount in the same message. Expect to lose a small number, usually the highest-support ones.

Should I include hosting in a website care plan?

Either is defensible, but pick one and say which. Including it is simpler and on a modern build costs you little; separating it gives a lower headline price and an extra conversation each year. The failure case is including it silently, which makes your plan look dearer than it is.

What is the difference between a care plan and a marketing retainer?

A care plan keeps the site working and makes small improvements. A marketing retainer is delivery work — search, content, campaigns — that happens to need the site to be healthy. They are different products at different prices, and selling one as the other is where most disappointment comes from.

This is one page out of the library

HDC Academy teaches the whole system it comes from. It is in development, there is nothing to buy yet, and people who register hear first.

See HDC Academy