What a fractional CTO costs in the UK, and how it adds up
If you want the answer before the argument: checked on 28 September 2026, the UK providers who publish fractional-CTO prices on their own websites charge between £450 and about £1,800 per day of work, and most sit between £750 and £1,250. A day a week costs roughly £3,500 to £6,000 a month.
I sell this too, so my prices are in the table below, though not in those figures. My retainer can work out cheaper per day than anything else in it, and I’ll explain why rather than leave you to guess.
Everything else here is the working. Search for what a fractional CTO costs and you get ranges, stated with confidence, mostly on pages selling fractional CTOs. Follow them back and many lead to each other rather than to evidence. A range is what someone thinks the market charges. A price is what a named provider will charge you, written down where you can hold them to it. So what follows sticks to prices: what each provider publishes on its own website, for its own service, quoted as written and linked to the page it came from. Then how a day rate becomes a monthly retainer, how the number is built from the other side of the invoice, and what a full-time CTO costs by comparison.
The short answer
From the other providers’ prices below, as of 28 September 2026:
- Per day of work, published prices run from £450 to about £1,800. Most sit between £750 and £1,250. The middle of the table, the median of each provider’s cheapest published day, is £925 to £1,000, depending on how you read one ambiguous row.
- One day a week costs roughly £3,500 to £6,000 a month.
- Two days a week mostly costs £7,000 to £9,600 a month.
- A day or two a month, the smallest packages sold by the day, starts at £1,500 to £2,500.
Published UK prices, side by side
| Offer | Published price, as written | Time included | ≈ per day |
|---|---|---|---|
| 941 Consulting1–3 months’ minimum by plan, then 30 days’ notice | |||
| Async CTO | £699 / month | async only | — |
| Foundation | £2,499 / month | 2 days a month | £1,250 |
| Momentum | £4,799 / month | 1 day a week | £1,107 |
| Breakthrough | £9,599 / month | 2 days a week | £1,108 |
| Project work | £1,200 /day | per day | £1,200 |
| Boardman“no long lock-in” | |||
| On demand | from £1,500 a day | per day | £1,500 |
| Starter | £6,000/month | “around four days a month” (typical engagement) | £1,500 |
| Team | £12,000/month | not stated | — |
| Growth | £18,000/month | not stated | — |
| CTO on Demand“no lock-in, no notice periods” | |||
| Retainer | £8k–£16k / month | 2–4 days a week | £923 |
| Interim | From £1,400 / day | fixed term, full commitment | £1,400 |
| 30-day tech audit | From £4,000 | fixed scope | — |
| Divisor“stop any month” | |||
| Fractional CTO | from £1,850 a month | two days a month | £925 |
| fcto.ukmonth-to-month, per its pricing page | |||
| Hands-on | £1,000 per day | typically 2–3 days a week | £1,000 |
| Advisory | £300 per hour (per its blog) | by the hour | — |
| Foresight Mobilemonthly retainer; minimum not stated | |||
| Hourly | £95 to £300 per hour | by the hour | — |
| Startup tier | £2,500-£6,000 | 2–5 days a month | £1,200–£1,250 |
| Full Stack Consultingfollows one of its paid assessments, from £995 | |||
| Fractional CTO | starting at £5,000/month, “plus some form of uplift participation” | not stated | — |
| GoMVP“No long-term commitment” | |||
| Fractional CTO | From £450/day | per day | from £450 |
| Ihor Chyshkalamonthly, rolling; “indicative pricing only” | |||
| Retainer | From £4,800/mo | 1–2 days a week | £554–£1,108 |
| Leadership Services“no long-term contracts” | |||
| Fractional CTO | £1,500 – £5,000 per month | by scope | — |
| Entry point (city pages) | from £1,795 per month for one day of executive time | one day a month | £1,795 |
| Prodevel3 months’ minimum, then 30 days’ notice | |||
| Starter | £1,500 /month | 2 days a month | £750 |
| Growth | £3,000 /month | 4 days a month | £750 |
| Enterprise | £5,000 /month | 6 days a month | £833 |
| SoftWeb“six months minimum” | |||
| Fractional CTO | £800–1,000 / day | 1 to 3 days a week | £800–£1,000 |
| Drizzlelabs (mine)all prices include VAT; retainer: 3 months, then 30 days’ notice | |||
| Fractional CTO | from £3,500/month | 1–2 days a week | £404–£808 |
| Project work | £1,000–£1,200/day | per day | £1,000–£1,200 |
| AI Readiness Review | £3,500 fixed | two weeks, part-time | — |
A few things stand out.
The middle is lower than the guides suggest. At £925 to £1,000 a day, the median published price sits at the bottom of the £1,000–£1,600 band that many of the pages ranking for these searches repeat. Providers who publish prices may simply be cheaper than those who don’t, so read this as the published market, not the whole of it.
Retainers are cheaper per day than one-off days. CTO on Demand’s retainer works out at about £923 a day against £1,400 for an interim day. 941 prices a day a week at £1,107 against £1,200 for a project day. That discount is the most useful thing to understand about fractional pricing, and it has a reason, which comes below.
Terms vary more than prices. Minimum commitments run from nothing at all to six months, and one provider adds a share of the upside to its fee. Two quotes with the same monthly figure can be very different commitments.
Nobody else states VAT. Not one of the other prices says whether VAT is included. If your company is VAT-registered it can usually reclaim it, but if it isn’t, 20% on top is a real difference. Ask before you compare.
How a day rate becomes a retainer
A month is not four weeks. There are 52 weeks in a year, so a day a week is 52 ÷ 12 = 4.33 days a month. At £1,200 a day, one day a week is £5,200 a month, not £4,800: a £400 gap before anyone has negotiated anything. Several providers’ own sums count four days to the month, and the gap compounds when you turn it into a year.
The same arithmetic explains why annual figures on the pages that rank for these searches disagree so wildly. Four weeks a month or 4.33; 52 working weeks a year or 46, once holidays come out; a day rate or a discounted retainer; one day a week or two. Each assumption is defensible. Stack them in the same direction and you can double an annual figure without anyone telling a lie.
The fix is simple. When you compare quotes, convert each one to a price per day of work, counting days the same way, before you compare anything else. That’s what the “≈ per day” column above does.
How the number is built
From the other side of the invoice, a day rate isn’t plucked from the air. It has to cover, over the days a practitioner can actually sell, roughly what the same person would cost a company to employ. Here is the arithmetic with round, illustrative numbers: not mine, and not anyone’s in particular.
Take someone who could earn £150,000 as an employed CTO. Their employer adds employer’s National Insurance, 15% of everything above £5,000 a year, which is £21,750, and at least the minimum workplace pension, which tops out at £1,320.90. Call it £173,000 a year.
An employee works about 228 days for that: 261 weekdays in 2026, less 25 days’ holiday and the eight bank holidays. So the employer pays roughly £760 per day worked.
An independent can’t sell 228 days. Some of the year goes on finding the next client, some on the gaps between engagements, some on admin, and none of it is paid. Assume 150 billed days, which is an assumption, not a statistic, and the same £173,000 needs about £1,150 a day. Add £7,000 a year for the things an employer would otherwise provide, such as the laptop, the insurance and the accountant, and it’s £1,200. At 140 billed days it’s nearer £1,290; at 160, about £1,125.
So a published rate of £1,000 to £1,300 a day isn’t a premium on a salary. It’s roughly the same salary, spread over fewer days.
The retainer discount follows from the same sum. A client who books a fixed number of days for months at a time takes the selling and the gaps out of the practitioner’s year, so the practitioner can afford a lower daily price. Most of the providers above that publish both kinds of price charge less per day on retainer.
What a full-time CTO actually costs
The comparison everyone makes is with a full-time hire, so it’s worth doing properly. Start with the salary, and notice how much the sources disagree:
- Job adverts tracked by IT Jobs Watch put the median advertised CTO salary at £100,000, from 59 adverts in the six months to 28 September 2026.
- The ONS’s annual earnings survey puts full-time IT directors, a wider group that includes CTOs, at a median of £91,671 across the UK and £108,053 in London (2025, provisional).
- Robert Half’s 2026 salary guide puts the median UK CTO at £160,500, with the middle half between £120,000 and £201,500.
- Robert Walters’ 2026 salary survey puts London CTOs at medium-sized companies on £165,000 to £260,000.
Which is right depends on who you would actually hire. Adverts and the ONS catch a lot of small-company CTOs; the recruiters’ guides describe the people they place, who skew senior and towards London.
Then add what the employer pays on top. Employer’s National Insurance is 15% of salary above £5,000, with no upper limit. The Employment Allowance can take up to £10,500 a year off an employer’s bill, but it’s per employer, not per hire: if your existing payroll already uses it up, a new CTO costs the full 15%. The legal minimum pension contribution adds at most £1,320.90 a year. Then come benefits, which carry their own 15% National Insurance, a recruiter’s fee if you use one, and equity, which deserves a post of its own.
Worked through for two of the salaries above:
| Option | Cost a year | Days of work a year | Cost per day |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full-time CTO on £100,000 | £115,571 | about 228 | about £507 |
| Full-time CTO on £160,500 | £185,146 | about 228 | about £812 |
| Fractional, 1 day a week at £1,000 | £52,000 | 52 | £1,000 |
| Fractional, 2 days a week at £1,000 | £104,000 | 104 | £1,000 |
Two things are true at once. Per day, the fractional CTO is dearer, by somewhere between a quarter and double. Per year, a day a week costs roughly a quarter to a half of a full-time hire, because you are buying fewer days.
You are not buying a cheaper CTO. You are buying fewer days of one. The only question that matters is how many days of CTO decisions your company actually has in a week, and if you aren’t sure, that is a question worth answering first.
A calculator for your own numbers
Put in the day rate you’ve been quoted, the days a week you think you need and the salary you would otherwise pay. It uses the same arithmetic as this post, so the starting values reproduce the table above: £1,000 a day, one day a week, against a £100,000 salary. The last line tells you how many days a week it takes before the fractional bill matches the full-time one.
What moves the price
Within the published range, a handful of things push a price up or down. None of them comes with a reliable percentage, and anyone who quotes you one is guessing, but the direction is consistent.
Commitment and exclusivity. A retainer is cheaper per day than an ad-hoc day. Interim work, a full-time stand-in for a few months that shuts out every other client, sits at the top: CTO on Demand’s interim days start at £1,400, against about £923 on its retainer.
Advice, ownership or hands. Advice alone is cheapest: 941 sells async-only access for £699 a month, and fcto.uk quotes £300 an hour for advisory work. Owning the technical direction, and the delivery that follows from it, costs more. A fractional CTO who also writes the code is doing a different job again, and should price it like one.
Who you’re contracting with. A solo practitioner, a network that places a director with you, a consultancy with a bench behind the person, or an agency that also builds software. The firms carry costs a solo practitioner doesn’t, and offer things a solo practitioner can’t, such as cover if your person leaves. Some also sell the build work that follows their advice. That isn’t a problem in itself, but it’s worth knowing when the advice is to build more; judging an agency’s work from the outside is its own skill.
Sector and stakes. A decision in a regulated product, whether payments, health or gambling, carries more consequence and more paperwork than the same decision in a to-do app. I’ve shipped under UK gambling regulation, where a casual decision comes back later with a compliance bill attached, and people who have lived through that price accordingly.
Where the work happens. Remote work is priced as quoted. Days on site can add travel at cost; 941, for one, says so explicitly.
Cash or upside. At least one provider in the table adds a share of growth to its fee. That can align incentives, but it makes the headline price impossible to compare, and equity deals are a subject of their own; what a co-founder’s stake costs against a fractional retainer is worked through separately.
Day rate, retainer or fixed price
Each model suits a different job.
A day rate suits work with a clear edge: technical due diligence before an investment, an architecture review, a second opinion on an agency’s proposal. You know what you’re buying and when it ends.
A retainer suits ownership: someone accountable for the technical direction week after week, which is what most people mean by a fractional CTO. It’s cheaper per day, for the reasons above.
A fixed price suits a first look. Several of the providers above sell a short, fixed-price assessment before any retainer, from under £1,000 to around £5,000, and some credit the fee against a retainer if you carry on.
Whichever you choose, get these in writing:
- Days, and how a month is counted. Four, or 4.33?
- What happens to unused days. Some providers don’t roll them over. Find out before the first quiet month.
- Access between days. Can you message them on a Tuesday, and how quickly will they answer?
- Who, exactly. The person you met, or whoever the firm assigns?
- Minimum term and notice. Anything from none to six months in this table.
- VAT and expenses. On top or included; travel at cost or not.
- Who owns the work. Documents, designs and code produced during the engagement should be assigned to your company in the contract.
- What you’re left holding. If you stopped in six months, what would stay with you? A vague answer here means dependence later.
Where my prices sit
For completeness: a fractional CTO retainer from £3,500 a month for one to two days a week, three months to start and then 30 days’ notice; project work at £1,000 to £1,200 a day; and a two-week AI Readiness Review at £3,500 fixed. All three include VAT. What each of those includes is set out on its own page.
At two days a week the retainer works out at about £404 a day, which is low against this table, and a low price should prompt questions. The answers are structural. It’s one person, not a firm, so there’s no bench, account manager or placement margin to fund. I take on a small number of clients at a time, alongside the studio’s own products, so the retainer doesn’t have to carry a whole practice on its own. And most engagements start with the fixed-price review, so neither of us commits to a retainer blind.
The corollary: if you need someone three or four days a week, or a team behind the person, several providers in the table are built for exactly that, and I’m not.
How the table was made
- Who’s in it. Providers selling fractional-CTO services to UK companies, priced in pounds, found through the first two pages of google.co.uk for “fractional CTO cost UK” and related searches on 28 September 2026, plus others found while looking for published prices. Many providers publish no price at all, and they aren’t in the table.
- What counts as a price. Only what a provider publishes on its own website for its own service. Not market ranges, not job adverts, not recruiters’ averages, and not the ranges providers publish about the market as a whole.
- How it’s quoted. As written on the day, with a link to the page. Where a provider’s pages disagree with each other, the table quotes the page that sells the service. 941 Consulting’s UK page says it is based in the UK; its site footer says the Netherlands.
- The arithmetic. “≈ per day” is the monthly price divided by the days it buys, with a week counted as 4.33 days a month unless the provider gives its own count, rounded to the pound. Where a provider gives a range of days against a range of prices, I’ve paired the ends.
- What I left out. The widely repeated market bands; a survey page that some guides cite, whose own text says its figures are placeholder estimates; and pages still using the employer’s National Insurance rate of 13.8%, which rose to 15% in April 2025. Job-advert data on CTO day rates is thin as well: IT Jobs Watch’s median UK CTO contract rate, £625, comes from 17 adverts in six months.
Corrections. If you sell fractional-CTO services in the UK and your price is missing or wrong here, email contact@drizzlelabs.ltd with the page and I’ll update the table.
Re-checks. I re-check every row each quarter and record what changed below. The next check is due in December 2026.
Changelog. 28 September 2026: first published, with every price checked that day.
Drizzlelabs is an independent software studio in Bristol, and I offer fractional CTO work, which is why my prices are in the table. The about page has the longer story.
Questions
- How much does a fractional CTO cost per month in the UK?
- Among UK providers who publish their own prices (checked 28 September 2026), one day a week works out at roughly £3,500 to £6,000 a month, and two days a week mostly at £7,000 to £9,600. The smallest packages, a day or two a month, start at around £1,500 to £2,500. Most published prices come to between £750 and £1,250 per day of work.
- Why is a retainer cheaper per day than a day rate?
- Because it removes the unpaid part of a practitioner’s year: finding the next client, the gaps between engagements, re-scoping every piece of work. A client who books a fixed number of days for months at a time takes that risk away, and many providers pass some of the saving back as a lower daily price.
- Are fractional CTO prices quoted with or without VAT?
- Usually the page doesn’t say. None of the other providers in this post’s table states a VAT basis for its fractional-CTO prices. If a provider is VAT-registered and silent, assume 20% on top until they tell you otherwise, and ask. Drizzlelabs’ published prices include VAT.
- Does IR35 change what a fractional CTO costs me?
- It can. If your company is medium or large, you decide whether the off-payroll rules apply and issue a status determination statement, and if they apply you account for tax and National Insurance on the fees. If your company is small, the fractional CTO’s own company makes that call. The rules apply contract by contract, so ask how an engagement is structured before you sign.
- Is a fractional CTO cheaper than a full-time CTO?
- Per day, no. Published fractional prices mostly work out at £750 to £1,250 a day, while an employed CTO on £100,000 to £160,500 costs roughly £500 to £810 per working day once employer’s National Insurance and a minimum pension are added. Per year, one day a week costs about a quarter to a half of a full-time hire, because you are buying fewer days. The real question is how many days of CTO decisions your company has.