A Texas freight brokerage pays $150 to $175 per user per month for fully managed IT in 2026, or roughly $45,000 a year at 25 people. A 3PL with a warehouse pays less per head.
Fully managed IT runs $150 to $175 per seat for a Texas freight brokerage, $145 to $165 once you pass 50 people, and less per head at a 3PL where part of the workforce stands on a dock. The reason brokerages look expensive is not the rate. It is that 84 percent of the workforce sits at a desk. Budget the seat count, not the headcount.
Most IT quotes a freight brokerage gets are priced like a trucking company’s. That is the whole problem. A 50-truck carrier and a 50-person brokerage look identical on a headcount line and nothing alike on an invoice, because one of them has 9 people who need a real workstation and the other has 50. Our maritime and logistics IT support in Houston page covers what that work involves day to day. This one is about the number.
Ask three Texas providers to quote a 3PL and you get three shapes. Per user. Per device. Per site. Flat. None of them will tell you which employees they counted, and that single decision moves the annual figure by tens of thousands of dollars.
I have watched a 42-person brokerage get quoted like a 42-person law firm. Twice. Both times the provider was not gouging anybody. They just applied the only model they had. So here is the freight version, built from federal wage data on the exact industry code brokerages file under, plus the rate card we publish rather than quote.
What managed IT costs a Texas freight brokerage or 3PL in 2026
Managed IT for a freight brokerage or 3PL is a fixed monthly fee per supported user that covers the help desk, monitoring, patching, backup, identity and a baseline security stack across the TMS, the load boards, email and the office network. In Texas the unit is almost always the seat. Not the device. Not the site.
Rates come from our 2026 Texas MSP Pricing Index. It is built from live quotes in three metros, not from a national survey somebody rounded off before publishing it, which matters here because freight rates in Houston and freight rates in Fort Worth are not the same number. Fully managed sits at $125 to $225 per user. Most small and mid-sized firms land at $150 to $175. Co-managed runs $75 to $100. Uprite publishes $138 per user per month for maritime and logistics work, printed on the page instead of held back until a discovery call. That is deliberate.
Two columns below, because a brokerage and a 3PL do not bill the same way. The brokerage column assumes every employee needs a full workstation, which is close to true. The 3PL column assumes 14 percent of the workforce is on shared handhelds and dock terminals, billed at $45 to $60 rather than the full seat rate, which is the split we see on almost every warehouse floor we walk.
| Headcount | Freight brokerage, annual | 3PL with a warehouse, annual | Per-user rate applied |
|---|---|---|---|
| 12 people (the Texas average) | $21,600 to $25,200 | $19,900 to $23,300 | $150 to $175 |
| 25 people | $45,000 to $52,500 | $41,000 to $48,000 | $150 to $175 |
| 50 people | $87,000 to $99,000 | $78,600 to $90,180 | $145 to $165 |
| 100 people | $156,000 to $168,000 | $141,400 to $153,000 | $130 to $140 |
Stare at the 50-person row. Same headcount, same rate card, and an $8,400 to $8,800 annual gap that exists purely because 7 of those people carry a scanner instead of a laptop. Nobody negotiated that. Seven scanners. It fell out of the org chart.
Rates step down with size for a boring reason. Onboarding, documentation and vendor management are mostly fixed, so they spread thinner across more seats. The curve is real. It flattens fast, and it stops helping anybody around 120 users. We traced that same curve, minus the freight overlay, in our look at what a 25, 50 and 100-person Texas company pays.
Why a brokerage pays almost 5 times what a carrier pays per employee
Here is the number nobody publishes. Freight brokerages, forwarders and agents file under NAICS 4885, freight transportation arrangement. Trucking companies file under 484. Pull the May 2025 occupational mix for 4885 from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the shape of the industry falls out immediately.
| Occupation group | Freight arrangement (NAICS 4885) | Truck transportation (NAICS 484) |
|---|---|---|
| Office and administrative support | 47.1% | 10.2% |
| Management | 12.5% | 4.4% |
| Business and financial | 11.1% | 2.2% |
| Sales | 10.7% | 1.2% |
| Computer and mathematical | 2.6% | 0.3% |
| Desk-based subtotal | 83.9% | 18.3% |
| Transportation and material moving | 13.9% | 75.2% |
83.9 percent against 18.3 percent. Read that gap again. It is a 4.6x difference in the share of payroll that needs a supported workstation, a licensed mailbox, an identity, a backup and a seat on the security stack.
Run it forward. A 50-person brokerage bills roughly 50 seats, so $87,000 to $99,000 a year. A 50-person carrier bills roughly 9 desk seats, so $15,660 to $17,820 on the same rate card. Same rate card. Different business. The carrier is not getting a deal, it is buying a different product, mostly fleet telematics and mobile device management, priced against a fleet rather than against a floor of workstations. But if your provider learned the trucking model first and never adjusted, you get quoted against an industry you are not in.
One honest correction. The 4885 code lumps freight forwarders and customs brokers in with truck brokerages, so a pure domestic brokerage will sit above 84 percent and an asset-light 3PL below it. Use it as an anchor. Then verify your own mix.
The average Texas freight brokerage is 12 people, and that changes the answer
Texas had 3,143 private freight arrangement establishments employing 36,462 people in 2025, according to the BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages. Divide it out. The average Texas freight brokerage employs 11.6 people.
Texas also carries 79 percent more of these firms per capita than the national average, on a location quotient of 1.79 for establishments, which is the highest concentration of any large-population state in the country. Establishments grew 1.8 percent last year and employment grew 3.0 percent. Average pay climbed 5.5 percent to $75,630. Small firms. Lots of them. The industry is growing and the companies inside it are staying small.
Now the part that decides your staffing question. Computer and mathematical occupations are 2.6 percent of employment in 4885. That is 1 IT person for every 38 employees in the industry. At 11.6 people, the average Texas brokerage needs 0.3 of an IT person. Zero point three.
You cannot hire 0.3 of an engineer. You can hire 1 and overpay for the 70 percent you do not use, or hire nobody and route tickets to whoever answers, which is how a dispatcher becomes the accidental sysadmin somewhere around month four. Both happen constantly. The third option is buying the fraction, which is the entire argument for the per-seat model and, yes, the model we sell. Bias disclosed. The arithmetic is still the arithmetic.
Metro-level numbers below, because the mix is not the same across Texas.
| County | Freight arrangement firms | Employment | Average firm size | Average annual pay |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Harris | 590 | 8,812 | 14.9 | $105,318 |
| Dallas | 253 | 4,916 | 19.4 | $80,263 |
| Tarrant | 182 | 3,408 | 18.7 | $78,782 |
| Bexar | 84 | 747 | 8.9 | $66,418 |
| Texas statewide | 3,143 | 36,462 | 11.6 | $75,630 |
The line items that never make it into the IT budget
Every brokerage owner I talk to can quote the managed IT number to the dollar and has no idea what the rest of the stack costs. So the budget looks fine right up until renewal season drops three invoices in the same week. Three at once. Every year.
Here is a full-year technology budget for a 25-person Texas brokerage, with the managed IT fee sitting inside it rather than standing alone.
| Line item | Annual low | Annual high | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fully managed IT, 25 seats | $45,000 | $52,500 | $150 to $175 per user, Texas MSP Pricing Index |
| Microsoft 365 Business Premium | $6,600 | $7,920 | $22 annual commitment, $26.40 billed monthly |
| Transportation management system | $4,200 | $24,000 | $350 to $2,000 per month, published Descartes Aljex range |
| Load board subscription | $1,908 | $5,388 | DAT One Express $159 to Office Broker $449 per month |
| Cyber liability insurance, $1M limit | $1,500 | $3,600 | Typical small business premium |
| Redundant connectivity with failover | $3,600 | $9,600 | Fiber primary plus 5G backup, Uprite planning range |
| Total | $62,808 | $103,008 | $209 to $343 per employee per month |
Managed IT is 51 to 72 percent of that total. Read that ratio twice. The lever most owners pull first, squeezing the provider fee, moves maybe a tenth of the real spend while quietly removing the thing that keeps the other five lines running.
Software prices are public where the vendor publishes them. DAT lists broker plans from $159 to $449 per month. Descartes Aljex publishes a $350 to $2,000 monthly range and notes that on-premise TMS licenses start around $50,000 with annual maintenance running at 15 to 20 percent of the license cost every year after that. Microsoft 365 Business Premium holds at $22 per user per month on an annual commitment.
Four more items belong in a first-year budget rather than a recurring one.
- Onboarding, usually 1 to 3 times the monthly managed fee, so $3,750 to $13,125 at 25 seats
- EDI or API build-out to a new trading partner, typically 5 to 10 business days per partner
- Replacing whatever workstations are past 5 years old, which on a brokerage floor is usually a third of them
- The $75,000 BMC-84 surety bond, which is not IT but competes for the same cash
Why a Houston customs brokerage carries a bigger archive bill than a Dallas truck broker
Two federal clocks. Three years, then five. Two very different storage bills.
A domestic property broker keeps a record of each transaction for 3 years under 49 CFR 371.3, showing compensation received, the payer, any non-brokerage services performed and the freight charges collected. Every party to the transaction has the right to review that record.
Customs brokers and importers of record keep records for 5 years from the date of entry under 19 CFR 163.4. Electronic formats are allowed if they meet generally accepted business standards. A low bar. A surprisingly common one to fail.
67 percent more archive years, on documents that are heavier to begin with because entry packets carry attachments. If your firm does both domestic brokerage and customs work, and plenty of Houston firms do, you inherit the longer clock across the whole retention policy rather than trying to segregate two archives on two different schedules. That is the correct call. It also costs more, so plan for it.
Wage data hints at the same split. Harris County freight arrangement pay averages $105,318 against Dallas County’s $80,263, a 31 percent gap inside the same NAICS code. QCEW does not break out customs brokers. Corroboration, not proof. But a forwarder and customs-heavy mix around the Port of Houston explains that gap better than anything else on the table, and it lines up neatly with the heavier compliance load those firms carry. Our ranking of IT providers for Houston Ship Channel and port logistics firms gets into who around the channel actually documents this work.
What freight fraud adds to the number
Numbers first. This is where a pricing guide stops being about price.
Highway’s Q2 2026 Freight Fraud Index puts communication-based attacks at 50 percent of all classified fraud vectors, up from 42.7 percent in Q1. Compromised inboxes. Spoofed email. Account takeover. Impersonation calls. The company blocked 784,201 fraudulent inbound emails in the quarter, 48.5 percent more than the quarter before, and intercepted 109,995 spoofed calls. Brand impersonation attempts jumped 282 percent.
So your fraud problem is a mailbox problem. Not a gate problem. Read that twice, because it reframes who owns the fix.
The Q1 2026 index put industry-wide freight fraud at roughly $18 million a day, with 22 percent of brokers losing more than $200,000 in a six-month window and 10 percent spending more than $200,000 on prevention. Meanwhile Verisk CargoNet counted about $725 million in 2025 cargo theft losses across 2,646 confirmed incidents, a 60 percent jump in losses year over year, with the average theft rising 36 percent to $273,990. Q2 2026 losses hit $304.6 million, more than double the same quarter a year earlier, even though incident counts fell.
Fewer thefts, bigger thefts. Strategic fraud scaled while smash-and-grab did not.
None of it is exotic. Phishing-resistant multifactor authentication on email and the TMS. Alerting when a mailbox rule starts quietly forwarding anything with the word invoice in it. Conditional access that refuses a login from a country you do not ship to. Immutable backups. Named accounts with revocation on the day somebody leaves, not the quarter after. Most of that already sits inside a decent managed IT fee, and cyber insurers now treat multifactor authentication, endpoint detection and tested backups as table stakes rather than credits, though carriers commonly hand back 10 to 15 percent for MFA alone.
There is a compliance floor underneath all of it. Texas SB 2610 has been live since September 1, 2025. Any firm under 250 employees that keeps a recognized framework running gets shielded from punitive damages when a breach ends up in front of a judge. A 20 to 99 person brokerage needs CIS Controls Implementation Group 1. Past 100 the bar rises. The floor climbs with headcount, and so does the per-user cost of standing on it. Separately, under 49 CFR 387.307 your $75,000 financial security has to stay intact, with stricter FMCSA enforcement that began January 16, 2026 and a 7-day window to replenish before your operating authority is suspended.
Managed, co-managed, or hire someone
Three models. One right answer per situation, and it moves with headcount more than with budget.
| Model | Cost at 25 seats | Best for | Where it breaks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fully managed | $45,000 to $52,500 a year | Brokerages under 60 people with no internal IT | You stop paying attention and let the provider own decisions you should own |
| Co-managed | $22,500 to $30,000 a year | Firms with 1 internal person who is drowning in tickets | Nobody writes down who owns what, so both sides assume the other is watching |
| In-house hire | $95,000 to $125,000 fully loaded | Firms past roughly 90 people, or anyone running their own TMS servers | One person cannot cover 24 hours, and freight does not stop at 5pm |
Co-managed at $75 to $100 per user is the model most 20 to 50 person brokerages should be looking at and almost none are, because the option rarely gets presented unless somebody in the room already knows to ask for it by name. Ask for it by name. Our page on co-managed IT support for Texas SMBs covers the split in detail.
If you only need somebody twice a year, you do not need any of this. Buy a good backup, turn on MFA everywhere, call it a day. That advice costs me money. It is still the right advice for a 4-person agency.
How to build the number in 6 steps
Do this in order and the quotes you get back will be comparable, which is more than most brokerages manage.
- Count desk seats, not employees. Walk the floor. Anybody with an assigned workstation and a licensed mailbox is a full seat.
- Count shared devices separately. Dock scanners, gate terminals and shop kiosks belong at $45 to $60, not the full rate.
- Write down which retention clock you live under, 3 years or 5, before anybody prices your backup.
- List every system that must not go down during a shift. TMS, load boards, EDI and API traffic to carriers, email, phones. That list is your uptime requirement and it drives the tier. If any of it has to reach a boat, keeping a Gulf Coast barge fleet online runs on a different set of numbers.
- Add the software, insurance and connectivity lines from the table above so you are budgeting technology rather than budgeting a vendor.
- Ask each provider to quote per seat and to state their seat count back to you. If two quotes disagree by more than 10 percent on seat count, one of them misread your business.
Ask step 6 first. It catches more bad quotes than anything else on the list.
Getting this wrong does not cost you the monthly fee. The fee is the small number. A brokerage that loses its TMS for a single shift loses the loads it did not cover, the carriers that went elsewhere for the rest of the week, and the customer who watched the whole thing happen in real time. Our breakdown of how to calculate the cost of IT downtime gives you the formula for your own operation.
Pricing IT for a Texas freight brokerage or 3PL right now? Count your desk seats first, then send that number and your retention clock to two providers and compare per seat. We publish our rate for managed IT services across Texas so you have a fixed point to measure the others against, and the deeper vertical detail sits on our maritime and logistics IT page.
What Texas freight operators ask before they sign
Does a warehouse worker count as a billable IT seat?
Sometimes. At a lower rate. A shared dock scanner or gate terminal should bill at $45 to $60 per month, not the $150 to $175 full seat rate. If a provider bills every warehouse body as a full user, ask them to show you the device inventory that justifies it. At 50 people that single distinction is worth about $8,400 a year.
Why is my TMS not covered by the managed IT fee?
Because the license belongs to Descartes, McLeod or whoever built it, and no provider can resell you their software. What the fee covers is the environment underneath. Servers, workstations, identity, network paths, printer and scanner performance, and the data exchange that keeps your customer status board current. Vendor management of the TMS relationship is usually included. The subscription itself never is.
Realistically, how fast should someone answer when the load board drops at 5am?
5 minutes is our average first response across every ticket, and freight is the vertical where that number earns its keep. Measured, not promised. Ask any provider for their measured average rather than their contractual SLA, because those two numbers are frequently 40 minutes apart. Ask what happens at 5am specifically, too. A lot of after-hours coverage turns out to be a voicemail box with an escalation policy attached.
Will a shipper’s security questionnaire force us to spend more?
Almost always, and the request arrives as a contract clause rather than a regulation. Terminals and large shippers push their own cyber obligations down the chain to the forwarders, drayage carriers, 3PLs and brokers who are not regulated entities themselves and have no obligation on paper until the contract creates one. Budget for documentation, not only tooling. The gap that costs firms an account is usually a missing network map or asset inventory.
What does fraud prevention actually add on top of managed IT?
Between $18 and $34 per user per month at the tiers most brokerages buy, covering advanced email security, conditional access, endpoint detection and immutable backup. Set that against 22 percent of brokers losing more than $200,000 to fraud in six months. It is also the spend that unlocks cyber insurance at a sane premium, since carriers now decline outright without MFA, endpoint detection and tested backups.
We are 11 people. Can we just hire one IT person instead?
The industry math says no. Computer occupations are 2.6 percent of employment across freight arrangement firms, which works out to 1 IT person per 38 employees. An 11-person brokerage justifies 0.3 of a role. You would be paying $95,000 or more fully loaded for coverage that still ends at 5pm and disappears entirely when that person takes a week off. Past roughly 90 people the answer flips.
Is a customs brokerage more expensive to support than a truck brokerage?
Yes, by about 2 years of archive and a heavier document set. Customs brokers and importers of record retain records 5 years from date of entry under 19 CFR 163.4, while domestic property brokers retain transaction records 3 years under 49 CFR 371.3. Longer retention on bigger entry packets means more storage, more backup and a stricter search requirement when CBP asks.
