The Real Cost of Penetration Testing in the UK in 2026

Pen testing (short for penetration testing) is one of those security line items everyone agrees is “important”… right up until they have to price it. Then the questions start:

Why does one quote come in at £3k and another at £18k for “the same” test?
Is a cheaper pen test better than nothing?
What does “CREST” actually change about cost and quality?
And what should budgets look like in 2026?

This 2026 update breaks down real-world penetration testing costs in the UK, what drives pricing up or down, and how to buy the right test (not just a report that ticks a box). I’m writing this from the perspective of someone who scopes, delivers, and reviews penetration tests, so I’ll focus on how the work actually happens and what you’re really paying for.

A penetration test is a controlled security assessment where testers attempt to identify and safely exploit weaknesses in systems, applications, or networks to demonstrate impact and prioritise remediation. The UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has specific guidance on commissioning and using penetration tests, including how to scope them and what good looks like.

What it isn’t: a vulnerability scan with a fancy PDF.

Automated scanning has a place—especially for hygiene and coverage—but a meaningful pen test involves human-led investigation, chaining issues, and validating risk. The difference shows up in three places:

False positives (and false confidence): scanners are noisy; humans validate.
Business logic and abuse cases: scanners don’t understand your workflows.
Attack chains: real incidents rarely come from a single, standalone issue.

In 2026, the market is full of “pen test” offerings that are mostly platform-led. That’s not automatically bad—but you need to understand what you’re buying.

Pen test pricing in the UK is commonly expressed as a day rate per tester, or as a fixed price derived from estimated effort.

A consistent view across UK market commentary is that thorough manual testing often sits roughly in the £1,000–£1,500 per tester per day range (with cheaper offerings often being lighter-touch or more automated, and higher costs reserved for specialist work).

You’ll also see wider “headline” ranges quoted for whole projects. For example, some UK providers position typical engagements for smaller organisations in the low thousands, with complex environments and higher-assurance work scaling upward significantly.

Typical UK ballparks (what buyers commonly pay)

These are practical planning ranges you can use in 2026 before scoping:

Small, well-scoped web app or external perimeter test (2–4 days): ~£3,000–£8,000
Medium engagement (5–10 days): ~£8,000–£18,000
Larger, multi-scope programme (10–20+ days): ~£18,000–£40,000+
Red team / simulated targeted attack (multi-week): £30,000–£100,000+ depending on objectives and realism

Those bands reflect how providers commonly frame costs (small tests in the £3k–£10k zone, and complex work climbing to £20k+).

Important: Two quotes can differ massively because “penetration testing” describes a category, not a single standard unit of work.

If you take only one thing from this article, take this: you are not paying for a document, you are paying for skilled time applied to a clearly defined risk problem.

Here are the core pricing drivers.

1) Scope: number of targets, features, and “unknowns”

Scope is the biggest lever. Examples:

One web app with a handful of roles, limited integrations, and a stable staging environment: predictable.
The same app plus APIs, SSO, third-party payment flows, admin consoles, and mobile clients: the days add up quickly.

Even within “web app testing”, the difference between brochureware and transactional multi-role with complex authorisation is night and day.

2) Depth: compliance check vs attack-led assessment

Two tests can have the same target list and still be different:

A compliance-driven test might focus on OWASP-style coverage and “prove we tested it”.
An attack-led test focuses on realistic compromise paths, privilege escalation, lateral movement, and business impact.

Attack-led work usually costs more because it’s less checklist-driven and more creative.

3) Assurance requirements: CREST, CHECK, and higher governance overhead

In the UK, buyers often ask for CREST pen testers (or a CREST-accredited provider) as a quality signal, especially where insurance, procurement, or public sector expectations exist.

Separately, the NCSC’s CHECK scheme is used for authorised penetration testing of certain public sector and CNI contexts, with defined standards and expectations.

More assurance typically means:

more rigorous scoping and rules of engagement,
tighter reporting requirements,
more senior testers,
potentially security clearance and additional governance steps,

…all of which can push the price upward.

4) Tester seniority and specialisms

A strong generalist can do a lot. But certain situations demand niche skill:

Complex cloud (AWS/Azure/GCP) identity and segmentation,
Thick-client / desktop app testing,
Mobile reverse engineering,
OT/ICS constraints,
Cryptographic review,
Adversary emulation / red team tradecraft.

Specialists cost more because the labour market is tighter and the delivery risk is higher.

5) Environment readiness: access, accounts, stability, and test data

Buyers unintentionally inflate their own costs when environments aren’t ready. Examples:

No working test accounts across roles,
Unstable staging environment,
Constant releases during the testing window,
Missing documentation for API endpoints,
Poor logging, making it hard to validate and reproduce.

Time spent “unsticking” access is still time.

6) Reporting quality (and whether remediation support is included)

A low-cost provider can produce a report that looks fine but is operationally weak:

Vague reproduction steps,
Generic remediation text,
Missing evidence,
Poor severity rationale,
No narrative explaining exploitability.

Higher-quality providers spend real time on:

Evidence capture,
Clean reproduction steps,
Context-specific remediation,
Prioritisation and risk translation.

Day-rate pricing

You pay £X per tester per day, based on estimated days.

Pros: transparent, flexible, good for variable scope.

Cons: can feel uncertain if the scope is loose.

Day rates discussed publicly by UK-focused providers often cluster around the low-to-mid thousands for thorough manual work (with warnings that very low day rates can signal shallow testing).

Fixed-price engagements

A fixed quote based on expected effort and defined deliverables.

Pros: budget certainty; easier procurement.

Cons: providers may narrow scope to protect margin; change requests can be painful.

A good fixed quote should spell out what happens if:

The target count changes,
Major new functionality appears,
Environments are unavailable,
Critical findings demand deeper validation.

Retainer / annual programme

An annual bank of days or scheduled quarterly tests across a roadmap (apps, APIs, infrastructure, cloud).

Pros: best value long-term; security becomes a process.

Cons: needs planning maturity and ownership.

PTaaS (Pen Testing as a Service)

Platform-led testing with a mix of automation and human effort, often via subscription. This is increasingly discussed as a trend as organisations want more continuous assessment models.

Pros: speed, collaboration, continuous workflow integration.

Cons: quality varies wildly; can be “scan-plus” if you’re not careful.

What does a “good” pen test include in 2026?

Regardless of pricing model, a credible penetration testing UK engagement should include:

Pre-engagement: scoping and rules of engagement

Clear in-scope targets and exclusions,
Test window and permitted hours,
Safe testing constraints,
Access method (VPN, jump box, IP allowlisting),
Data handling and evidence storage,
Incident process if something breaks.

NCSC guidance emphasises proper commissioning and use; scope and expectations matter.

Testing: manual verification and exploitation

Recon and mapping
Vulnerability discovery
Exploitation (where safe)
Privilege escalation / lateral movement (where in scope)
Impact demonstration aligned to business risk.

Reporting: actionable detail

Executive summary that a non-technical stakeholder can understand
Technical findings with clear reproduction steps
Evidence (screenshots/requests/log excerpts)
Prioritised remediation guidance
Severity rationale (not just “CVSS says so”).

Close-out: validation and support

Findings walkthrough
Q&A with engineers
Optional retest/verification to confirm fixes.

The hidden costs buyers forget to include

Pen testing isn’t just the supplier cost. In 2026, the real total cost often includes:

Internal time: access setup, test accounts, whitelisting, stakeholder coordination.
Remediation effort: fixing auth flaws, patching, redesigning flows, reconfiguring cloud policies.
Retesting: confirming fixes (especially for audit evidence).
Delivery disruption: if you schedule the test at peak release pressure.

If your organisation treats the pen test as a once-a-year “security theatre” event, remediation becomes a scramble. If you treat it as part of delivery, costs stabilise, and findings drop over time.

When buyers ask for CREST pen testers, they’re usually trying to reduce delivery risk: consistent methodology, baseline competence, and a provider that can stand up to scrutiny.

CREST alignment is also commonly used by providers as a marker of process and quality in penetration testing services.

That said, accreditation is not a magic wand. You still need to assess:

Who will actually be on the keyboard,
Whether they’ve tested systems like yours,
How good the reporting is,
How collaborative they are with engineering teams.

The best CREST-aligned teams combine standards with real-world pragmatism.

Below is a buyer-friendly view of how effort usually scales. (Exact numbers depend on scope.)

External network penetration testing (perimeter)

Typical effort: 2–5 days depending on IP range, exposed services, and complexity.

Cost driver: breadth of targets, cloud edge complexity, VPN/SSO edge cases.

Internal network penetration testing

Typical effort: 3–10+ days depending on network size, segmentation, AD complexity, and constraints.

Cost driver: whether you’re testing “flat network + AD” versus modern zero-trust-ish segmentation, identity hardening, and EDR maturity.

Web application penetration testing

Typical effort: 2–10+ days depending on roles, features, and integrations.

Some UK providers cite web app testing commonly priced in a day-rate band and varying by complexity.

API penetration testing

Typical effort: 2–8+ days depending on endpoint count, auth model, and data sensitivity.

Cost driver: authZ logic and object-level authorisation (the place attackers love).

Cloud configuration and cloud penetration testing

Typical effort: 3–10+ days depending on accounts/subscriptions, identity model, IaC maturity, and whether it’s config review vs exploitation-led.

Cost driver: scale and identity complexity.

Red team / simulated targeted attack

Typical effort: 2–8+ weeks.

Cost driver: objectives (crown jewels), realism, social engineering, physical elements, detection engineering, collaboration, and executive reporting.

You don’t want “cheaper”. You want efficient.

1) Scope ruthlessly around risk

Start with what matters:

Internet-facing assets,
Authentication and authorisation paths,
Sensitive data flows,
Admin functions,
Key integrations.

Avoid paying testers to look at low-risk components “because they exist”.

2) Provide excellent pre-engagement info

Give the team:

Architecture diagram,
Environment URLs and IPs,
Role matrix (who can do what),
API specs (OpenAPI/Swagger),
A short list of “what keeps us up at night”.

Good testers will still verify everything—but you’ll reduce waste.

3) Fix the obvious hygiene before testing

Patch, remove dead services, rotate exposed creds, kill legacy endpoints, and harden configs. Don’t spend pen test days rediscovering what a basic scan could have told you.

4) Choose the right cadence

If you ship weekly, an annual mega-test is the wrong shape. Smaller, regular tests on key change areas are often cheaper and more valuable.

Mistake 1: Buying based on a single headline price

If one quote is half the cost, ask: what isn’t included?

Common omissions:

Exploitation validation
Authenticated testing
Full role coverage
API testing
Retest
Walkthrough session.

Mistake 2: Scoping that doesn’t match the business objective

If your objective is “reduce breach risk”, don’t buy a compliance-only checklist test.

If your objective is “pass an audit”, don’t buy a vague red-team-lite exercise.

Mistake 3: Treating the report as the finish line

The value is in what you fix. A pen test that produces 15 findings you remediate properly is more valuable than 80 findings you ignore.

Mistake 4: Not asking who will actually test

You want names, roles, and relevant experience. Senior oversight matters, but so does the person doing the work.

A few trends are shaping cost and buying behaviour:

AI augmentation and “continuous” testing expectations

There’s growing discussion in the industry about AI-augmented testing and PTaaS models that aim to make testing more continuous and collaborative. This can improve speed in some areas (triage, reporting workflows), but it doesn’t remove the need for human reasoning in complex attack chains.

Pricing impact:

Some providers will offer cheaper entry points via subscription.
High-quality manual testing remains premium—especially for authZ/business logic and

complex environments.

Cloud and identity complexity keeps rising

More hybrid environments, more SaaS integrations, more identity providers. Testing has to follow where the trust boundaries went.

Pricing impact:

More time spent on identity, permissions, and misconfiguration exploitation, not just port scanning.

Assurance pressure (public sector and regulated buyers)

Where CHECK/ITHC-style expectations exist, governance overhead and reporting standards increase.

Pricing impact:

Higher day rates and more structured deliverables.

If you want a straightforward way to plan spending:

Step 1: List your crown jewels

Top 3–5 systems that would materially hurt the business if compromised.

Step 2: Map the likely attack surfaces

Internet-facing apps/APIs
Identity provider and SSO
Admin tooling
Cloud management planes
Third-party integrations.

Step 3: Pick a realistic cadence

Examples:

Fast-moving SaaS product: quarterly targeted tests on major change areas + annual deeper assessment.
Enterprise internal environment: annual internal test + ad-hoc tests for major infrastructure changes.
Heavily regulated: align to audit windows + evidence requirements.

Step 4: Allocate budget bands

Baseline (most SMEs with a few key systems): £8k–£20k/year
Growth / multi-app / multi-cloud: £20k–£60k/year
High assurance / CNI-style / red teaming: £60k–£200k+/year

These aren’t rules, just sensible starting points that reflect typical engagement costs and how programmes scale.

When you’re comparing quotes, ask these questions:

What exactly is in scope—and what is explicitly out?
Is testing authenticated? How many roles?
How do you handle APIs, mobile clients, and integrations?
What is the split between manual testing and automated scanning?
Who will test (names/roles), and what’s their relevant experience?
Do you align with CREST standards / provide CREST pen testers where required?
What does the report look like (sample, redacted)?
Is a retest included, and what are the time limits?
Will you do a findings walkthrough with engineers and leadership
How do you prioritise risk in a way that supports remediation decisions?

If a provider can’t answer these clearly, it’s a warning sign.

How much does a pen test cost in the UK in 2026?

For many UK organisations, a well-scoped test often lands somewhere between £3,000 and £20,000, depending on complexity and days required, with advanced work scaling beyond that.

What is a typical UK pen testing day rate?

Market commentary commonly places thorough manual testing in the region of ~£1,000–£1,500 per tester per day, with wider ranges appearing depending on provider, complexity, and specialism.

Are cheap pen tests worth it?

Sometimes, but only if you’re clear what you’re getting. Very low-cost offerings may be largely automated scanning, which can be useful for hygiene but is not the same as a human-led penetration test.

Do I need CREST pen testers?

If your procurement, insurer, or customer requires it—or if you want an extra quality signal—CREST-aligned testing can be valuable. But still assess the individuals, the methodology, and the reporting quality.

How often should we do penetration testing?

At minimum, annually for key systems—and additionally after major changes (new authentication, major feature releases, cloud migrations, new integrations). High-change environments benefit from more frequent, targeted testing.

In 2026, the UK penetration testing market is crowded. You can buy something called a “pen test” at almost any price point. But the real cost of penetration testing is what happens after the report:

Did it find issues that matter?
Did it explain them clearly enough to fix?
Did it reduce real-world breach risk?
Did it make your engineers faster and your decisions sharper?

If you want, paste your rough scope (e.g., number of web apps/APIs, auth model, cloud setup, any compliance requirements like CREST/CHECK), and I’ll sanity-check what a fair 2026 range would look like, and what to include in the statement of work so you don’t get stung.