SOC 2 Cost and Budget
What does a SOC 2 audit actually cost?
What does a SOC 2 audit cost?
Two numbers matter, and most published answers quote only one.
Cash out of pocket is what you write checks for: the auditor, the platform, tooling, a consultant if you hire one. For the cheapest credible path this starts around $11,000.
Loaded cost adds the engineering time the work consumes, priced at $150/hr. That time comes out of your roadmap and it is the largest single line for most small teams. The same $11,000 path is $33,500 loaded.
The other thing to understand: the auditor and the preparation are two different bills. The auditor is a licensed CPA firm that issues the report. Everything else, policies, evidence collection, the control matrix, remediation, is preparation you either buy software plus a consultant for, or have an agent do.
Cost breakdown by path
Type I, Security TSC only, penetration test deferred.
| Path | Platform | Consulting | Auditor | Engineering time | Cash | Loaded |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DIY with a GRC platform | $5,000–$20,000 | $0 | $5,000–$20,000 | 150–250 hrs ($22,500–$37,500) | $10,000–$40,000 | $32,500–$77,500 |
| Platform + consultant or vCISO | $5,000–$20,000 | $24,000–$60,000 | $5,000–$20,000 | 60–100 hrs ($9,000–$15,000) | $34,000–$100,000 | $43,000–$115,000 |
| AI agent (Screenata) | $5,988/year ($499/mo) | $0 | $5,000–$20,000 | 10–20 hrs ($1,500–$3,000) | $10,988–$25,988 | $12,500–$29,000 |
The auditor fee is identical in all three rows. Screenata does not bundle the audit and does not take referral fees from audit firms, so nothing in this comparison depends on discounting the one line item you cannot skip. What an agent compresses is the middle: the platform, the consultant, and the engineering hours.
Why quotes range from $3,000 to $200,000
Seven real quotes from the 2026 market, all for a small B2B SaaS company:
| Quote | What it covered | Source |
|---|---|---|
| $3,000 Type I / $5,000 Type II | Standalone SOC 2, Security only | An AICPA peer-reviewed firm with thousands of active audit customers, quoted on a call in September 2026 |
| ~$3,000 | SOC 2 covering Security and Availability | A low-cost GRC bundler's partner firm, reported by the boutique auditor the client later moved to |
| $5,000 Type I / $7,000 Type II | Standalone SOC 2, Security only, "for startups using a compliance platform" | A boutique CPA firm's written rate card, emailed in September 2026 |
| ~$6,000 | SOC 2 Type II plus two penetration tests plus the audit, all in | An AI compliance vendor's bundle, quoted to a channel partner |
| $8,000 Type II | Standalone SOC 2, their lowest tier; 25 to 50 employees adds only $1,000-$2,000 | A boutique CPA firm with published peer review results, quoted on a call in September 2026 |
| $12,000–$13,000 | SOC 2 Type II, Security only, first-time client already on a GRC tool | A US regional boutique CPA firm, quoted on a call in August 2026 |
| $30,000–$80,000 | SOC 2 from a specialized assurance firm | Published range for firms like Schellman, A-LIGN, Coalfire, BARR |
Two things to notice. The same ~$3,000 figure appears as both a peer-reviewed firm's standalone Type I and a bundler's partner-firm report, so the price alone cannot tell you which product you are buying. And the same Type II report spans $5,000 to $13,000 across four reputable boutiques — a 2.6x spread with no public price sheet that would let you see it. Collect three quotes.
These quotes sit at the aggressive end of the market, so budget with a buffer rather than anchoring on the lowest number. The independent directory SOC2Auditors.org, which tracks pricing estimates across roughly 190 audit firms, models the small-team specialist scenario (under 50 employees, Security only, controls ready) at $5,000–$7,000 for a Type 1 and $7,000–$10,000 for a Type 2 — refreshed August 2026. A realistic planning band is $5,000–$10,000 for a Type I and $7,000–$15,000 for a Type II at a startup-focused firm.
A SOC 2 opinion is backed by billable hours from licensed CPAs: planning, walkthroughs, control testing, sampling, and partner review before signature. A $3,000 fee can be legitimate at a high-volume firm auditing hundreds of platform-prepared startups against standardized evidence. At a firm that cannot explain its efficiency, something shrank — usually sample sizes, the number of controls tested, or how much a partner reads before signing. There is a floor: one peer-reviewed firm told us it prices Type II work at no less than $5,000 and turned down high-volume Type II work at $2,000 per report from a platform that later collapsed publicly.
The expensive failure is a report your buyer declines to accept, discovered inside their procurement process about three months into a deal cycle. You then pay a second firm to redo it. None of this means small is bad, and a clean opinion from a peer-reviewed boutique carries the same weight with most buyers as one from a large firm. The question to ask about a cheap quote is what makes the price possible, and whether the firm's peer review results are published. For the full version of this analysis see the bootstrapped founder's guide to SOC 2.
SOC 2 Type 1 vs Type 2 cost
This is the most common cost question, and the two are priced differently because they test different things.
- Type I attests that your controls are designed correctly at a single point in time. Plan on $5,000–$10,000 at a startup-focused firm (up to $20,000 elsewhere); September 2026 quotes from peer-reviewed firms ran as low as $3,000, but treat that as an outlier, not the budget. It's faster and cheaper because the auditor reviews design, not operation over time.
- Type II attests that those controls operated effectively over a period, usually 3 to 12 months. Plan on $7,000–$15,000 at a startup-focused firm (up to $25,000 elsewhere), because the auditor samples evidence across the entire observation window, not a single day. Sourced boutique quotes for this scope in August–September 2026: $5,000, $7,000, $8,000, and $12,000–$13,000 — and SOC2Auditors.org's small-team specialist model puts it at $7,000–$10,000 (their estimate, refreshed August 2026).
Most companies get a Type I first to unblock a deal, then a Type II over the following months. The observation window is where continuous evidence collection matters most: the auditor will sample any date in the period, so evidence has to exist for the whole window, not just at fieldwork. That's the operational work an agent handles on a schedule so you're not reconstructing months of screenshots at the end.
What drives the auditor fee
Auditor pricing depends on:
- Scope — more Trust Services Criteria (adding Availability, Confidentiality, Processing Integrity, or Privacy to Security) means a higher fee.
- Company size — more employees and systems means more testing.
- Audit type — Type II costs more than Type I.
- Firm size — Big 4 firms charge 3–5× what startup-friendly firms charge for the same report.
- Readiness — if your evidence is organized before fieldwork, the engagement is faster and cheaper.
- Whether the audit is bundled with your platform — an unusually low fee usually means the platform introduced the firm and folded the fee into your subscription. That is legal and common, and it is also the thing enterprise reviewers ask about, because the firm attesting to your controls is being paid alongside the vendor whose tooling produced your evidence.
- Peer review posture — any US firm issuing SOC 2 reports should be enrolled in the AICPA Peer Review Program, and you can check that on the AICPA Public Firm File in about a minute. Enrollment is not the same as a completed review, which has three ratings — pass, pass with deficiencies, or fail — and firms choose whether to publish their result. A firm that passed has no reason not to publish, so check three things: enrolled, completed, and published. Treat hesitation as an answer.
Hidden costs people forget to budget
The sticker price is the audit fee. The real budget includes:
- Penetration test — the price depends on the delivery model. A human engagement is $3,000–$5,000 for a credentialed web app test, up to $50,000 for larger scopes, over several weeks. A pentester-validated AI test runs about $850–$1,500 and increasingly clears a SOC 2 audit. Raw autonomous scanner output ($249–$799/month rate cards) sold as a pen test gets reclassified as a vulnerability scan during the audit. Not strictly required by SOC 2, but most auditors and enterprise buyers expect one; check which model your buyers expect.
- Readiness / gap assessment — finding the gaps before the auditor does.
- Security-awareness training and background checks — small per-head costs that recur.
- Engineering time — the largest hidden cost and the one your prep path actually changes: 150–250 hours DIY, 60–100 hours with a consultant, 10–20 hours with an agent. At $150/hr that is a $1,500 to $37,500 swing, bigger than the audit fee itself.
- Annual renewal — SOC 2 is not one-and-done. Type II renews on a recurring window, so continuous evidence collection is a yearly cost, not a one-time one. This is where an agent that runs the program compounds its savings.
ISO 27001 and HIPAA cost, briefly
If you're weighing frameworks:
- ISO 27001 certification runs about $15,000–$40,000 for a small company, because it adds a two-stage external audit (Stage 1 documentation review, Stage 2 certification audit) by an accredited certification body, plus surveillance audits in following years.
- HIPAA has no certifying audit, so there's no auditor fee. The cost is the readiness work, a risk analysis, policies, a Business Associate Agreement program, and ongoing evidence. That makes HIPAA cheap to "start" and easy to under-invest in.
The lever that makes multi-framework affordable is shared evidence: SOC 2, ISO 27001, and HIPAA overlap heavily, so one well-collected evidence set can satisfy controls across all three. Screenata maps a single evidence set across frameworks instead of collecting three times. See Screenata vs Vanta and the full comparison hub for how platforms differ on multi-framework pricing.
How to minimize cost
- Scope to Security-only Trust Services Criteria for your first report.
- Use a startup-friendly audit firm, not Big 4.
- Replace the GRC platform + consultant with an AI agent that writes policies and collects evidence.
- Prepare evidence before fieldwork so the engagement is short.
- Keep your system boundary small.
Screenata reduces the preparation cost to $5,988/year ($499/mo) per framework by replacing both the GRC platform and the compliance consultant, and by collecting evidence continuously so nothing is reconstructed at the end. That leaves the auditor fee, and the pentest, as your main expenses. See what's included.