How much does ISO 27001 certification cost?

How much does ISO 27001 certification cost (or any other ISO)?

Any ISO certification (ISO 27001 / ISO 20000 / ISO 9001 / ISO 22301 / ISO 27701 etc) journey has two major types of possible cost heads.

  • ISO certification audit fee: This is the fee you to the external independent registered certification body that you select for the final ISO certification audit of your Organization’s management systems (QMS, ISMS, ITSMS, PIMS, BCMS etc).
  • ISO certification readiness expenses: Your organization may either prepare the chosen management system (QMS, ISMS, ITSMS, PIMS, BCMS etc) by its own (through mobilization of your internal experts), or engage an external IT management consulting company to help them be ready for the audit (or a third hybrid option of these two). In both cases, your organization will need to commit resources (funds, human resource etc).

This calculator is provided for an approximate understanding of the ISO certification audit fee that your organization will need to pay to the certified auditing bodies. (the first type of cost head)

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A detailed view of the certification cost

Any ISO certification (ISO 27001 / ISO 20000 / ISO 9001 / ISO 22301 / ISO 27701 etc) journey may have two major types of possible cost heads.

  • ISO certification audit fee: This cost head includes two primary components:
      1. The registration fee charged by the ISO accreditation body (example: IAF, IAS etc). This fee is different for different ISO standards and the location of the organization interested in being certified. This fee does not change based on any other parameter like the number of employees of the organization, or the number of office locations in-scope etc. This typically constitutes about 20-30% of the total certification audit fee.
      2. The audit fee defined by the registered certification body (RCB’s like BSI, DNV, TUV, BVQI etc) you choose. This fee is calculated as (the number of audit X the professional fee per day of the auditor). The professional fee differs across various RCB’s (the more well known RCB, the higher this fee). It also varies across various ISO standards (example: ISO 9001 audit professional fee could be lower than ISO 27001). The number of audit days is directly proportionate to the count of audit locations, the count of employees in scope and the ISO standard in-scope. For example, the fee for an ISO 9001 audit for one location of a 30 people organization will be considerably lower than the fee for an ISO 22301 audit for three locations of a 120 people organization.
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  • ISO certification readiness expenses: This cost head needs to be studied from two perspectives:
      1. When you opt for external assistance: In this perspective, you will need to consider a professional fee to be paid to the external management consulting organization that you select. Organizations generally avail services of such external agencies for one of the two primary reasons (or a combination of both). Either you lack in-house expertise required to establish the management system standard that you have targeted (example: ISMS, PIMS etc), or you lack the bandwidth to take up the journey by using your internal resources. 
      2. When you use only internal resources: A wrong belief is that you save funds when you opt for a readiness journey only using the internal resources of your organization. We should not forget that irrespective of whether you use internal or external resources (assuming that you have the same quality of management system experts internal to your org), in both cases we consume effort of those human resources.