SimplISO › ISO 9001 certification cost
Straight answers, no quote formMost pages on this subject end with "contact us for a quote". This one does not. Below is what a business under ten people actually pays, split into the two separate bills that nobody ever explains.
Written for UK businesses. Last updated 22 September 2026.
For a UK business with fewer than ten people certifying to ISO 9001 on its own, the certification body will charge £650 for the initial audit if it is not UKAS accredited, or about £1,700 if it is. That part barely moves.
What moves is the other bill, getting ready for them. That is anything from nothing but your own evenings to £15,000 with a traditional consultant.
So year one lands anywhere from about £650 to £18,000, and where you land depends almost entirely on one decision. Below is how to make it.
Every quote you get will blur these together. Keep them apart and the numbers stop being mysterious.
An independent body audits you and issues the certificate. This is unavoidable. Nobody can certify themselves, and nobody can sell you a certificate without an audit. This bill is fairly predictable because it is worked out from audit days.
Building the management system, writing what needs writing, running an internal audit, gathering evidence. This is where the price varies enormously, because it can be a consultant, a platform, or your own evenings.
Certification bodies price by audit day. The number of days comes from a published table driven mostly by how many people you employ, then adjusted for how many sites you have and how complex your work is. A business under ten people sits at the bottom of that table, which is the good news.
The bigger lever is whether the body is UKAS accredited. Both figures below are what we actually see on our clients' quotes.
| What it is | When | Non UKAS body | UKAS accredited |
|---|---|---|---|
| Initial certification audit | Year one | £650 | £1,700 |
| Surveillance audit | Each of years two and three | £500 | £1,200 |
| Recertification audit | End of year three | £585 | £1,530 |
A non UKAS body will usually fold Stage 1 into the main visit and charge you once. A UKAS body bills the document review separately, around £500, then the site visit at around £1,200. That structural difference is most of the gap.
Adding standards does scale, but not painfully. Certifying ISO 9001, 14001 and 45001 together through a non UKAS body runs about £1,950 for the audit and £1,200 a year for surveillance, because it is one combined visit rather than three separate exercises.
UKAS accreditation is not a legal requirement. A non accredited body is a real, legitimate option and it will save you money, so the only question that matters is whether the people you are trying to sell to insist on it.
Public sector tenders and larger supply chains frequently do. If yours do not, take the saving. If you are unsure, read the tender wording before you choose, because changing your mind later means paying for the audits a second time, and that wipes out the saving several times over.
This is the part that swings your total by thousands, and there are four honest routes.
| Route | What you are buying | Typical cost |
|---|---|---|
| Do it yourself | Your own time. Reading the standard, writing procedures, running an internal audit, chasing evidence. | 80 to 150 hours |
| Traditional consultant | Ten to twenty days of somebody's time, usually over three to six months. Day rates run £500 to £1,200. | £5,000 to £15,000 |
| QMS software on its own | A document system with nobody in it. Cheap per month, but the reading, writing and auditing is still yours. | £30 to £500 a month |
| Platform with a consultant | Software that holds the system together, plus a real consultant reviewing your evidence, running your internal audit and prepping you for the visit. | From £249 a month |
The do it yourself route is not free, it just moves the cost off the invoice and onto your evenings. It is entirely doable. The risk is turning up to Stage 2 with gaps you did not know were gaps, collecting non conformities and having to pay for extra audit time to close them out.
Software on its own has the same risk with a monthly bill attached. Read the standard carefully before you buy a tool that assumes you already have.
Same business every time. Five people, one office, ISO 9001 only, a non UKAS certification body. The certification body bill barely moves. Everything else does.
| Route | Getting ready | Certification body | Year one total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Do it yourself | Your own time | £650 | £650 |
| Traditional consultant | £5,000 to £15,000 | £650 | £7,000 to £18,000+ |
| QMS software on its own | £360 to £6,000 | £650 | £8,000 to £20,000+ |
| SimplISO | £1,546 | £650 | £2,196 |
The SimplISO figure is the four months of subscription it typically takes to reach your certificate on one standard, £249 a month, plus the consultant internal audit fee of £550. That is our published price and the pricing calculator will do the same sum for two, three or four standards, with or without UKAS.
The software only total looks odd next to its own monthly fee, and that is the point. The subscription is cheap. The year is not, because you still end up buying consultant days to close the gaps, or spending the hours yourself and paying for the extra audit time when something is missed.
The certification body bills you directly on every one of these routes, and always will, because nobody can prepare you for an audit and then certify you. That would rather defeat the point.
One thing worth knowing before you budget: we are still in our founding period, and the first fifteen registrants get 25% off the whole of their first year, locked in from the first invoice. That takes the SimplISO row above down by roughly £250.
This is the bit people get caught by. ISO certification is not a project you finish, it is a three year cycle that renews.
For one standard through a non UKAS body, that annual bill is the surveillance audit at £500, plus the internal audit and management review, which is either your own time or about £550 to have a consultant do it properly.
So the honest way to think about ISO 9001 is about £1,050 a year of invoices once you are certified, plus whatever keeping the system alive costs you in hours. It is a running cost, not a one off purchase, and any quote that does not say so is not telling you the whole thing.
If you want a number closer than a range, these are the four things a certification body will ask you first.
Three of ISO 9001's requirements are pure people admin, and if you run them in the platform the evidence builds itself instead of being reconstructed the week before an audit.
| Employee tool | What it evidences |
|---|---|
| Onboarding workflow | Clause 7.3 Awareness. Proof that each person was made aware of the quality policy, the objectives and how their own work contributes to them. |
| Competence matrix and training log | Clause 7.2 Competence. Deciding what competence each role needs, showing the person has it, and keeping the evidence that the training actually worked. |
| Job descriptions and org chart | Clause 5.3 Roles, responsibilities and authorities. Who is responsible for what, held in one place and kept current. |
| Annual reviews | Clause 7.2 again. The yearly check that competence is still current, recorded rather than remembered. |
Holiday booking is not an ISO requirement, and we would never pretend it is. It earns its place for a different reason. It is the thing your staff open the platform for every week, so while they are in there booking leave, the competence records and the training log stay current on their own instead of decaying quietly until an auditor asks to see them.
No. Certification runs on a three year cycle. You pay for the initial Stage 1 and Stage 2 audits in year one, then a surveillance audit in years two and three, then a recertification audit at the end of year three and the cycle starts again. Budget for an annual cost, not a one off project.
No. UKAS accreditation is not a legal requirement and a non accredited body is cheaper. For ISO 9001 at a business under ten people, expect around £650 for the initial audit through a non accredited body, against about £1,700 through a UKAS accredited one, and £500 against £1,200 a year for surveillance after that. The thing that matters is whether your customers or the contracts you are bidding for insist on it. Public sector tenders and larger supply chains often do. Check the tender wording before you choose, because switching later means paying for the audits twice.
Yes, and plenty of businesses do. The cost moves from money to time. Expect to spend somewhere between 80 and 150 hours reading the standard, writing procedures, running an internal audit and preparing evidence, and accept a real chance of non conformities at the Stage 2 audit that you then have to close out.
Audit time, which is driven mainly by headcount, then by how many sites you operate from, how complex what you do is, and how many standards you are certifying at once. A five person business working from one office is at the cheap end of every published table.
For a small business with support, typically three to six months from starting to holding the certificate. Doing it alone usually takes longer, not because the work is harder but because it competes with running the business.
Twenty minutes on a call and we will tell you what your certification body will charge, what getting ready will take, and whether you need UKAS at all.
Same treatment, real numbers, no quote form.