Budgeting against published numbers instead of last year plus a bit

Most IT budgets are built by taking last year's figure and adding a percentage. That works in a year when nothing structural changes. The year ahead is not one of those, because several of the costs sitting inside a typical small business IT budget have already been repriced by the suppliers, on dates that are published and are not open to negotiation.

Every figure below is one a supplier has published, with the date it takes effect. None of it is a forecast, and a budget built from last year's spend will be short by the total of them.

Microsoft 365 costs more from your next renewal after 1 July 2026

Microsoft has published new list prices for its business suites, effective 1 July 2026 and applying at each customer's next renewal after that date. The list is published in US dollars and Microsoft states that pricing varies by country and currency, so your sterling figure comes from your licensing agreement and reseller. The increases themselves are the same wherever you buy.

  • Microsoft 365 Business Basic Up by 16 per cent on Microsoft's published figures.
  • Microsoft 365 Business Standard Up by 12 per cent.
  • Office 365 E3 Up by 13 per cent.
  • Microsoft 365 E3 Up by 8 per cent.
  • Microsoft 365 E5 Up by 5 per cent.

The timing matters as much as the percentage. The new price applies at renewal, not on 1 July, so a business renewing in February 2027 pays the old rate for most of the year and the new one after that. Your renewal date decides the split, and the budget line is a blend of the two rather than a single rate.

Copper phone lines double in price, then stop working

Openreach has published three increases to the rental price of a wholesale line rental basic connection, which is the ordinary copper telephone line that analogue services sit on. The starting point was 10.65 pounds per month excluding VAT.

  • 1 April 2026 Openreach states the price rises from the current price of 10.65 pounds by 20 per cent.
  • 1 July 2026 A further rise of 40 per cent of the current price.
  • 1 October 2026 A further 40 per cent of the current price, which Openreach states will double the current rental price.

These are wholesale prices charged to providers, so what reaches your own bill depends on your contract, but the direction is set. Openreach is retiring the copper telephone network on 31 January 2027, which falls inside the year being budgeted for now.

On the published wholesale rate, four analogue lines at 10.65 pounds a month came to 511.20 pounds a year. At double that rate they come to 1,022.40 pounds, for a service that stops at the end of January 2027 whatever has been budgeted for it. So the cost rises every quarter until the line is migrated, and the migration itself belongs in this budget rather than the next one, because there is no next one for that service.

Windows 10 is now either a subscription or a hardware refresh

Windows 10 reached end of support on 14 October 2025. Continuing to run it securely means paying for Extended Security Updates, which Microsoft sells to organisations per device through its Volume Licensing Programme. Microsoft publishes that list price in US dollars, so the sterling cost comes from your reseller, but the structure is fixed wherever you buy it: the price doubles every consecutive year, for a maximum of three years. Year Two is twice Year One and Year Three is four times it.

Two rules make it cost more than it first looks. It has to be bought a year at a time with no partial periods, and the years are cumulative, so a device enrolled in Year Two is charged for Year One as well. The cheaper consumer route runs to 12 October 2027, but Microsoft excludes devices joined to an Active Directory domain, joined to Microsoft Entra or managed through mobile device management, which rules out most company laptops.

So each Windows 10 machine in the business is a line in the budget: an escalating annual fee that quadruples by its third year, or a replacement. For a machine that cannot meet the Windows 11 hardware requirements, and Trusted Platform Module 2.0 and the supported processor list are the two that most often rule an older PC out, the replacement is the only route that ends the recurring cost.

Cyber Essentials became harder to pass in April

If the business certifies, the assessment changed. IASME, which runs the scheme, published a new question set called Danzell and states that the changes apply to all assessment accounts created after 26 April 2026. Accounts created before that date were given a six month grace period to certify under the previous requirements, and that period is now running out.

Two of the changes turn areas that used to be scored into outright failures. Multi factor authentication, which is the second step beyond a password, is now a mandatory requirement for all cloud services where it is available, and failing to have it means failing the assessment. Two further questions require high risk or critical security updates to be installed within fourteen days of release, across operating systems, applications and the firmware in routers and firewalls, where firmware is the software built into the device itself.

Non-compliance with either of these questions will result in an automatic failure of the assessment.

The budget implication is not the certificate fee, it is the remediation. A firewall too old to receive firmware updates has to be replaced, and patching that happens when somebody remembers has to become something that runs and can be evidenced. Both are cheaper before a failed assessment than after one.

Backup is probably a new line rather than an existing one

Microsoft 365 does not include backup, and Microsoft now sells it separately as a product called Microsoft 365 Backup, charged by the gigabyte per month for all protected data, with restores included at no extra cost. It covers OneDrive accounts, SharePoint sites and Exchange mailboxes.

Because it is charged by volume rather than per user, the figure depends on how much data you hold rather than how many people you employ, which makes it the one item here you have to measure before you can budget it. Third party products are priced differently again, and several run on the same underlying Microsoft platform.

Check the price rise clause in the contract you actually signed

From 17 January 2025 Ofcom prohibited phone, broadband and pay television providers from including inflation linked or percentage based price rise terms in new contracts. Where a contract signed from that date contains a rise, it has to be set out in pounds and pence, prominently and at the point of sale, with the timing made clear.

The limit on that rule is the part that affects a budget: it does not override existing contract terms, so a line taken out before January 2025 can still carry an inflation linked rise nobody can predict in September. Ofcom's General Conditions also give businesses with no more than ten employees a right to at least one month's notice and a penalty free exit if a provider raises prices beyond what the contract allowed.

So find the renewal date and the rise mechanism for each connectivity contract rather than budgeting a flat percentage across all of them. Some are fixed in pounds and some are not, and which is which is knowable today.

What quietly falls out of the budget

The same year removes some costs, and they are easy to leave in by accident because nobody deletes a line that has been there for years.

  • Copper line rental Once a line is migrated, its rental stops, including the increases above. Any analogue line still being paid for after January 2027 is paying for a service that no longer exists.
  • Extended Security Updates for replaced machines The per device fee ends when the device is upgraded or replaced. A refresh part way through the year removes the following year's doubled fee rather than just the current one.
  • Duplicated tools Businesses on Microsoft 365 Business Premium are frequently still paying separately for products the licence already includes. That is a checkable overlap rather than an assumption, and the licence comparison is published.
  • On premises server running costs Power, cooling, maintenance contracts and the replacement cycle itself all stop when a server is retired, and those are usually recorded somewhere other than the IT budget, which is why they survive the move.

The numbers are published, so build from them

Microsoft, Openreach, IASME and Ofcom have each published what they are changing and when. A budget built from those figures will be closer than one built from last year plus a percentage, and where it is wrong it will be wrong for a reason somebody can point at.

The work is counting what the business actually has: the devices, the lines, the licences and the contract dates.