What WordPress maintenance really costs in 2026
Most agencies underprice maintenance because they only count the hours they can bill. A realistic 2026 price list includes tooling, risk, and the cost of calm weekends.
Robin
Charging by the hour for maintenance made sense when every site was a one-off project. In 2026 it is the fastest way to turn your agency into a support desk that works evenings for free.
The real cost of maintenance is not the time you spend clicking update buttons. It is the stack of tools that keep sites safe, the hours you spend on incidents that were not planned, and the margin you lose every time a client treats a Saturday outage like an emergency.
Hosting and infrastructure come first. If you include hosting in your maintenance package, you have to price it as a separate line, not as a free add-on. A €5 shared host and a €40 managed server both keep a site online, but only one of them keeps you asleep at night.
Next, tooling. A backup service, an uptime monitor, a security scanner, and a central update dashboard each have a per-site or per-account cost. Multiply them across your entire portfolio and you are looking at a real monthly bill before you touch a single site.
Then comes the human work. Monthly updates, plugin conflict checks, report writing, and the occasional restore after a bad release. Even with automation, someone has to watch the exceptions.
Finally, risk. Every maintenance contract is a small insurance policy. You are promising that the site stays online, secure, and recoverable. That promise has a price, even if nothing breaks this month.
A realistic 2026 calculation for a standard brochure site looks like this: hosting €15, tooling €12, planned labour €25, and risk margin €18. That is €70 per site per month before profit. Add your margin and you end up between €89 and €149 for a single site, depending on response time and what is included.
For ten sites the math changes. Hosting and tooling get volume discounts, but incidents do not scale down. Plan for at least one unexpected hour per month for every five sites. With scale, the per-site price can drop to €49–€79, but only if your tooling is good enough to handle the routine work without constant manual intervention.
Some things should never be included in the maintenance price. Redesigns, new features, custom plugin development, and premium plugin licenses are project work or pass-through costs. Put them in a separate scope so your maintenance fee stays predictable.
The price is only defendable if the client understands what they are buying. A clear monthly report with uptime, applied updates, and open security items proves the value. Predictability is what turns a maintenance invoice into a retainer.
If you want to see how Sentro structures its own maintenance tiers, have a look at our pricing page. The numbers may differ from yours, but the math behind them is the same.