Enterprise Cybersecurity Budget — How Much Should Companies Spend in 2026?

By [Gammatek ISPL, Industrial Systems & Compliance Analyst at Gammatek ISPL

Last updated: August 2026 | 8 min read

Security spend is accelerating faster than overall IT budgets in 2026 — the question isn't whether to increase it, but by how much.

Why This Number Matters More in 2026 Than It Did a Year Ago

If you're building next year's budget right now, here's the number that should reframe the conversation: global enterprise security spending is on pace to <cite index="4-1">reach roughly $248.9 billion in 2026, up about 12.7% from the year before</cite>. That's not a routine increase — it reflects a market where breach costs, AI-driven threats, and regulatory pressure are all rising faster than budgets were built to handle. If your 2026 security budget looks like a slightly bigger version of 2025's, there's a real chance you're already behind where your peers are heading. This article breaks down exactly what "enough" looks like by industry, where that budget should actually go, and how to build the number your CFO won't push back on.

What Companies Are Actually Spending: The Real 2026 Benchmarks

The honest answer to "how much should we spend" depends heavily on your industry, but the current benchmarks give a real starting point rather than a guess:

Metric	2026 Benchmark
Security spend as % of total IT budget (general)	<cite index="7-1">10-15% of IT budget for most organizations</cite>
Security spend, regulated industries (finance, healthcare)	<cite index="7-1">15-18% of IT budget</cite>
Measured average IT budget share (actual, not target)	<cite index="7-1">10.9% of IT budget in 2025, down from 11.9% in 2024</cite>
Security spend as % of company revenue	<cite index="2-1">roughly 0.69% of total revenue on average</cite>
Spend per employee	<cite index="2-1">around $2,700 per employee on average</cite>
Financial services revenue share	<cite index="2-1">0.8-1.0% of revenue</cite>
Healthcare revenue share	<cite index="2-1">0.3-0.5% of revenue</cite>

Worth noting: that measured average — <cite index="7-1">10.9% of IT budget, down slightly from 11.9% the year before</cite> — is actually the first year-over-year decline in five years, not because companies are cutting security, but because overall IT budgets (driven heavily by AI infrastructure spend) are growing even faster than security spend. That's a gap worth watching, not ignoring — a shrinking share of a growing pie can still mean real exposure if the underlying risk is growing faster than either number.

Where the Budget Should Actually Go

Once you know the total number, allocation matters as much as size. The typical, well-structured enterprise security budget splits roughly: <cite index="7-1">40% to software and platforms like EDR, SIEM, WAF, and identity management, 30% to personnel, 15% to hardware such as firewalls and network appliances, and 15% to outsourced services</cite> like penetration testing and incident response retainers.

Two 2026-specific shifts are worth building into that split before you finalize a number:

• Managed services are absorbing headcount gaps. With <cite index="6-1">a global cybersecurity workforce shortage exceeding 4.8 million professionals</cite>, many companies simply can't hire their way to a fully staffed in-house team — which is why <cite index="6-1">managed security services are growing around 11.1% in 2026, the fastest rate of any services segment</cite>. If your plan assumes hiring 3-4 new analysts next year, have a realistic fallback: outsourced monitoring may be faster to deploy and easier to budget than a hiring plan that stalls.

• "Securing AI" is now its own line item. Gartner recently split this out as a distinct category for the first time, projecting it will <cite index="4-1">grow from 16.3% of relevant spend in 2026 to roughly 20.1% by 2030</cite>, eventually overtaking endpoint protection as the largest security category. If your 2026 budget has no line for securing the AI tools you've already deployed, that's a gap worth flagging now rather than after an incident involving one of them.

Applying This to Industrial and Manufacturing Environments

The benchmarks above are built primarily around enterprise IT — but industrial and manufacturing environments carry two extra cost centers that a generic percentage-of-revenue calculation misses entirely:

1. OT/ICS security is a separate discipline from IT security, often requiring different tooling (network segmentation for legacy equipment that can't run modern agents) and different expertise than a standard SOC provides. Budgeting security purely as "IT spend" risks under-funding the plant floor specifically.

2. Compliance documentation is a recurring cost, not a one-time project. For regulated industrial sectors (pharma, chemical, food manufacturing), the budget needs to cover not just preventing incidents, but proving — continuously, to auditors — that controls are working. This is a cost center that's easy to underestimate in a generic IT security budget template.

In our own work helping industrial clients size their security and compliance budgets at Gammatek, the plants that get this right treat OT security and audit-readiness as their own line items from the start, rather than folding them into a general "IT security" number and hoping it covers both.

A Practical Framework for Setting Your 2026 Number

Rather than picking a percentage out of the benchmarks above and calling it done, walk through this order:

1. Start with your industry's benchmark range (10-12% general, 15-18% regulated) as a floor, not a target.

2. Add a dedicated OT/ICS line if you operate any physical plant, warehouse, or production environment — this is commonly missing from generic enterprise templates.

3. Add a compliance documentation and audit-readiness line, sized to your actual regulatory exposure, not a rough guess.

4. Decide your make-vs-buy split for headcount now, given the current talent shortage — don't budget for hires you may not be able to make in time.

5. Set aside a specific "securing AI" line, even if small, for any AI tools already in production.

The Bottom Line

There's no single correct number — but going into 2026 with last year's percentage and no adjustment for AI security, OT-specific risk, or the widening talent gap is very likely to leave you under-budgeted relative to where the rest of the market is heading. The safer approach is building the number from these five components rather than picking one industry-wide percentage and stopping there.

If your organization operates industrial or manufacturing facilities, sizing your security budget alongside your compliance and audit-readiness requirements — rather than as two separate conversations — is where Gammatek's platform helps teams plan both at once.

See how Gammatek helps industrial teams budget security and compliance together → (https://www.gammateksolutions.com/post/best-enterprise-cybersecurity-platforms-in-2026-palo-alto-vs-fortinet-vs-crowdstrike-pricing), https://www.gammateksolutions.com/post/openai-playground-explained-how-it-works , https://www.gammateksolutions.com/post/fortinet-cyber-security-pricing-2026-firewall-cost-guide