What Does Compliance Actually Cost? Run the Numbers.

It multiplies a framework-specific labor hour baseline (sourced from published consulting benchmarks and Petronella Technology Group engagement records) by your inputs: employee count, location count, hourly rates, and consultant-versus-internal split. Then it adds your annual tooling line for GRC platform subscriptions. The result is the year-one fully-loaded cost to author the documentation set in-house.

Documentation labor for the System Security Plan (or framework equivalent), policies, procedures, risk analysis, POA&M, evidence checklists, vendor assessments, and training records. Both the in-house side and the ComplianceArmor side cover the same scope of artifacts so the comparison is apples-to-apples.

None of the third-party assessment fees are included on either side. The C3PAO Level 2 assessment ($30K-$50K), CPA SOC 2 audit ($5K-$50K), and PCI QSA Report on Compliance ($25K-$75K) are billed separately by independent assessors. We exclude them on both sides because they are not part of either build path; they are part of the certification path that follows. Petronella Technology Group, Inc. is a Cyber AB RPO and is not a C3PAO, CPA firm, or QSA.

The defaults are $125 per internal staff hour (a typical loaded mid-market IT or compliance staff rate) and $285 per outside consultant hour (the published mid-band for compliance consulting in 2025-2026). Both are user-editable. If your team is loaded at $200 or your boutique consultancy quotes $450, plug in the real numbers and the estimate updates instantly.

Each framework has its own labor baseline. CMMC Level 2 (110 controls) is the heaviest at roughly 700 baseline hours. HIPAA (33 policies) runs around 280. SOC 2 Type I sits near 340. PCI DSS lands around 260. CCPA / CPRA is roughly 210. CMMC Level 1 is the lightest at about 120 hours. CMMC Level 3 (134 controls plus NIST 800-172 overlays) is the heaviest at roughly 1,100 hours.

They reflect the median pattern we see when prospective customers run the numbers honestly. A 50-employee, single-site mid-market company looking at CMMC Level 2 typically estimates $90K-$150K in first-year in-house cost. ComplianceArmor's Tier 1 documentation package starts at $24,997 fixed for the same scope, so the savings on documentation alone are substantial. The calculator will not flatter the buy side — if your scope is small enough, it may show smaller savings, and we will tell you so.

The calculator estimates one framework at a time. For multi-framework programs (HIPAA + SOC 2, CMMC L2 + HIPAA, etc.), the bundled cost is meaningfully lower than the sum of individual estimates because the data inventory, vendor list, training records, and risk assessment are shared. Schedule a demo for a bundled estimate.

Petronella Technology Group has authored these documentation sets hundreds of times over 23 years. The platform encodes that institutional knowledge, so the marginal cost of producing a new package is dramatically lower than the cost of an organization that is doing it for the first time. You receive the same artifacts a senior compliance consultant would author, but the engineering effort to author them was amortized long ago.

No. The calculator runs entirely in your browser. No personal information is sent to a server, no email gate, no marketing automation. When you are ready to talk, the demo request form on the contact page is the only place we collect contact details.