What AI consulting costs in 2026

Ranges are wide, sources are conflicted, and the number you are quoted depends more on who you ask than on what you need.

Written for the person signing the invoice. Last reviewed 8 August 2026 — sources at the foot of the page.

The published ranges

Across the vendor-published guides available in 2026, the numbers cluster like this:

Engagement type	Commonly published range	What it usually means
Freelance / independent, hourly	$100–$300 per hour	One person, one workflow. The realistic option for most small businesses.
Senior or specialist, hourly	$300–$700+ per hour	Deep domain or regulatory expertise, or someone with a reputation you are partly paying for.
Day rate, independent	$600–$1,200 per day	Workshops, audits, discovery.
Day rate, agency	$1,500–$2,500 per day	A team rather than a person; some of it is overhead.
Readiness assessment	from ~$5,000	A bounded piece of scoping work. The right first purchase.
Strategy engagement	from ~$10,000	Where "deck risk" begins. Insist on a shipped artefact.
Standalone build project	$20,000–$200,000	Custom implementation. The spread is mostly integration complexity.
Monthly retainer	$2,000–$50,000+	Ongoing operation and iteration.

Sources for the table are listed at the foot of the page. Several of them disagree with each other by a factor of three at the top end, which is itself the most useful finding on this page.

What actually moves the price

• Integration, not intelligence. The model is the cheap part. Connecting it to your CRM, your billing system and your permissions model is where the budget goes. A project touching one system and a project touching five are not the same project at any price.
• The state of your data. If your information lives in inboxes and spreadsheets, a meaningful share of the fee is data cleanup. That work is unglamorous, unavoidable, and frequently omitted from the initial quote — ask explicitly whether it is included.
• Regulatory exposure. Healthcare, finance and legal work carries review requirements that add cost regardless of technical complexity.
• Who is on the account. Agency day rates include people you will never meet. That is not automatically bad, but you should know what proportion of the rate is the person doing the work.

The costs that are not in the quote

Budget for these separately, because they are routinely left out:

• Model and API usage, which is ongoing and scales with how much you use the thing you just built.
• Your own people's time — someone internal has to answer questions, supply examples and test outputs. This is usually the largest hidden cost.
• Maintenance. Models change, providers deprecate, and a system built in March may need attention by September.
• Training and change management. A tool nobody uses costs the full price and returns nothing.

What to pay first

For most small and mid-sized businesses the correct first purchase is not a strategy engagement. It is a small, fixed-fee, fixed-date piece of work with a deliverable you can see — an audit of one process, or a working prototype of one workflow. In the published ranges above, that lands somewhere around a readiness assessment: a few thousand dollars, not tens of thousands. If it works, you have a partner and a proven number. If it does not, you have lost a small amount and learned something cheaply.

How to sanity-check any quote you receive

Work out what the process currently costs you per year before you take the call — people, hours, wage, error rate. Then compare. A quote is only expensive or cheap relative to a number you calculated yourself. The free ROI calculator will produce that figure in a few minutes and costs nothing, and walking into a pricing conversation with your own arithmetic changes it substantially.