How much should you charge for WordPress maintenance?

The short answer

In 2026, WordPress maintenance plans typically sell between $50 and $500 per site per month. A simple brochure site on a basic plan sits at the bottom of that range. A business-critical WooCommerce store with a formal service level agreement sits at the top, and sometimes well above it.

The usual mistake is picking a number from that range and then discovering the delivery cost does not support it. The price should be built rather than chosen.

How much to charge for website maintenance: three pricing models

1. Cost-plus

Estimate hours per site per month, multiply by your effective hourly cost, add tooling, add margin. Simple, defensible, and easy to explain internally.

The weakness is that it anchors your price to your efficiency rather than to the client's risk. If you get better at maintenance, cost-plus quietly reduces your price. It also underprices sites where downtime is expensive, because a store and a brochure site take similar effort but carry wildly different consequences.

2. Value-based

Price against what a problem would cost the client. A store turning over $80,000 a month loses roughly $110 for every hour it is down, before counting the customers who go elsewhere and do not come back. A plan that credibly reduces that risk is worth considerably more than the labour that goes into it.

The weakness is that it needs a conversation about consequences, and it is hard to justify on a small site where the honest answer is that downtime would cost almost nothing.

3. Tiered hybrid, which is what most successful plans actually are

Publish three tiers with a cost-plus floor, then price revenue-critical sites against risk. Define a support allowance and track it. Review margin per account quarterly. This gives you a price list you can put on a website and the flexibility to charge properly where the stakes are higher.

Pricing bands that hold up in 2026

These are observed market ranges rather than a recommendation. Where you sit depends on your market, your positioning and what the site does.

• $29 to $60, essential: updates, backups, uptime monitoring, security patching, a monthly report. No support allowance or a very small one. Viable only if delivery is genuinely automated.
• $75 to $150, standard: everything above plus performance monitoring, one to two hours of support, faster response targets, staging for larger changes. This is where most brochure and small business sites should land.
• $200 to $400, priority: same-day response, real-time backup, freeze windows around campaigns, a named contact, a formal SLA. Appropriate for stores and anything where downtime has a number attached.
• $500 and above, managed: effectively a fractional retainer. Includes development time, strategic input and proactive optimisation. This is a different product wearing the same name.

Work out your floor before you look at the bands

Your floor is delivery cost plus the margin you need. The arithmetic:

Monthly delivery cost per site = (hours per site x your effective hourly cost) + (tooling spend / number of sites)

Your floor = delivery cost / (1 - target margin)

If a site takes 1.5 hours a month, your effective cost is $65 an hour, and tooling works out at $13 per site, delivery cost is $110.50. At a 60 percent target margin your floor is roughly $276. If you are currently charging $95 for that site, the plan is losing money and no amount of efficiency elsewhere fixes it.

Two things usually come out of doing this honestly. First, hours per site are higher than people estimate, because report assembly, support conversations and context switching rarely get counted. Second, the effective hourly cost is higher than the billing rate, because not every hour is billable.

The care plan calculator does this arithmetic with your own numbers and shows the margin.

What margin should you target?

Healthy care plans run at 55 to 75 percent gross margin once routine work is automated. Below 40 percent the plan is fragile: one incident, one long support call, or one plugin conflict absorbs the entire month's profit on that account. Above 80 percent, check the plan still contains enough visible value that a client renews without resentment.

The support allowance is where margin goes to die

The single most common cause of care plan margin collapse is undefined support. A plan sold as updates and backups quietly becomes unlimited small edits, then unlimited phone calls, then a retainer that loses money on precisely the clients who use it most.

Define the allowance in hours or tickets, track usage, and show it in the monthly report. Clients are almost never upset about a defined limit they can see. They are upset about being told, after the fact, that something was not included.

How to raise prices on existing clients

Most people underprice for years and then attempt a large correction, which goes badly. A better approach:

1. Give real notice. Ninety days, in writing, with the new price and the date.
2. Add something visible at the same time. Performance monitoring, a better report, a faster response target. The increase should coincide with a change the client can see.
3. Lead with what has changed on your side. More plugins to manage, more security exposure, more sophisticated verification. This is all true and clients understand rising input costs.
4. Grandfather selectively, not universally. Long-standing clients can keep the old rate for a defined period. Making it permanent creates a two-tier business you will resent.
5. Accept some churn. If nobody leaves, the increase was too small. The clients who leave over a $30 increase were rarely the profitable ones.

What to exclude, explicitly

The excluded list matters more than the included list. State clearly that content edits beyond the allowance, new features, design changes, third-party integrations, SEO work and recovery from client-caused problems are outside the plan and quoted separately. Ambiguity here always resolves in the client's favour and against your margin.

The thing that makes all of this work

Every number above depends on delivery cost, and delivery cost depends on how much of the work is automated. If updates, verification, backups, monitoring and reporting consume billable attention, no pricing model saves the plan. If they run without you, the same price becomes comfortably profitable.

That is the actual lever. Pricing strategy matters, but it matters second.