How much does usability testing cost in the UK?

Typical UK prices in 2026

One round with five participants, remote and moderated, from a UK agency: roughly £5,000–£7,000. Ours is £5,500, with recruitment, participant payments, moderation, analysis and a written report all inside it.

A larger round with eight to ten participants, or two user groups tested side by side: roughly £9,000–£13,000. Ours starts at £9,500.

A programme, meaning test, fix and test again, or work on a regulated product: £15,000 and up. Ours starts at £16,000.

Across UK agencies, a single qualitative study generally lands somewhere between £5,000 and £20,000. Where a particular quote falls in that band has much more to do with the four factors further down this page than with the agency's name or postcode.

Where the money goes

A five-session round is not five hours of work. Here is the time and spend behind one, done properly, whoever does it.

That comes to six to eight and a half days of an experienced researcher, on top of recruitment and the participants' payments. So if a five-session round comes in well under £5,000, ask what has been left out. It is usually the analysis (you get recordings and a few notes rather than findings), the recruitment (you are expected to find the people yourself), or the participant payments (billed separately later).

The four things that push the price up

1. Who you need to test with. Members of the public who use online shopping are quick to find. Clinicians, finance directors, people who use screen readers or people in the first month after a diagnosis are not. Professionals also expect to be paid like professionals: on our panel that runs from £75 an hour for officer level to £200 for directors, and £200–£350 an hour for doctors. Specialist recruitment across the UK market costs between £160 and £400 a head, before the participant's own fee.

2. Testing in person. Some things have to be tested in the room: kiosks, devices, anything physical, or people who would struggle on a video call. Expect to pay £1,400–£1,800 a day for facilitation, venue and travel. Three sessions a day is a sensible maximum, so eight sessions means three days on site.

3. More than one type of user. Five participants is a fair number for one group doing one set of tasks. If patients and clinicians both use the product, or buyers and admins, you need around five of each, which is closer to two studies than one. We cover how to work the number out in how many usability testing participants you actually need.

4. Regulated or clinical products. Health and medical products bring governance, careful consent, safety-related tasks and documentation someone may need to audit later. Our calculator adds 15% for this. Formal human factors validation of a medical device for regulatory submission is a bigger job again, which we price as design validation.

Three worked examples

Each figure below comes straight out of our cost calculator, which uses the same pricing as our service pages. Participant payments are included in every one.

The upper end of each range allows for the things that only become clear once we see the brief, such as a tight screener or a longer session.

Spending less without wasting the study

Get an expert review first. If nobody outside the team has looked hard at the product, a usability test will spend most of its budget showing you problems an experienced reviewer would have spotted in a day. A UX audit starts at £2,500 and clears those out, so the test finds the problems only real users can show you. UX audit vs usability testing covers which to do when.

Buy recruitment on its own. If you have a researcher in-house, recruitment is the part that eats their week. We supply screened participants from £1,500 for six people (£750 setup plus £125 each), with participant payments passed through at cost plus a 12% handling fee. Details are on our participant recruitment page.

Test smaller and more often. Two rounds of five with fixes made in between will usually teach you more than one round of ten, and the first round can be cheaper because it doesn't need to be polished.

Use unmoderated testing for the narrow questions. Platforms that record people working through tasks alone are cheaper per session and fine for "can people complete this?". They are poor at "why did they get stuck?", and someone still has to watch the recordings and make sense of them, which is the expensive part.

Don't save money on who you test with. Testing with colleagues, friends or whoever replies first looks free and gives confident wrong answers. It is the one cut that makes the rest of the spend pointless.

Questions buyers ask us

Do agency prices include paying the participants? Not always, so ask. Ours do, apart from recruitment-only work, where we pass the payments through at cost.

How long does a round take? Five remote sessions usually take two to three weeks from brief to report. Eight to ten sessions take three to four.

Is remote testing as good as in person? For most websites and apps, yes, and it is cheaper and easier to recruit for. In person earns its cost for physical products, for settings that matter (a ward, a shop floor) and for people who find video calls hard.

Does testing in London cost more? Usually, because researcher day rates and venues cost more there. Our published prices are the same wherever the participants are. For in-person work, the day rate falls within the £1,400–£1,800 range depending on venue and travel.