The help desk is the first thing a business outsources. 8.3% of US providers name one.

Limitations

• This measures what providers publish about themselves, not what they operate. A firm running a full desk that never names it is counted in the 91.7%.
• Services are on file for 35,431 of the 39,366 published firms. Every share against the full directory is a floor, and an unknown counts against the share, per the directory's denominator rule.
• Service labels come from provider sites and are matched to a controlled vocabulary. "Help Desk" in the headline includes equivalent help desk and service desk labels: 3,268 firms, or 8.3%. The wider 15.0% figure additionally includes general support services.
• The service-line bar chart counts the specific Help Desk label, one service per bar, so the Help Desk bar reads 7.9%, or 3,117 firms, rather than the headline's broader 8.3%. Both are measured against the same 39,366. The Co-managed IT bar uses 1,860 firms, which is also the figure used in the co-managed section.
• The pricing comparison rests on 20 help-desk providers and 330 others. It is quoted per firm, taking each firm's cheapest tier, restricted to rates published as per user per month between $10 and $500. A twenty-firm median is indicative only and should not be cited as a market rate.
• We cannot measure hours of cover. Only 36 firms in the whole directory carry a 24/7 token in their service list, which reflects how our extraction reads service lines rather than how many providers offer after-hours support. No claim about round-the-clock coverage is made from it.
• Rating, certification and headcount shares inside the help-desk group are quoted against the 3,268; the directory comparisons are against all 39,366. The two bases differ and are labeled wherever they appear.
• Median headcount is computed over the 1,969 help-desk firms that publish one and the 31,739 directory-wide firms that do. 1,299 help-desk firms publish no headcount at all. It is not a market average.
• Measured from 39,366 published firms on 2026-09-22 in one consistent directory snapshot. Older cards on this site are frozen at earlier totals (39,864 for 2026-09-15, 39,722 for 2026-09-11, 39,351 for 2026-09-03) and were not rebased for this one. A card's total is stated on its own face by design.

What to do with this

• Buying: ask for the hours and the headcount behind the desk before anything else. 60.6% of the providers that publish both are under ten people, which is a fine answer during business hours and a different conversation at 2am.
• Selling: 8.3% of the market has claimed this in writing, and 95.4% of them used one word to do it. Adding "help desk" to your services list is the cheapest available move in this category.

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