What Security Awareness Training Costs Per User in 2026

A quote lands for 180 employees. Working out whether the total on it is fair turns out to be surprisingly hard, because almost nobody in this market publishes what they charge, and the figures circulating in place of real prices mostly have nothing behind them.

The number you carry into a budget meeting is the number you get held to. A figure picked up from a page that invented it becomes a real variance in a real forecast about four months later, and by then the contract is signed.

So this page uses two kinds of figure and no others. The first is a price list a vendor publishes on its own website, with the seat band and the contract term it applies to. The second is a contract record a public buyer filed under its own name. Where neither exists, the page says so and explains what moves the price instead of guessing at it. There is no market average anywhere below, because there is no independent dataset to average, and the spread of documented spending on this one category is wider than a single figure could usefully cover: $4,500 a year at one end and $985,000 across three years at the other.

How Much Does Security Awareness Training Cost?

The market splits into two groups, and the split is what makes the question hard to answer. A small number of vendors publish a real price list on their own website: tier, seat band, contract term, dollar figure. Everyone else runs a contact-sales motion, which means the only prices in circulation are the ones buyers repeat to each other and the ones content marketers make up.

From the published lists, a straight per-seat license for a content library and a phishing simulator sits between roughly $1.17 and $3.75 per person per month for a company of 25 to 1,000 employees, before add-ons and before anything a person has to do. That band comes from two named price lists, quoted in full in the next section, and it is not a market average. It is what two companies say they charge.

Above 1,000 seats both published lists stop and refer you to sales, which tells you something on its own. So does the shape of what the federal government pays, where the same category of product shows up in contract records at $4,500 a year at one small agency and $213,600 across a 14 month term at one large department.

Price is also the least useful thing to compare first. The cheap license only works if a named person inside your company runs it, and the expensive one includes that person. Sorting out what the subscription actually includes before you sort out the price stops you from comparing two documents that are not describing the same service.

Security Awareness Training Cost Per User

KnowBe4 publishes a full USD price table on its pricing page, broken out by product tier and seat band, on a three year term, billed as a monthly price per seat. As of September 2026 it reads:

Those are KnowBe4's own published list prices and they are list prices, not transaction prices. The same page prices four add-ons the same way, again per seat per month on a three year term: third-party integrations at $1.20 for 101 to 500 seats and $1.10 for 501 to 1,000, Compliance Plus at $0.93 and $0.82, PhishER Plus at $1.50 and $1.15, and a student edition at $0.17 in both bands. An add-on can therefore add more than half again to the license price, which is the first reason two quotes for the same headcount stop being comparable.

Wizer publishes an annual figure instead of a monthly one. Its published MSRP for the Boost plan, on a three year contract billed yearly, is $25 per user per year at 25 or more users, $20 at 51 or more, $17 at 101 or more, $14 at 501 or more, $12 at 1,001 or more and $8 at 3,001 or more, with anything above 5,000 users going to sales. There is a free tier at $0 covering basic annual training, and 25 users is the minimum to buy online at all.

Read those two lists side by side and the structure of the market shows up clearly, whatever any individual vendor charges.

• The price is per seat, tiered downward. KnowBe4's published Foundation price falls 32 percent from its smallest band to its largest. Wizer's falls 68 percent, across a ladder that runs three times further up the headcount scale.
• There is a floor. Neither table quotes below 25 seats. A 12 person company pays the 25 seat price or uses a free tier.
• There is a ceiling on transparency. Both stop publishing above 1,000 or 3,000 seats. Large deals are negotiated, and nobody publishes what they settle at.
• The tier gap is wide. KnowBe4's Advanced tier runs 56 percent to 71 percent above Foundation at the same seat count. Wizer's ladder spans more than three to one from its smallest band to its largest. Naming a per-user number without naming the tier and the seat band says almost nothing.
• The term is doing work. Both published tables are three year prices, so a shorter commitment is quoted separately and none of these figures applies to it.

What Real Buyers Paid for Security Awareness Training

Federal agencies file every contract they award, and those filings are public. They name the product, the tier, the period of performance and the obligated dollar amount. They are the closest thing this market has to observed prices rather than claimed ones.

Each of those is a filed record. The Merit Systems Protection Board renewal covering October 2026 to September 2027 is $4,500, and the same $4,500 appears in that agency's filings for each of the two preceding years. The Treasury award names the Diamond tier and says it includes support and enterprise services. The Department of Labor filing is unusually explicit, writing the funding profile into the description: a base year estimated at $86,700, then option years estimated at $91,000 and $95,000. That is a real escalator, disclosed by the buyer, of roughly 5 percent a year. The Department of Agriculture courseware contract covers a base year and two option years for $985,000 in total.

One agency bought the same product three years running, and the filings show what happened to the price.

Those three figures come from the agency's own filings for 2024, 2025 and 2026. The reseller changed each year, which is how federal buying works, and the price fell rather than climbed.

Two honest limits on all of this. These are federal buyers on government schedules, so the discounts behind them are not the discounts a 200 person company gets. And crucially, the filings do not publish seat counts. That means no per-user figure can be derived from them, and anyone who divides $62,851.41 by a headcount they looked up is inventing a number. The records tell you the size of the check, not the size of the unit price.

What Drives Security Awareness Training Costs

Seven variables move the total, and the first one moves it more than the unit price does.

What counts as a seat. Every employee, every mailbox in the directory, every named account including shared and service accounts, or only the staff in scope for a compliance obligation. The same 180 employees can be a 180 seat quote from one vendor and a materially larger number from another counting directory objects, and the difference is invisible until somebody asks. A vendor quoting a lower rate against a mailbox count can bill more in total than one quoting a higher rate against a headcount.

The tier. Every vendor's cheapest tier is a content library plus a simulator. The expensive ones add compliance course catalogs, custom branding, phishing template libraries, reporting APIs, single sign-on and integration with your mail platform. KnowBe4's published gap between its two named tiers is 56 percent to 71 percent for identical headcount, which is the honest size of a tier decision.

The term. Both published price lists are three year prices, so neither tells you what a one year commitment costs. Ask for both, because the gap between them is the price of the right to leave.

Add-ons. Priced per seat, so they scale with headcount rather than sitting as a fixed line. The published add-on prices above range from $0.17 to $1.50 per seat per month.

Managed hours. A program somebody else runs costs more than a login. If a proposal includes a program manager it should say how many hours a month and what those hours are spent on, and most do not.

Custom content and languages. Quoted per module and per language, outside the subscription, and neither vendor that publishes a seat price publishes these. Ask for the per module rate in writing before you assume a course on your own policies is included.

In-person or live work. Executive briefings, live vishing exercises and classroom sessions are day rates, not seat rates, and they are the reason two quotes for the same 300 people can differ by an order of magnitude.

What the Quote Leaves Out

The license is the part with a price on it. NIST's guidance on building an awareness program is the most useful public checklist of everything else, because it was written for budget holders rather than for buyers of a particular product. Section 2.10.1 of NIST SP 800-50r1, on establishing a program budget, lists the typical costs as training personnel including program managers, instructional designers and instructors; classroom space and materials; printed materials, handouts and certificates; online space to distribute materials; learning management systems for delivery, registration and completion records; licenses per seat for learning platforms or content; awareness materials such as posters and themed items; professional services for curriculum design; and culture mapping efforts.

Notice where "licenses per seat" sits in that list. It is one of nine items, and it is the only one your vendor quotes.

Staff time is the line most buyers leave out and the one most likely to sink the cheaper option. NIST's own budget questions include asking what the cost in staff time is, and it is the only cost on the list you can price yourself with a published figure. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts median pay for information security analysts at $129,180 a year, or $62.11 an hour, as of May 2025. Take the hours a month a program honestly needs from whoever will run it, multiply by a fully loaded version of that rate, and put the answer next to the license price. Four hours a month of an analyst's time comes to just under $3,000 a year at that rate, before benefits and overhead, which is more than the entire annual license for a 100 person company on either published price list.

Two other costs land outside the quote and outside the software. If the program exists because a customer or an auditor asked for it, somebody has to produce completion evidence in a form an examiner accepts, and awareness training completion is one of the controls tested across the whole period in a SOC 2 examination. And if nobody senior owns the program, it decays quietly until the renewal, which is why some companies end up paying a fractional security leader for a few hours a month rather than buying a more expensive platform.

Do You Already Pay for Security Awareness Training?

Check before you buy, because one of the few vendors that does publish a price bundles simulation into a plan a lot of companies already pay for. Defender for Office 365 lists Plan 1 at $2.00 per user per month paid yearly and Plan 2 at $5.00 per user per month paid yearly, and cyberattack simulation training is listed as a Plan 2 feature. Any company already on Plan 2 for its mail security is paying for a simulation engine today, usually sitting switched off in a portal nobody has opened.

That does not make a dedicated platform redundant, and it is worth being precise about the difference rather than pretending either side wins. What is bundled is a simulation engine with a training library attached to it, running against your own mail platform. What a dedicated vendor sells on top of that is a wider and better produced content catalog, role-based and compliance-specific courses, reporting built for an auditor rather than for a security team, and support for the parts of the workforce who do not have a mailbox.

The point is narrower than "you already own it". It is that a simulation program can start next week at no additional license cost, which gives you a baseline click rate to negotiate against before you sign anything. Buying a platform on the strength of a vendor's benchmark, when you could have measured your own population first, is how companies end up paying for the top tier to solve a problem they never sized.

Security Awareness Training Cost for a Small Business

Under about 250 people the arithmetic changes shape, because the fixed floors start to dominate.

The minimum seat count is the first one. Neither published price list quotes below 25 seats, so a 14 person company pays the 25 seat price or uses a free tier. On the published lists, 25 seats costs $625 a year at Wizer's MSRP or $720 a year at KnowBe4's Foundation list price, and those are the smallest checks either vendor will take. A 50 person company on the same published lists is looking at roughly $1,250 to $1,440 a year at the entry tier, and roughly $2,250 a year if it takes KnowBe4's Advanced tier instead.

Free tiers are real and they are not a trick. Wizer publishes a $0 plan covering basic annual training with a learner console and completion reminders. For a company whose actual requirement is "prove everyone did annual training", that is a complete answer, and the money is better spent on multi-factor authentication and backups. It stops being a complete answer the moment somebody needs simulation data, role-based content or an export an auditor will accept.

For most companies at this size the training line is a small fraction of a small company's whole security budget, which is a useful sanity check in both directions. If a quote is a meaningful share of your total security spend, something in its scope is wrong.

How to Budget for Security Awareness Training

Build the number rather than looking it up. Five inputs, in this order, and only the first is a price.

The reason a cap matters more than a forecast is that renewals are where the leverage moves. At the first signature you have alternatives and a live comparison; eleven months later you have integrations, historical completion data an auditor has seen, and no time. Vendors price accordingly. Settling the year two and year three numbers in the original contract costs nothing at the point where you still have options.

Is Security Awareness Training Worth the Cost?

It is a cheap control with a measurable but middling effect, and the case for it is stronger when it is argued honestly than when it is oversold.

Hold the first and last of those together. The attacks training addresses are the most common way in and the most expensive when they land, and training itself sits in the middle of the pack of controls that reduce what a breach costs. Both things are true. It is worth buying, at a price that reflects a mid-table control rather than a decisive one, and it is not a substitute for identity work.

The arithmetic is undemanding at these prices. A 200 person company at the entry tier on either published list is spending between $3,400 and $4,728 a year on the license. That does not need a dramatic drop in click rate to justify itself; it needs the program to contribute to avoiding one incident across several years. What it does need is for the program to actually run, which is the argument for spending more on the managed version rather than less on the license.

How to Compare Security Awareness Training Quotes