We do this math with prospects often enough that it is worth writing down once, with the real numbers, so the conversation can start from facts instead of impressions. The question is always some version of: should we hire a CISO? And the honest answer, for most of the small and mid-size businesses that ask us, starts with what the role actually costs.

The base number, precisely.

Salary.com's benchmark for the Chief Information Security Officer role in the Phoenix metro puts the average base salary at $380,591, with a range from roughly $310,618 at the 10th percentile to $464,982 at the 90th. That is base salary alone, in Phoenix specifically. Phoenix is a major metro but not at the top of the national compensation table; in San Francisco, New York, or Boston the same role runs higher.

We cite the exact figure deliberately. "About $380K" is close enough for a headline but the precision matters in the room, because the next number is derived from it and rounding compounds.

The fully-loaded number.

A salary is not what an employee costs. The U.S. Small Business Administration's own guidance puts the fully-loaded cost of an employee at 1.25 to 1.4 times base salary, once benefits, payroll taxes, and overhead are included. That multiplier is not an insurance-industry construct or a consulting talking point; it is the federal small-business agency's stated rule of thumb.

Apply it to the Phoenix CISO base. $380,591 multiplied by 1.25 to 1.4 is $475,739 to $532,827 in fully-loaded annual cost. That is before any bonus or equity. The IANS Research and Artico Search 2025 CISO Compensation Benchmark, which measures total compensation rather than base, shows how much higher the all-in number runs at scale: technology-sector CISOs averaged $844,000 in total compensation, financial-services CISOs $744,000, with the benchmark reporting a 6.7% year-over-year increase in 2025.

So the honest cost range for a credible full-time CISO is roughly half a million dollars at the Phoenix base, fully loaded, and substantially more in higher-paying sectors and metros. That is the number on one side of the math.

The number on the other side: what an SMB actually consumes.

Here is the part of the conversation that most hiring discussions skip. The cost of a full-time CISO is a fixed annual line. The question is whether the business consumes a full FTE of CISO judgment. For most of the small and mid-size organizations we work with, it does not.

A CISO's work at an SMB is real but finite: own the risk assessment, set the security strategy, handle the cyber insurance renewal relationship, run vendor risk, maintain the incident response posture, report to leadership or the board, and be the senior judgment in the room when something goes wrong. Add it up honestly for a 40-person professional services firm or a 15-person medical practice, and the consumption is typically somewhere between a few hours a month and roughly twenty. It is not zero. It is also not 2,000 hours a year.

When the consumption is a fraction of an FTE, a full-time hire is not a credential decision. It is an over-buying decision. You pay for half a million dollars of capacity and consume a fraction of it, because the org chart of larger companies suggested the role should exist.

Where the fractional number comes from.

The alternative is not "go without senior security judgment." It is "buy the amount you actually consume." Cynomi's August 2025 vCISO cost guide puts the full-time CISO at approximately $300,000 per year all-in as its baseline, and states that fractional vCISO services cost 30% to 70% less than a full-time hire, with retainers running from about $2,600 to $11,600 per month depending on scope.

That range maps cleanly to actual SMB consumption. A practice that consumes five to ten hours of CISO-level work a month does not need a $500,000 fixed cost; it needs a defined retainer that delivers the credential, the judgment, and the deliverables at the cadence the business actually uses. The fractional model works economically because the senior practitioner amortizes across multiple engagements. Each client gets the right slice of a senior person rather than the wrong fraction of a full FTE.

This is the model we run. We are not neutral about it, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise on our own blog. But the math above is not ours; it is Salary.com's, the SBA's, IANS's, and Cynomi's. The conclusion follows from their numbers, not our pricing.

The honest test.

The question to put to the math is not "should a company like ours have a CISO?" It is "how much CISO capacity does our business actually consume?"

  • If the honest answer is more than roughly thirty hours a month, and the business has the regulatory or operational profile that requires constant availability of senior security judgment, the full-time hire becomes defensible. The fully-loaded half-million is buying something the business consumes.
  • If the honest answer is five to twenty hours a month, the full-time hire is over-buying. The fractional retainer delivers the same credential and judgment, sized to what the business uses, at 30% to 70% less.

Most of the SMBs that ask us the question fall in the second category. They came in expecting a debate about whether they could afford a CISO. The actual answer is that they were about to buy far more CISO than their business consumes, and the cost of the excess is the $380,591 base, fully loaded, that they would have paid for capacity they would never use. The math is not complicated. It just rarely gets done with the real numbers before the decision gets made.