What SOC 2 really costs a startup in 2026

Just got asked for SOC 2 by your first enterprise prospect? Here is the number nobody puts in the quote.

For a 25-person B2B SaaS on AWS going for SOC 2 Type II, year one runs about 63,000 to 98,000 dollars. Not the auditor invoice. The whole project.

The breakdown

• Auditor (CPA firm): 12k to 30k dollars, the number you actually get quoted.
• Compliance automation tooling: about 11k dollars a year.
• Independent pen test: 4k to 12k dollars.
• Your own team's hours: about 36k dollars.

The line founders miss

Around 405 hours of policy writing, wiring up logging, chasing vendor security docs and assembling evidence. At a blended 90 dollars an hour it is the single biggest cost, bigger than the auditor, and it pulls engineers off the roadmap for roughly 30 weeks.

How fast you can actually get one

The other number missing from the quote is time. A SOC 2 Type II report covers a window of operating controls, and that window has a floor: auditors will not observe less than 3 months, and 6 months is the more common ask. The window only starts once your controls are in place, and getting them in place is the 405 hours above, which run for weeks before the clock even starts.

So a fresh Type II for the prospect who just asked is realistically months out, not weeks. If the deal cannot wait, a SOC 2 Type I, a point-in-time snapshot that your controls exist and are designed correctly, can be produced faster and is often accepted as a bridge while the Type II window runs. A short bridge letter then covers the gap between the two reports.

What year two and beyond cost

The year-one number is not the running cost. A SOC 2 Type II is not a certificate you earn once; it is an attestation report covering a fresh observation window, so you commission a new one every year to keep an in-date report in front of buyers. That means most of the lines above recur: the compliance tooling at about 11k dollars a year, the auditor fee each cycle, and, for many programs, an annual penetration test. The one big line that largely does not repeat is the roughly 36k dollars of first-year setup, the policy writing, logging and evidence plumbing you build once. In later years that shrinks to lighter maintenance: keeping evidence flowing, refreshing policies and running the vendor reviews.

So year two and beyond typically land well below year one, commonly reported at about 40 to 60 percent lower, often somewhere in the low-to-mid tens of thousands of dollars a year depending on how much tooling you keep and whether the pen test is annual. The practical takeaway is to budget SOC 2 as a recurring line, not a one-off project: the buyer who asked for it will want a current report again next year, and a lapsed one reopens the same questions.

SOC 2 or ISO 27001, and what the other one costs

The same estimator covers ISO 27001 because plenty of teams get asked for that instead. Which one you need is usually decided by the customer in front of you: North American buyers tend to ask for SOC 2, while ISO 27001 is the more widely recognised standard with European and international buyers. If nobody has specified, ask before you spend, because the two are not interchangeable deliverables.

The all-in cost sits in the same range, but the shape differs. SOC 2 is an attestation report you refresh every year. ISO 27001 is a certificate valid for three years, earned through a two-stage initial audit and then kept alive by a lighter surveillance audit in years two and three, with a recertification at the end of the cycle. First-year ISO 27001 for a small company tends to land broadly where SOC 2 does, often a little higher, because the two-stage audit plus a required management system (the ISMS, with its own mandatory internal audit and management review) add work. The trade is cheaper renewals: a surveillance audit costs less than commissioning a fresh SOC 2 report every year.

If you might eventually need both, the overlap works in your favour. The two frameworks share most of their underlying controls, so the evidence you assemble for one does most of the work for the other, and automation tooling that pulls that evidence covers both frameworks rather than doubling the bill.