What Does Managed Threat Hunting Cost in 2026?

Almost nobody in this industry publishes pricing. You get "contact sales," a discovery call, a demo, and three weeks later a quote that seems to have come from a random number generator. We think that is a bad way to treat someone making a five-figure security decision, so here are the real numbers, including the ones that are not flattering to vendors.

One honest caveat: every environment is different, and anyone quoting a firm price before scoping your environment is guessing. What follows are the ranges and the factors that move you inside them.

The short answer

For a small to mid-size organization, managed threat hunting and MDR services generally run:

• Per-endpoint pricing: roughly $5 to $25 per endpoint per month across the market, depending on how much human attention is included
• Per-user pricing: roughly $10 to $40 per user per month where identity and email are in scope
• Monthly minimums: most serious providers have floors between $2,000 and $10,000 per month, because a 24/7 human operation has fixed costs no matter how small the customer

Our pricing for a 100-person firm, including everything, lands between $10 and $11 per user per month on a yearly contract.

What the money is protecting you from, with numbers

Price only makes sense against the threat volume it is buying coverage for. Our hunt desk tracked 2,522 ransomware claims in the first ten weeks of 2026, from 81 distinct groups, averaging more than 37 victims per day, up roughly 22% over the same period last year. Nine of those organizations were claimed by two or more separate groups, breached twice before they finished responding once.

The identity side is worse. Analysis we covered in our infostealer research found 1.17 million stealer logs containing both enterprise credentials and active session cookies, with Microsoft Entra ID appearing in 79% of enterprise identity logs. Those cookies carry the MFA claim. Your MFA does not protect you from a session that has already passed it.

And the downside case is public math: IBM's 2025 Cost of a Data Breach report puts the average U.S. breach north of $10 million, with detection and escalation as one of the largest line items. You are not pricing MDR against your software budget. You are pricing it against weeks of undetected dwell time and, for a defense contractor, against the contract itself.

What you are actually paying for

The pricing spread in this market tracks one variable more than any other: how much human analyst time is in the service.

Software-only detection is cheap to deliver. The tooling flags anomalies, you get the alerts, and what happens next is your problem. This is the bottom of the range, and it has a blind spot with a name on it: CISA's AR26-113a documented the FIRESTARTER firewall backdoor persisting through patches while generating no log events at all. Tooling cannot alert on what is never logged. Finding that class of intrusion takes a human reconciling flow records against authentication logs, which is exactly the labor you are paying for or not paying for.

Alert triage services put a human between the tooling and your inbox. The question is whether that person investigates or just forwards the alert with a severity label.

Actual threat hunting means analysts form hypotheses about how an attacker would move through your environment and go look, on a schedule, whether or not an alert fired. This is the expensive part because it does not scale like software. It is also the part that finds the intruder using valid credentials who never trips an alert.

Response authority is the other driver. Microsoft has documented AiTM attackers replaying stolen sessions within five minutes of the phish. A service that can kill that session at 3 a.m. without waking you is priced differently from one that sends an email and wishes you luck, because it carries more skill, more liability, and more staffing.

When you compare quotes, you are not comparing prices. You are comparing how many trained humans look at your environment and what they are allowed to do when they find something.

The costs that do not appear on the quote

Onboarding. Sensor deployment, log integration, baseline tuning. Setup fees across the market run $2,000 to $15,000, or get folded into longer contracts. Ask which.

Log ingestion metering. Some models meter your log volume, so your bill grows as your logging matures. That quietly punishes you for doing security well. Ask what happens to the bill if your log volume doubles. We never charge for log ingestion, regardless of the amount of telemetry.

Response retainers. The gap between "we contain it" and "we handle it" can be a $30,000 surprise during the worst week of your year. Ask whether IR beyond containment is included, hourly, or a separate retainer.

Compliance evidence. If you are a defense contractor, ask whether assessor-ready CMMC reporting is included or an add-on. Rebuilding a year of monitoring evidence by hand costs more than the service did.

Cheap, expensive, and worth it

The cheapest offering in this market is a false sense of coverage, and it is overpriced at any number, because you are paying real dollars for a control you do not have. You find out what you bought during your first real incident, at the most expensive possible moment for the discovery.

The most expensive offerings bundle brand prestige and enterprise process you may not need at 80 or 200 employees.

Worth it sits in the middle: senior analysts, 24/7 coverage that is actually staffed, response authority, and evidence you can hand an assessor. That is what we built. Since 2007 our hunt teams have detected over 47,000 threats and prevented over 12,800 attacks, and every one was a human decision backed by our MILBERT platform, not an auto-generated ticket. Our detection work is public; judge it before you pay anyone anything.

How to pressure-test any quote, including ours

Ask the analyst-to-customer ratio. Ask what percentage of forwarded alerts turn out to be false positives. Ask the year-two price. Ask what leaves with you if you leave. Then ask for two references past their second renewal, and ask them what the first invoice surprise was.

We will answer all of the above on the first call, with numbers, before the demo.