PagerDuty costs $21 per user per month on Professional and $41 per user per month on Business when billed annually, or $25 and $49 billed monthly. The free plan covers up to 5 users and 100 international phone and SMS notifications a month. Enterprise is quoted. The number most buyers miss is that PagerDuty does not monitor anything: it has no checks, no probes and no synthetic tests, so the paging bill is only half the cost of being told your site is down.
That last point is the one worth settling before you compare tiers. PagerDuty is an incident response platform. It receives an event from something else, decides who is on call, escalates when that person does not acknowledge, and keeps a record of what happened. Every one of those jobs is valuable, and none of them detects an outage. If you are pricing PagerDuty because you want to be woken up when the site goes down, you are pricing one of two products you need.
PagerDuty pricing 2026: the full rate card
These are the list prices published on PagerDuty's own incident management pricing page, read in September 2026. All figures are US dollars per user per month.
| Plan | Annual billing | Monthly billing | Annual saving per user | User limit | SMS and phone |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | None | Up to 5 users | 100 a month, total |
| Professional | $21 | $25 | $48 | No cap | Unlimited global |
| Business | $41 | $49 | $96 | No cap | Unlimited global |
| Enterprise | Custom, contact sales | Not published | No cap | Unlimited global | |
The annual discount is exactly 16% on both paid tiers, which is unusually consistent. Professional saves $4 a user a month and Business saves $8, which is where PagerDuty's own "save $48" and "save $96" claims come from. Both check out.
Professional also includes 1,000 one-time PagerDuty Advance AI actions, Business includes 5,000 and Enterprise includes 20,000. Those are one-time allocations rather than monthly refills, so treat them as a trial allowance rather than a running budget.
The free tier ends at 5 users and the step is steep
PagerDuty's free plan is genuinely usable: full alerting, schedules, escalation policies and 100 international phone or SMS notifications a month, for up to five people. The moment you add a sixth, the whole account converts to a paid plan and every user is billed, including the five who were free the day before.
On Professional annual that sixth engineer takes you from $0 to $126 a month, which is $1,512 a year. On Business it is $246 a month, or $2,952 a year. This is the single largest step in PagerDuty's pricing and it lands on small teams at exactly the point where they start growing. If you are at four responders and hiring, budget for it now rather than discovering it in a renewal conversation.
What PagerDuty actually costs per year
Per-user-per-month numbers are hard to reason about at team scale. These are annualized list prices, before any add-ons and before enterprise discounting.
| Responders | Professional annual | Professional monthly billing | Business annual | Business premium over Professional |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | $1,260 | $1,500 | $2,460 | $1,200 |
| 6 | $1,512 | $1,800 | $2,952 | $1,440 |
| 10 | $2,520 | $3,000 | $4,920 | $2,400 |
| 25 | $6,300 | $7,500 | $12,300 | $6,000 |
| 50 | $12,600 | $15,000 | $24,600 | $12,000 |
Business costs almost exactly double Professional at every headcount, because $41 is close to twice $21. That is the clearest way to frame the upgrade decision: you are not paying a premium for Business, you are paying for a second copy of Professional, and the features it adds (service dependencies, deeper analytics, unlimited API access, single sign-on) need to be worth that much to you.
The add-ons are where the quote grows
PagerDuty sells several capabilities separately from the seat price, and it does not publish rates for most of them. The figures below come from third-party pricing trackers and buyer guides rather than from PagerDuty, so treat them as a planning range and get your own quote in writing.
| Add-on | What it does | Reported pricing (third party) |
|---|---|---|
| Status pages | Public or private customer-facing status page | Around $89 a month |
| AIOps | Event correlation and noise reduction, licensed per accepted event | From roughly $699 a month |
| Stakeholder licenses | Read-only access for people who need updates but not pages | From about $150 per 50 stakeholders a month |
| Live call routing | Phone number that routes an inbound call to on call | Not published |
| Automation | Runbook and process automation | Separate product line, quoted |
Add a status page and stakeholder licenses to a ten-person Business plan and the $4,920 annual baseline becomes something closer to $8,000 before anyone has run an AIOps event through it. Enterprise bundles premium status pages, stakeholder licenses and live call routing into the seat price, which is often why teams end up there.
PagerDuty does not detect anything, and that changes the total
This is the part the tier comparison hides. PagerDuty's product is the response, not the signal. It integrates with hundreds of sources and it needs at least one of them to be sending events, which means a monitoring tool, an APM, a log platform, or a script you maintain. Buying PagerDuty without a detection layer gives you an excellent on-call rotation that nothing ever triggers.
So the honest question is what the pair costs. A five-person team that wants both external availability checks and proper escalation is looking at PagerDuty Professional at $1,260 a year plus whatever the detection tool costs. If the detection tool already includes escalation and unmetered SMS, the second line item may not be necessary at all at that team size. Our alerting and escalation is on the Team plan, and the wider question of which layer to measure is covered in our comparison of availability monitoring tools.
Where PagerDuty earns its price is at scale and complexity: dozens of services with different owners, follow-the-sun rotations, service dependency mapping so one database failure does not page nine teams, and event correlation across a dozen signal sources. None of that is replaceable by a monitoring tool's built-in notifications, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Routing the right work to the right owner is its own discipline, which is why the same problem shows up outside engineering too and gets solved by automatically routing each request to the right person rather than by a shared inbox.
Three worked bills
A four-person startup. Free plan, $0. Four responders is inside the cap, and 100 international phone or SMS notifications a month covers a quiet service. The risk is that the allowance is account-wide, not per user, so one noisy week can exhaust it. Cost for the year: nothing, until you hire.
A ten-person platform team. Professional annual, $2,520 a year. Unlimited SMS and phone, unlimited escalation policies, unlimited schedules. Add a status page at roughly $1,068 a year and the real figure is closer to $3,600. This is the most common shape and it is where PagerDuty is straightforwardly good value against building rotations by hand.
A fifty-person engineering org on Business. $24,600 a year in seats alone. Service dependencies and analytics are usually the reason, and at that size they are worth paying for. Add AIOps and the quote passes $33,000. At this point list price stops being the right number and you should be negotiating, because PagerDuty discounts multi-year commitments.
Is PagerDuty worth it?
Below about six responders, usually not, because the free plan covers you and a monitoring tool with built-in escalation covers the rest. Between six and twenty, it depends entirely on whether you have more than one on-call rotation. Above twenty, or with more than a handful of services that have distinct owners, it is the category standard for a reason and the alternatives get thin quickly.
What it will not do, at any price, is tell you sooner. Detection speed is a property of your monitoring interval, not of your paging tool, so if your checks run every five minutes then PagerDuty receives the event five minutes late no matter which tier you bought. That trade is worked through in our guide to how often to check uptime, and the practical rotation side in on-call rotation best practices.
Does PagerDuty have a free plan?
Yes. The free plan supports up to 5 users with unlimited email and push notifications, schedules and escalation policies, plus 100 international phone and SMS notifications a month across the whole account. It is one of the more generous free tiers in incident management, and the cap is on people rather than on features, which is unusual.
How much does PagerDuty cost per user?
$21 per user per month on Professional and $41 on Business with annual billing, or $25 and $49 billed monthly. Every person who needs to be paged consumes a full license. Stakeholders who only need to read updates can be put on cheaper stakeholder licenses, reported at around $150 per 50 stakeholders a month, which is the main lever for keeping the seat count down.
What is the difference between PagerDuty Professional and Business?
Business roughly doubles the price and adds service dependency mapping, richer analytics, unlimited API access, single sign-on and a larger PagerDuty Advance allowance. Professional already includes unlimited SMS and phone notifications, unlimited schedules and unlimited escalation policies, so the upgrade is about modelling a complex service estate rather than about getting alerts through.