MSP Market Size: Census Data Puts US Managed IT Services at $140 Billion, Growing 7.5% a Year

The US MSP market size was about $140.2B in 2025 (90% range $124.3B to $156.1B), counting revenue for managing client IT infrastructure and networks plus IT technical support. We built it from the Census Bureau’s 2022 Economic Census product lines and grew it with the Quarterly Services Survey. Add hosting and cloud and it reaches $494.7B.

Search for the size of the managed services market and the top results are paywalled forecasts that disagree with each other by a factor of two. None of them shows its arithmetic. This page does: every number below comes from a public Census file you can download, and every assumption is listed.

The bottom-up build: from one product line to the whole market

The Economic Census asks every sampled business how much revenue it earned from each product it sells, regardless of its industry. That lets us count managed services revenue wherever it shows up, not only at companies that call themselves MSPs. In 2022, US employer businesses earned $31.7B from IT infrastructure and network management services and $81.1B from IT technical support services. Growing each seller’s revenue by its industry’s growth in the Quarterly Services Survey gives the 2025 bars below.

Estimated 2025 revenue in billions of dollars. Blue: managed IT services. Light blue: hosted infrastructure product lines. Grey: hosted applications. Dark bars are running totals. Source: Census Bureau 2022 Economic Census Products by Industry, grown with Quarterly Services Survey revenue by selling industry.

Which bars you count is the whole argument. The narrowest honest definition, outsourced management and monitoring of a client’s systems, is $38.0B. Adding technical support, the help desk, patching, and recovery work in the Census definition, gives $140.2B. Adding web hosting, cloud storage, data management, colocation, and hosted applications gives $494.7B, which includes the US cloud revenue of the hyperscalers and SaaS vendors.

Every product line, with its error margin

CV is the Census Bureau’s coefficient of variation for the 2022 revenue estimate; the 90% range is plus or minus 1.645 times the standard error. Combined CVs assume the two lines’ sampling errors are independent. Growth factors are revenue-weighted QSS growth for the industries that sell each line. Q2 2026 QSS figures are preliminary.

Who actually sells managed services

Most managed services revenue does not come from businesses the Census classifies as MSPs. Establishments in computer facilities management services (NAICS 541513) sold 31% of IT infrastructure and network management revenue in 2022. The rest of the computer services sector (systems design, programming, and other computer services) sold another 29%, cloud and hosting companies 19%, and computer wholesalers and distributors 9%.

Share of each product line’s 2022 revenue by the industry of the selling establishment. Where Census withholds a dollar value but publishes the industry’s percentage share, we use the share. “Withheld” is the remainder Census does not disclose.

Technical support is even more spread out. Software publishers sold 22% of it and cloud and hosting firms 23%: the definition includes “the provision of patches and updates”, so vendor support contracts land here. That is a reason to treat $140.2B as the market MSPs compete in, not the revenue MSPs already earn. For the businesses classified as MSPs, the two managed lines are the core of the business: in 2022, 541513 establishments earned 41.2% of their $23.8B revenue from infrastructure and network management and 22.8% from technical support. Our MSP industry statistics track the jobs, wages, and establishment counts in that industry every quarter.

Is the MSP market growing?

Yes, but at single digits. The two managed IT lines grew from $76.2B in the 2017 Economic Census to $112.8B in 2022, 8.2% a year. Infrastructure and network management grew faster than support, 55% against 46% over the five years. Hosting and storage grew much faster still, so any definition that includes cloud grows faster too.

Product line revenue, all sectors, employer establishments, 2017 and 2022 Economic Census. Hollow dot 2017, filled dot 2022. Product definitions are unchanged between the two censuses (Census 2022-to-2017 NAPCS concordance). Data storage and application service provisioning have wide 2022 error margins (CVs of 37% and 24%). “Other IT infrastructure provisioning” has no comparable 2017 line.

From 2022 to 2025 we have no product-line data, so we grow each line with the Quarterly Services Survey revenue of the industries that sell it. Those industries grew at very different speeds, which is why cloud-heavy lines grow faster in our build:

Census Quarterly Services Survey, total revenue of employer firms, not seasonally adjusted, sum of four quarters. Q2 2026 is preliminary.

A cross-check: if instead each managed line kept growing at its own 2017 to 2022 pace, the 2025 total would be $142.9B, within 2% of our estimate. Both methods put growth near 8% a year. Revenue for computer systems design as a whole, the subject of our IT services industry growth report, rose 16.3% from 2022 to 2025.

Why the market reports disagree

The managed services market reports that rank highest in Google for this topic quote headline numbers from about $200 billion to over $500 billion for the world, and $71 billion to $161 billion for the US. For 2026 alone, the highest US estimate is 2.3 times the lowest. Here is what each says, read from its own public page in October 2026:

Numbers as published on each page, retrieved October 2026. JumpFactor’s page, also ranking for this query, refused automated access and is not quoted. Technavio publishes a growth increment rather than a market size.

US-scope estimates only (red), against the 90% range of the Census-based 2025 build (blue band) and the core-only line (dashed).

Three things drive the gap. Scope: global figures cannot be compared with US figures; Grand View Research itself puts the US at 26.5% of the global market. Definition: MarketsandMarkets counts managed infrastructure and data center, network, security, communication and collaboration, and mobility services, categories that overlap the hosting and data center lines we keep out of the $140.2B figure. Year and method: base years run from 2023 to 2026, and the public pages do not show the calculation; MarketsandMarkets, for example, lists its source as secondary research, interviews with experts, and its own analysis. The Census build sits inside the range of US estimates: above Mordor, Grand View, and Fortune, below MarketsandMarkets. The two lowest US estimates fall between our core-only figure and our managed IT figure.

Assumptions, in full

1. Managed IT services = two Census product lines. IT infrastructure and network management services (NAPCS collection code 7014450000) plus IT technical support services (7014475000). Technical support includes some break-fix and vendor support work, so this is an upper bound for recurring MSP-style revenue; the core line alone is the lower bound.
2. Employer businesses only. The Economic Census and QSS exclude nonemployer sole proprietors and government IT departments.
3. Growth by seller. Each seller’s 2022 revenue is grown by its industry’s QSS revenue change from 2022 to 2025 (sum of four quarters). Sellers outside QSS coverage (wholesale trade, manufacturing, other) and withheld cells are grown at the line’s average for QSS-covered sellers. This assumes each line grew as fast as its sellers’ total revenue.
4. Error margin. The range reflects Census sampling error in the 2022 benchmark only. It does not include error in the growth assumption, which the cross-check above suggests is a few percent.
5. No forecast. The latest figure is the four quarters through Q2 2026. We do not project beyond published data.

What this means for MSPs

Use $140.2B as the US addressable market for managed IT and $38.0B for pure infrastructure and network management, and plan on growth near 8% a year rather than the roughly 10% to 15% that most of the commercial reports above project. Your competition is wider than other MSPs: in 2022, software vendors, cloud and hosting providers, and IT distributors together sold more managed infrastructure and support than establishments classified as MSPs. When a vendor deck cites a “$400 billion managed services market”, ask whether it is global, whether it includes cloud hosting, and what year it is for. For where these firms are located, our IT services firms by state atlas maps every computer services establishment.

Frequently asked questions

How big is the MSP market in the US?

About $140.2B in 2025, by our count of 2022 Economic Census revenue for IT infrastructure and network management services ($31.7B) and IT technical support services ($81.1B), grown to 2025 with Census Quarterly Services Survey revenue for the industries that sell them. The 90% confidence range is $124.3B to $156.1B.

How fast is the managed services market growing?

About 7.5% a year from 2022 to 2025 on our method, and 8.2% a year between the 2017 and 2022 Economic Censuses, when the two lines rose from $76.2B to $112.8B. That is slower than the 10% to 15% compound growth rates in most commercial reports.

Why do managed services market size estimates differ so much?

They measure different things. US estimates for 2026 range from $71.14 billion (Mordor Intelligence) to $161.06 billion (MarketsandMarkets), a 2.3x spread, and the firms define the market differently: MarketsandMarkets, for example, counts data center, network, security, communication and collaboration, and mobility services. Global figures add other countries and are not comparable with US figures.

How many companies sell managed services in the US?

31,264 establishments reported revenue from IT infrastructure and network management services in the 2022 Economic Census, and 55,765 reported IT technical support revenue. Of the core-line sellers, 5,833 were classified in NAICS 541513, the industry code most associated with MSPs.

Do MSPs sell most managed services?

No. Establishments classified as computer facilities management services (NAICS 541513) sold 31% of IT infrastructure and network management revenue and 13% of the two managed IT lines combined. Software publishers and cloud and hosting firms sold 38%, much of it support contracts for their own products.

What counts as managed services in Census data?

The Census product line “IT infrastructure and network management services” covers managing and monitoring a client’s hardware, software, and networks, remotely managing IT security systems, and day-to-day operation of a client’s computer system. Help desk, patching, and disaster recovery fall under IT technical support services.

Methodology

References

1. U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census bulk data, sector 00 (EC2200NAPCSPRDIND, EC2200NAPCSINDPRD). Accessed October 2026.
2. U.S. Census Bureau, Economic Census: Products by Industry Statistics for the U.S.: 2022. Accessed October 2026.
3. U.S. Census Bureau, 2017 Economic Census bulk data, sector 00 (EC1700NAPCSPRDIND). Accessed October 2026.
4. U.S. Census Bureau, Quarterly Services Survey time series. Accessed October 2026.
5. U.S. Census Bureau, Quarterly Services Survey historical data. Accessed October 2026.
6. U.S. Census Bureau, North American Product Classification System (definitions and 2022-to-2017 concordance). Accessed October 2026.
7. Grand View Research (US) market report page. Accessed October 2026.
8. Mordor Intelligence (US) market report page. Accessed October 2026.
9. Fortune Business Insights (US) market report page. Accessed October 2026.
10. MarketsandMarkets (US) market report page. Accessed October 2026.
11. Grand View Research (global) market report page. Accessed October 2026.
12. Mordor Intelligence (global) market report page. Accessed October 2026.
13. Fortune Business Insights (global) market report page. Accessed October 2026.
14. Business Research Insights (global) market report page. Accessed October 2026.
15. Market Research Future (global) market report page. Accessed October 2026.
16. MSP Alliance (global) market report page. Accessed October 2026.
17. JumpCloud (global) market report page. Accessed October 2026.
18. Technavio (global) market report page. Accessed October 2026.