What Does a SOC 2 Type 2 Report Cost?

The four buckets

Money leaves in four directions. Only one of them sends you an invoice with “SOC 2” written on it.

Bucket 1: the external auditor

A licensed CPA firm has to issue your report. This is the fee people mean when they ask what SOC 2 costs.

What you pay depends more on which firm you pick than on anything you do.

Three things move this number once you have picked a firm.

• How many criteria you take. Security is the one you cannot skip. Each extra category adds 15 to 30 percent to the fee, because the auditor tests more controls.
• How long your window runs. A 12-month window costs more than a 6-month one. The auditor samples across a wider period, which means more hours. This is the single biggest lever on a Type 2 fee.
• How much there is to look at. More systems, more people, more sites, more sampling. A 25-person team on one cloud app is a short audit. A 500-person company with four products is not.

Bucket 2: internal time

Nobody invoices you for this. That is why it goes missing from comparisons. In many projects it is the largest single cost.

A first SOC 2 consumes 150 to 500 hours of staff time. Scoping, writing policies, building controls, pulling evidence, answering auditor questions, sitting in walkthroughs.

Do the sums with your own loaded rate. Take 250 hours at a blended 90 dollars an hour. That is 22,500 dollars of work that never appears on a purchase order. Most of it lands on engineering, not on the compliance lead.

Bucket 3: consultants

Two separate spends live here, and people blur them.

A readiness assessment runs 5,000 to 20,000 dollars. Someone checks your controls against the criteria. You get a gap list before the auditor sees it. It pays for itself often enough that the market treats it as standard.

Remediation is whatever the gap list says you have to build. Anywhere from 5,000 to 50,000 dollars. It is the loosest line in the budget, because you cannot price it until you know what is missing.

That is the honest case for a readiness review. It does not make the audit cheaper. It turns your biggest unknown into a number you can plan against.

Bucket 4: tools

A compliance platform runs 3,600 to 45,000 dollars a year, depending on headcount and how many frameworks you run. It pulls evidence from your cloud, identity and ticketing systems. No more screenshots. It cuts audit prep time, and often the auditor’s hours with it.

A penetration test runs 4,000 to 30,000 dollars. And here is something worth knowing before you buy one.

“Management uses a variety of different types of ongoing and separate evaluations, including penetration testing, independent certifications…”

AICPA Trust Services Criteria, CC4.1Penetration testing appears as one option among several

Read that again. A pen test is one example of a monitoring activity, not a requirement. Nothing in the criteria mandates one. Auditors expect to see one, and enterprise buyers ask for it, so most teams do it. But if budget is tight and nobody has asked, this is a line you can question. Our guide to penetration testing methodologies covers what you get for the money.

Three worked examples

Same framework, three different companies, three very different totals.

Built from the published ranges above. Internal time is shown in hours rather than dollars, because your rate is not our rate. Add it to the cash line to get true cost.

Where the money goes that you did not plan for

Four lines catch teams out.

1. Criteria you did not need. Somebody adds Availability and Confidentiality because they sound prudent. That is 30 to 60 percent on the fee for controls no customer asked about. Take Security. Add more when a contract names it.
2. A window longer than required. Twelve months feels thorough. It costs more and delays the report by nine months. Pick three for the first one unless a buyer specified otherwise.
3. Evidence you did not collect. You cannot recreate records after the period closes. Miss them and you either narrow the report or run the window again. Both cost money.
4. Scope that grew mid-audit. Adding a system after fieldwork starts means a change order. Fix the boundary in writing before you sign.

Year two costs less

The first report is the expensive one. After that the curve bends.

“Staying with the same firm typically costs 60 to 80 percent of your first-year fee since the auditor can reuse prior-year workpapers.”

SOC2Auditors.orgFrom an analysis of 174 audit firms

The savings are real. They are not automatic. They depend on your controls still running and your evidence still collecting. Treat the first report as the end of the project and you rebuild from scratch next year. Then you pay close to full price again.

Budget SOC 2 as a subscription, not a purchase. Our piece on how long a SOC 2 Type 2 takes covers why the cycle never stops.

What this costs in Canada

Three things change north of the border, and none of them are the framework.

The figures are in US dollars

Almost every published SOC 2 price is USD, including all of the above. Convert before you budget. Canadian CPA firms often quote in Canadian dollars, so compare like with like and ask which currency a quote is in.

Your auditor does not have to be American. A Canadian CPA firm can issue your report, and CPA Canada publishes its own SOC 2 guide for practitioners. A Canadian report carries the same weight with US buyers.

SOC 2 alone may not finish the job

This is a budget problem more than a compliance one. SOC 2 has no data residency criterion, so the report says nothing about where your data sits. It also proves nothing about PIPEDA, PHIPA, Quebec Law 25 or OSFI B-13.

Selling to Canadian hospitals, banks or government? Expect to need more than SOC 2. Many teams end up running ISO 27001 alongside it. Budget for both from the start rather than discovering the second one in a security questionnaire.

The good news is that the controls overlap by a wide margin. Evidence you collect once serves both. The second framework costs far less than the first. That is the strongest argument for planning them together.

Is it worth it

Compare the spend to what it protects and to what it unlocks.

The average breach in Canada cost CA$7.11 million in 2026, a record (IBM). A first SOC 2 at the mid-market end of the range is about one percent of that.

The sharper argument is commercial. One report answers a hundred security questionnaire lines. If SOC 2 unblocks one enterprise contract, the arithmetic stops being interesting.

How to spend less without cutting corners

1. Scope to Security and a three-month window. The two biggest levers on the auditor’s fee, and both are free to pull.
2. Get three quotes, with written scope. Boutique specialists and Big Four differ by four times for the same work. Make sure all three quotes describe the same job.
3. Run readiness before the window opens. A gap found in month one is a fix. The same gap in month four is a hole in your evidence and a second window.
4. Automate evidence from day one. It cuts your internal hours and the auditor’s, which are buckets one and two.
5. Ask whether the pen test is required. The criteria list it as an option. Your buyer may still insist, and that is a fine reason. “We assumed” is not.
6. Keep the same auditor. Year two runs 60 to 80 percent of year one when they can reuse their workpapers.

Nank.ai delivers this as compliance as a service. A compliance manager runs the project with you, and our agentic AI compliance platform handles evidence collection and control monitoring. That attacks buckets two and four, which is where most of the waste sits. We publish our own pricing on request rather than in a blog post, because scope decides it.

Frequently asked questions

Key takeaways