How Much Does Mobile App Penetration Testing Cost in the UK? (2026 Pricing Guide)

Most penetration testing companies will not publish their prices. You fill in a form, sit through a discovery call, and only then learn whether the quote is £3,000 or £30,000. We think that wastes everyone's time, so this guide sets out what mobile app penetration testing actually costs in the UK in 2026 and what determines where your project lands.

The short answer

A professional mobile app penetration test in the UK typically costs £3,500 to £12,000 per application. Most single-platform tests (iOS or Android) with a supporting API fall between £4,500 and £8,000. Testing both platforms plus the backend usually runs to £7,000 to £15,000.

If someone quotes you well under £3,000 for a full mobile pentest, you are almost certainly buying an automated vulnerability scan with a report template wrapped around it, not a penetration test. Above £20,000, you are either testing a genuinely complex application (banking, healthcare, multi-tenant platforms) or paying a large consultancy's overheads.

How UK pentest pricing actually works

Nearly all UK providers price on a day-rate model. A qualified penetration tester's day rate in 2026 sits between £800 and £1,500, depending on seniority and how the firm positions itself. The quote you receive is simply:

(Estimated testing days + reporting days) × day rate

A typical single-platform mobile app test is scoped at 4 to 8 days. In practice that breaks down along these lines:

• 0.5 to 1 day: scoping, environment setup, build access

• 3 to 5 days: hands-on testing (static analysis, dynamic analysis, API testing, business logic)

• 1 to 2 days: report writing and quality review

So the maths is transparent: 6 days at £1,000 per day comes to £6,000. When you get a quote, ask for the day count. A firm that will not tell you how many days they have scoped is hiding something in the number.

The six factors that move your price

1. One platform or two

An iOS app and an Android app are two different attack surfaces, with different runtime protections, storage mechanisms and reverse-engineering toolchains. Testing both is not double the price, because the shared backend only needs testing once, but expect an uplift of 50 to 70 per cent over a single platform.

2. The backend API

The mobile binary is only half the story. Most serious mobile findings live in the API the app talks to: broken authorisation, insecure direct object references, weak session handling. A test that excludes the API is scoped wrong. A large API with dozens of endpoints and multiple user roles can add 3 to 6 days on its own.

3. Authentication complexity and user roles

An app with one user type is quicker to test than a platform with customers, merchants and administrators, where every permission boundary between roles has to be attacked. Each additional role adds testing time. Privilege escalation between roles is where the high-severity findings usually sit.

4. Methodology and depth

Ask whether the test follows the OWASP Mobile Application Security Verification Standard (MASVS) and its companion testing guide (MASTG), and at which level:

• MASVS-L1: baseline security, appropriate for most apps

• MASVS-L2: defence in depth, appropriate for apps handling sensitive data such as fintech and health

• Resilience (R): reverse-engineering and tamper resistance, relevant where there is client-side IP or fraud exposure

L2 with resilience testing is materially more work than L1 and should cost more. A quote that does not reference any methodology at all tells you the "test" is a scanner run.

5. Retesting

Once you have fixed the findings, someone has to verify the fixes. Some firms include one retest round in the quote; others charge an extra day or two for it. Ask up front. A £5,000 quote with retest included beats a £4,500 quote without it.

6. Compliance drivers

If the test is for ISO 27001, PCI DSS, SOC 2 or a client's supplier due diligence, say so at scoping. Compliance-driven tests need the report structured to satisfy an auditor, and PCI in particular has segmentation and scoping requirements that affect the day count. It is cheaper to get this right at the start than to redo the report later.

What a proper quote should include

When you compare quotes, check that each one covers all of the following. If any are missing, the prices are not comparable:

1. Static analysis of the app binary (decompilation, hardcoded secrets, insecure storage)

2. Dynamic and runtime analysis on real or jailbroken and rooted devices

3. Full testing of the backend APIs the app consumes

4. Authentication, session management and role-based authorisation testing

5. Business logic testing performed by a human tester, not a scanner

6. A report with severity ratings (CVSS), reproduction steps and remediation guidance

7. A debrief call and a defined retest window

Cheap tests are expensive

The most common mistake we see is buying on price alone and receiving a report generated from an automated scan. Those reports miss the vulnerability classes that actually get mobile apps breached, such as authorisation flaws, logic abuse and insecure API design, because scanners cannot reason about what your app is supposed to allow. You then walk into a client security review or an incident with a false sense of assurance. A pentest that finds nothing important is rarely a good result. More often it was a shallow test.

The second most common mistake is over-buying: paying a big-name consultancy £25,000 for a test that a specialist firm would deliver at the same technical depth for £8,000. The tester's skill matters far more than the logo on the report.

How Xium Labs prices mobile app pentests

We test to OWASP MASVS and MASTG, scope in days, and tell you the day count before you sign anything. Every test includes the backend API, a CVSS-rated report with clear remediation steps, a debrief with your engineers and a retest of fixed findings. Our testers come from hands-on offensive security backgrounds rather than audit checklists.

For a scoped quote, tell us three things: the platforms (iOS, Android or both), the number of user roles, and roughly how many API endpoints the app uses. That is enough for us to give you a fixed price within one working day. No discovery-call theatre.

Get a fixed quote for your mobile app pentest

You can read more about our full methodology on our mobile application penetration testing service page.