MSP Benchmarks: What the Numbers Actually Say (and Where They Disagree)

Benchmarking your MSP sounds straightforward. Find out what a good MSP looks like, compare, fix the gap.

Then you look up revenue per technician and get $110,000 from one source and $200,000 from another. EBITDA comes back as 11%, or 18.4%, or "15 to 25%", depending on who you ask. At that point most people pick the number that makes them feel best and move on.

The spread isn't noise. It's mostly definitional, and understanding why the sources disagree is more useful than any single figure. Here's what's actually published, where it comes from, and how to read it.

Revenue per technician

The most-quoted productivity metric, and the one with the widest spread.

That looks like a contradiction and mostly isn't. The high figures use a narrower denominator — service revenue per billable technician, often recurring revenue only. The low figures tend to use total revenue over total technical headcount, which includes your help-desk junior and the engineer who spends half their week on internal projects.

So the metric is close to meaningless until you state your own definition. Before comparing yourself to anything, write down: total revenue or recurring only? All technical staff, or billable only? Does the owner who still does tickets count as a technician?

Then hold that definition still for a year. A trend against your own baseline tells you far more than a comparison against someone else's arithmetic.

EBITDA margin

Here the spread is genuinely about performance and definition.

The word doing the work is adjusted. Owner compensation is the big one: a two-partner MSP where both owners take modest salaries and large distributions will show a very different EBITDA from one where they pay themselves market rate. Serious benchmarking normalises owner comp to a market salary, and whether a given source did that is often unstated.

The useful takeaway isn't a target number, it's the shape: roughly 11% is average, high performers roughly double that, and the difference between the two is not usually pricing — it's utilisation, service mix and how much unbilled work leaks out each month.

Gross margin

The most actionable of the four, and the least disputed.

Published targets cluster at 50–65%, with some sources putting well-run managed services at 60–70%. Hardware resale sits far lower, often single digits to the low teens, which is why a blended gross margin tells you almost nothing — a hardware-heavy quarter will drag it down even while your managed services line is healthy.

Track gross margin per service line, and per client. Managed services, projects, and hardware are three different businesses and should be measured as three. If you've never separated them, that's usually where the first unpleasant surprise lives. How to price managed services covers getting to a defensible per-client number.

Referral rate: the benchmark nobody actually publishes

This one deserves its own section, because people search for it constantly and the answer is unsatisfying.

Phrases like "most MSPs get the majority of new business from referrals" circulate widely in the channel. We went looking for a primary source with a methodology behind a specific percentage and couldn't find one. Not a disputed figure — an absent one.

So treat any confident percentage you see as folklore until someone shows you the sample. The honest version is: referrals are widely reported as the leading source of new business for small and mid-sized MSPs, and no credible published figure quantifies it.

What makes this fixable is that your own referral rate is knowable, and it's the only one that matters. It needs exactly two things:

1. Every new client record carries a source from first contact — referral, search, outbound, partner, event — captured when the lead is created, not reconstructed later
2. That source survives all the way to closed-won, so you can ask the renewal-time question: which channel produced the clients still with us three years on?

Most MSPs can't answer that, which is why they're looking for an industry average in the first place. An industry average is a substitute for measurement, and a poor one.

What to track instead of chasing averages

If you're starting from nothing, these five, measured monthly against your own prior month:

• MRR, and net new MRR — gross new, minus churn. Net is the number that compounds.
• Gross margin by service line — managed services, projects, hardware, separately.
• Revenue per technician, your definition, written down — as a trend, not a comparison.
• New client source — captured at lead creation, carried to close.
• Quote-to-close rate and time-to-quote — if quotes take two weeks, that's usually a bigger constraint than lead volume.

The last two are sales-side and the most commonly missing, because PSAs are built to measure service delivery rather than selling. If your pipeline lives in a spreadsheet, none of them are reliably available — which is the real reason benchmarking stalls for most shops.

On benchmarking software

There's a small category of tools that pull your PSA data and compare it against aggregated peer figures. They can be genuinely useful at scale.

Two cautions. First, you're comparing against their customer base, not the industry — a self-selected sample of MSPs who bought benchmarking software. Second, your inputs have to be clean: if time entry is inconsistent or contracts are miscategorised in your PSA, the comparison is confidently wrong, which is worse than not knowing.

Fix your own measurement before paying to be compared. A spreadsheet with five honest metrics beats a dashboard built on bad time entry.

Frequently Asked Questions

What's a good EBITDA margin for an MSP? Around 11% is reported as average by the Service Leadership Index, with top performers at 18–20%. Check whether a figure normalises owner compensation before comparing yourself to it.

What should revenue per technician be? Published figures range from $110,000 to $200,000 depending on whether the measure uses total or recurring revenue and all technical staff or billable only. Define yours, then track the trend.

Do most MSPs really get most business from referrals? It's widely asserted and, as far as we can find, not backed by a published figure with a stated methodology. Measure your own.

Is benchmarking worth it for a small MSP? Comparing against industry averages, not especially — the samples are too broad and your definitions won't match. Tracking your own five numbers monthly, absolutely, and that's free.

NeroEngine tracks MRR automatically from the attached quote, and carries lead source from first contact through to closed customer — so the two benchmarks that matter most are a report rather than a reconstruction. Flat $49/month, unlimited seats. Join the waitlist.

Figures above were checked in November 2026 and come from: Service Leadership figures via SVMA Partners, LTVplus on revenue per technician, Pharallax MSP benchmarks, Rewired MSP financial benchmarks. Most are vendor-published; where they disagree we've said so rather than picking one.