What does AI training for staff cost in the UK? Every published price, and the free routes.

Ask six UK providers what a day of AI training costs and you will get answers from under £1,000 to over £4,500, for what looks like the same thing. The difference is almost never the content. It is whether the price is per session or per head, whether it is on your premises or theirs, how many people are in the room, and whether the session ends with something the team keeps. A £980 half day for twenty people and a £2,500 half day for twelve are both defensible; one is £49 a head and the other £208, and which is better value depends on what you needed.

We read every UK provider we could find that publishes a price, recorded the figure, the format and the date, and put them in one table. Then we set them against the official statistics on how much training is actually happening, which turns out to be very little, and against the free routes that government and the large technology companies have committed to. Augustova sells training too, at £1,200 for a half day and £2,000 for a full day, so we are one of the rows, and you should read our advice on what a good session contains with that in mind.

Prices as displayed on the providers’ own pages on 14 September 2026, excluding VAT where the page says so. Several providers we were asked to check either publish no price or have changed since the figures circulating on other sites were written; those are noted rather than guessed. Where a provider states a delegate cap, it is included, because the cap is what turns a session price into a per-head price, and a session for up to 20 at £980 is a different product from one for up to 12 at £2,500.

All figures exclude VAT where stated. Coaley Peak’s free offer had expired two weeks before we read the page. Read on 14 September 2026; prices change, and the provider page is the authority.

The published prices reconcile once you divide by the room. For a team of twelve, a private half day costs £75 a head at Insightful AI, £82 at Elansio, £100 at Augustova, £125 at CodeLeap and £208 at Point Academy. The same twelve people on public courses cost £295 each at Point Academy’s half day, £750 each for QA’s three-hour literacy course, £650 each for a Coaley Peak day and £1,565 each for QA’s leaders’ day. The cheapest public option for twelve people is £3,540; the dearest private half day is £2,500.

That is not an argument that public courses are bad. They suit one or two people who need a specific skill, and they are the right answer for a developer who needs to learn integration rather than a team that needs to learn use. It is an argument that once six or more people need the same thing, a session built around your own work is cheaper per head and lands better, because the examples are your invoices, your client emails and your rota rather than a sample dataset nobody recognises.

The crossover is easy to find for your own team. Take the cheapest public course that covers what you need, multiply by the number of people, and compare with the private session price for the same duration. At Point Academy’s own prices the crossover is nine people: nine public half days at £295 cost £2,655, against a private half day from £2,500. At Insightful AI’s £895 it is two people against QA’s £750 literacy course. Below the crossover, send people on courses; above it, bring the trainer in.

Session prices are the published starting price; providers with lower delegate caps than 12 are excluded. Excludes VAT and staff time.

In June 2025 the Prime Minister announced a target of 7.5 million UK workers gaining essential AI skills by 2030 through an industry partnership, alongside £187 million for TechFirst. By January 2026 DSIT’s AI Skills Boost explainer had restated the goal as 10 million workers by 2030 and reported 1,001,147 course completions according to data shared by eleven industry partners: Accenture, Amazon, BT, Barclays, IBM, Google, Intuit, Microsoft, SAS, Sage and Salesforce. Skills England’s October 2025 announcement said those companies had committed to making high-quality training materials available to workers in businesses large and small, free of charge, over the next five years, and published three tools: an AI Skills Framework across technical, responsible and non-technical domains, a nine-stage adoption pathway model, and an employer readiness checklist.

The Growth and Skills Levy now funds apprenticeship units, short programmes of one to sixteen weeks aimed at specific skills gaps, with the first release covering digital and AI including AI leadership; levy payers can spend their funds on them. Help to Grow: Management remains a 12-week programme with a £750 joining fee, though neither GOV.UK nor the Small Business Charter describes AI content in it. Cosmic, a Cornwall digital skills charity, delivers Google’s AI Professional Certificate with the Good Things Foundation for people in administrative, sales and customer service roles, which is the kind of free route worth checking locally.

The honest summary is that the free materials are real and the framework is useful for deciding what your people need. What they do not do is sit in a room with your team and your data. The DSIT employer survey found the main barrier to AI training was not cost but being unsure what training is relevant, cited by 50 per cent; a free course does not solve that, and a half day with someone who has read your processes usually does. The sensible combination is the free framework to decide what each role needs, a paid session to make it land, and the free courses afterwards for the people who want to go further.

The ONS found in June 2026 that around 35 per cent of UK businesses with ten or more employees used AI, but that only 11 per cent reported more than half of their workforce had received AI-related training. Among businesses that cited a lack of AI expertise as a barrier, around 62 per cent said they were training or retraining existing staff: the most common response to the gap, and still a minority activity overall.

DSIT’s employer survey of 801 UK employers, with fieldwork in spring 2024, found 11 per cent had staff undertake AI training in the previous twelve months, rising to 48 per cent among businesses with AI specialists; 61 per cent had no staff working with AI at all, 56 per cent rated their business’s knowledge as beginner or novice, and 36 per cent were interested in training in future. The barriers were being unsure what training is relevant (50 per cent), lack of time (47 per cent) and cost (41 per cent). The companion summary found only 21 per cent of people felt confident using AI at work. In DSIT’s separate adoption research across 3,500 businesses, 60 per cent cited limited AI skills, expertise or knowledge as a barrier.

The professions are no different. ACCA’s 2025 survey of over 10,000 finance professionals found only 32 per cent said their organisation provided opportunities to learn AI skills. The gap between the 35 per cent of businesses using AI and the 11 per cent that have trained most of their people is where the risk sits: staff pasting client data into consumer chatbots because nobody told them what the rules were.

A good session is aimed at one audience. Developers, managers and leadership need different material, and a mixed room produces a session too shallow for the builders and too technical for the decision makers. It uses your own work: real emails, real documents, real spreadsheets, after agreeing what may be used. It spends at least a third of the time on judgement rather than clicks: how to check an output, when to distrust it, what it costs, and what must never be pasted anywhere. And it ends with an artefact the team owns: a prompt library for the tasks they actually do, a one-page policy on data, and a short written note of what the team can now do and what still needs support.

Avoid a recorded course sold as a workshop, a session built around whichever tool is impressive this month, and any provider whose examples are generic. Avoid, too, the certificate that means nothing to an employer. Insightful AI is right to note that documented evidence of training completion matters for ICO purposes; the value is in the record of what was taught, not the badge.

The other thing to avoid is training everyone at once on everything. Skills England’s framework separates technical, responsible and non-technical skills across three job levels for a reason: the person who approves AI spend needs to judge a proposal, the person who uses the tools needs to judge an output, and the developer needs to integrate and measure. One session cannot serve all three, and a provider who says it can is selling a slide deck.

Take a twelve-person professional services firm where everyone uses email and documents all day and three people manage clients. The fee for a private half day is £895 to £2,500 depending on the provider, or £1,200 from us. The cost most firms forget is the staff time. At the ONS median full-time weekly pay of £766.60 in April 2025, a half day of one person’s time is about £77 and a full day about £153, assuming a five-day week. Twelve people for a half day is about £920 of pay; for a full day, about £1,840.

So a half-day session for twelve costs £1,815 to £3,420 all in, and a full day £3,235 to £6,340. Against that, the ONS reports 62 per cent of businesses with a skills gap are already training existing staff, and the DSIT survey found half of employers do not know which training is relevant, so the choice is rarely between training and not training; it is between a session designed for your firm and a set of free courses nobody finishes.

No published UK study measures the return on AI training for small firms, and we will not invent one. What can be said is that the hours a firm spends on tasks a trained person could do with a tool in a fraction of the time are countable in a week of your own diary, and that a session that saves each of twelve people an hour a week recovers 624 hours a year, or about £12,800 of gross pay at the ONS median. A half day at £1,200 is 59 hours of pay at that rate, so it needs to save each of twelve people about a minute and a half a working day to pay for itself inside a year; at five minutes a day it pays back inside a quarter.

Staff time uses the ONS full-time median of £766.60 a week, taken as £20.44 an hour over 37.5 hours; substitute your own payroll. Break-even assumes 46 working weeks of five days.

A half day is £1,200, a full day £2,000, and a multi-day programme up to £6,000, all fixed and excluding VAT, delivered within three weeks of booking, in person or remote. Every session starts with a short skills assessment and a curriculum written around your own workflows, uses your processes in the exercises, and ends with written materials the team keeps and a short note of what they can now do and what still needs support. We aim each session at one audience: developers, product and operations people, or leadership. We do not sell recorded courses as workshops, and building the thing the team designs on the day is a separate scoped project rather than something hidden in the training fee.

We read every UK provider pricing page cited above on 14 September 2026 and recorded the price, format and delegate cap as displayed. Three figures circulating elsewhere were not on the pages as they stand: Elansio shows no £449 introductory course, Coaley Peak shows £650 per person per day rather than half-day and full-day rates with a minimum of eight, and Ignite AI Solutions’ training day prices could not be found at any live address. Those are left out. Government figures are from GOV.UK pages published between June 2025 and September 2026, and statistics from the ONS and DSIT releases named. Pay is the ONS 2025 full-time median. Staff time and break-even in the worked example are our arithmetic, with assumptions stated. We sell training; our prices are from /pricing.