3CX publishes UK pricing in GBP, ex-VAT, on a per-system per-year basis. The system is sized by Simultaneous Calls (SC), not by user count. Recommended user-to-SC ratio is 5:1 to 7:1, so a 35-user UK office typically needs 8 SC.
| SC band | Users (recommended) | BASIC / yr | PRO / yr | AI / yr | + 3CX-hosted / yr |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8 SC | 16–40 | £250 | £330 | £480 | £245 |
| 16 SC | 41–80 | £500 | £660 | £910 | £245 |
| 24 SC | 81–120 | £685 | £910 | £1,245 | £830 |
| 32 SC | 121–192 | £845 | £1,125 | £1,490 | £830 |
| 48 SC | 193–288 | £1,245 | £1,660 | £2,075 | £830 |
| 64 SC | 289–384 | £1,685 | £2,240 | £2,690 | £1,245 |
Prices ex-VAT, sourced from 3cx.com/ordering/pricing/pricelist, snapshot May 2026. Multi-year discount (10/15/20% off 1/2/3-year) applies to the licence column. 3CX-hosted column is excluded from the multi-year discount.
SMB FREE (up to 10 users, max 3 free subscriptions per account) is fully free with feature limitations — no call recording, no advanced queues, no CRM integration. Most UK SMEs upgrade to PRO when those features become needed; BASIC is rarely picked because the feature gap to PRO is small relative to the licence delta.
The full UK cost stack (licence + hosting + SIP + handsets + setup + support) for a typical 35-user firm lands between £200 and £300 per month all-in. See our line-by-line honest-pricing page for the full decomposition.
3CX is the PBX software. Outbound and inbound calls flow over SIP trunks bought from a separate provider. The UK SIP market is mature and consolidated; the providers below cover the overwhelming majority of UK SME deployments.
SIP pricing in the UK lands at roughly £2.50–4.00 per channel per month at wholesale, £4–10 per channel per month at end-customer retail, plus per-minute call charges (typically zero for inbound; £0.005–0.02 per minute outbound to UK landlines and mobiles). Managed providers usually bundle SIP into the monthly fee. We mark up modestly and itemise on the quote rather than bury it — see honest pricing.
3CX runs a partner programme with five public tiers: Registered, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and Titanium. Tier signals licence-discount level, training depth, and operational scale.
The tier signals what level of licence discount the partner can pass to you, plus operational maturity. It does not signal customer support quality directly — a Gold partner with 20 happy customers and tight processes will often serve you better than a Titanium partner with 200 customers and a saturated support queue. The right question to ask a UK 3CX provider isn't "what tier are you?" but "what's your average time-to-first-response for a customer support ticket, and what's your hosted infrastructure SLA?"
Full breakdown: how to evaluate UK 3CX partners.
Openreach is closing the UK analogue PSTN network in staged regions, completing nationally by end of January 2027. Any business still on traditional copper lines (PSTN) or ISDN30 needs to migrate to a SIP-based system before their local exchange's deadline. 3CX is one option; full-stack cloud services (RingCentral, 8x8, Vonage UK) are another. See our PSTN switch-off guide for the full timeline and migration sequence.
UK call recording is governed by the UK GDPR (post-Brexit successor to EU GDPR) plus PECR (Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations). For inbound calls, you must inform the caller that the call may be recorded and state the purpose. For outbound business-to-business calls, the same applies. 3CX PRO and above include recording with retention policies, redaction support, and access controls; we configure these as part of any managed deployment.
For regulated sectors (legal, healthcare, financial services), keeping call recordings and CDR data on UK-located infrastructure simplifies audits. 3CX-hosted typically provisions in Frankfurt or Amsterdam; UK residency is achievable on partner-managed deployments where the partner runs UK infrastructure. Port Phones hosts in DigitalOcean's London (LON1) data centre — recordings and call data never leave UK soil.
Three buyer profiles dominate UK 3CX deployments:
Yes. It's one of the two or three most-deployed business PBX platforms in the UK SME segment (10–250 users), competing primarily with RingCentral, 8x8, and the legacy Mitel / Avaya / Cisco hardware market that's still migrating to cloud. 3CX vs RingCentral covers the SaaS comparison; legacy hardware migrations are covered in switch from your provider.
Yes. Licence and 3CX-hosted are both self-service from 3cx.com with UK GBP pricing and UK invoicing. You'll still need to source SIP, handsets, and any porting / training separately. About 5–10% of UK deployments are fully DIY; the rest go through a managed partner.
£6–10 per user per month all-in for a 25–80 user firm on PRO is the realistic UK SME band. Below that, the partner is probably under-supporting you or quoting on a licence-only basis with hidden support charges. Above that — particularly above £12/user/month — the partner is probably over-spec'ing the SC count or burying margin in opaque "Cloud Hosting" line items. See honest pricing for the typical decomposition.
Number porting is the procedural part: a UK number port from BT or another carrier to your new SIP provider takes 2–4 weeks, including the Letter of Authorisation, the technical hand-over date, and the cut-over weekend. Hardware migration is usually swap-out: old IP phones (Polycom SoundPoint, Mitel 5300-series, Cisco SPA) sometimes work with 3CX with manual provisioning, but cleaner to install new Yealink or Snom handsets pre-cut-over. See switch from your provider for the standard sequence.
The AI tier (16+ SC) provides Teams direct routing — your users dial out and receive calls inside the Teams client, with 3CX handling the actual call routing underneath. Often cheaper than buying Microsoft Teams Phone Standard plus a UK calling plan from Microsoft directly. A dedicated 3CX vs Microsoft Teams Phone comparison is coming in Stage B of our content plan; in the meantime, our 3CX vs RingCentral page covers the same SaaS-versus-3CX framing.
We're a managed-3CX provider for UK SMEs, operating from Poole, Dorset (HQ) and Canary Wharf, London. We sell the full stack — licence, UK-hosted infrastructure (London data centre), Gamma SIP trunks, Yealink handsets, porting, install, training, and support — at £6–10 per user per month with a transparent line-by-line quote, not a per-user marketing number.
If you're researching 3CX for a UK business, start with the plain-English explainer. If you're already evaluating providers, our honest-pricing page shows you exactly what the cost stack should look like — so you can audit any quote (ours or anyone else's) line by line. Book a free audit and we'll give you a transparent quote against your real numbers.