En bref : CyberSecure Canada certification cost comes entirely from the accredited certification body you hire, not from any government fee schedule. CAN/DGSI 104 is Canada’s national standard for baseline cybersecurity controls in small and medium organizations. The Standards Council of Canada has overseen the program since 2023, and what a certification body charges moves with your size and scope.
Search « CyberSecure Canada certification cost » and you land on two kinds of pages. The government page describes the program in plain terms and names no number anywhere on it. Almost everything else that ranks is written by a managed service provider hoping to sell you the remediation work behind the certificate, which is a real conflict of interest whether or not the page admits it. Factero holds this certification itself and sells no managed services, so there is no upsell hiding in this answer. Readers who work in French can find the same breakdown in Combien coûte une certification CyberSécuritaire Canada ?, the reference page for that keyword on our site.
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How much does CyberSecure Canada certification cost, and who sets the price?
Nothing, directly: no government office charges you for CyberSecure Canada certification. Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) launched the program, but ISED has not been its program authority since March 31, 2023. The Standards Council of Canada (SCC) now holds that role, and the certificate itself is issued by a private certification body (a CB), not by a government office.
The SCC, the federal accreditation body, sets the accreditation requirements and maintains the directory of CBs allowed to audit and certify against CAN/DGSI 104. Each accredited CB is a separate business. It sets its own fee schedule, quotes you directly, and collects payment from you, not from the SCC.
That single fact explains why a search for a fixed number turns up nothing official: there isn’t one to find. Calling two or three accredited bodies for a quote is a reasonable afternoon’s work, not a research project.
For the mechanics of the certification itself, beyond price, our guide to CyberSecure Canada certification covers the full process. It is currently published in French only.
What did it actually cost to get CyberSecure certified?
Factero has held CyberSecure Canada certification against CAN/DGSI 104 since April 19, 2026, and the certificate is verifiable on IAF CertSearch, the public registry run by the International Accreditation Forum (IAF). That is first-party experience, not a number copied from a competitor’s landing page.
We are not going to hand you a single total and pretend it applies to your company, because it would not: the same audit costs a different company a different amount. What we can say, having lived through it, is where the weight actually fell, from smallest to largest:
- The certification body’s audit fee, the smallest of the three.
- Closing the handful of real gaps that internal review turned up before the CB ever opened the file, the middle cost.
- The internal time our own team spent pulling together evidence for each control area: policies, configurations, logs, records that already existed but were not assembled in one place. This was the largest cost, by a wide margin.
We told that story control by control in our own CAN/DGSI 104 certification, told from the inside (also French only for now). If your documentation and access controls are already in reasonable shape, expect your own experience to look similar: the certification body’s invoice is rarely the number that surprises a leadership team.
None of this means the audit fee is trivial. It is a real line item, invoiced once for the initial certification and again at every renewal cycle. It is simply not the biggest number in the file for most companies, and any cost conversation that starts and ends with « what does the CB charge » is asking only part of the question.
Why does the CyberSecure Canada audit fee vary between certification bodies?
Three factors move the number a CB quotes you: the size of your organization, the scope of what you are certifying (one office versus several, on-premise systems versus cloud services, one product line versus your whole operation), and the CB’s own pricing model. Some price by employee count, some by the number of systems in scope, some by a flat baseline plus complexity add-ons.
Fee ranges circulate online from third parties, but treat them the way you would treat a stranger’s quote for a kitchen renovation: a starting point for a conversation, not a number to budget against. The only reliable figure is the one a specific accredited CB puts in writing for your specific company, after you tell them your size and scope.
CyberSecure Canada certification cost breaks down into four components:
| Cost component | What drives it | Who sets the number |
|---|---|---|
| Certification body audit fee | Company size, scope, the CB’s own pricing model | The certification body |
| Internal evidence-gathering hours | How mature your existing documentation and controls already are | Your own team |
| Gap remediation before the audit | How far your current state is from the standard’s baseline controls | You, with or without outside help |
| Renewal audit | What has changed since the last cycle, and eventually Rev 2 | The certification body again |
Get quotes from more than one accredited CB before you commit. Nobody sends you their price list unprompted.
What is the hidden cost nobody quotes: your own team’s hours?
A CB’s quote covers the audit: the hours their auditor spends reviewing your evidence and testing your controls. It does not cover the hours your own people spend producing that evidence in the first place.
For a small or mid-sized organization without a dedicated security function, that preparation work usually falls on whoever already wears the IT and operations hats, on top of their regular job. None of it shows up on the certification body’s invoice, and all of it takes real hours away from other work:
- Asset inventories that need updating, not a spreadsheet from two years ago.
- Backup and patch records that need pulling together in one place.
- Access control lists that need a real review, not an assumption that they are current.
Counting those hours honestly, before you start, is the single most useful thing a leadership team can do to avoid an unpleasant surprise partway through the file.
Some companies choose to bring in outside help specifically for this stage, not for the audit itself but for the gap assessment and documentation work that precedes it. That is a legitimate cost decision, and it belongs in the same conversation as the CB’s fee, not as an afterthought discovered halfway through the process.
Did the certification actually pay off for us?
Nobody can promise you a return on a compliance certificate, and any firm that does is selling you something, not informing you. We will not do that here.
What we can say plainly: some procurement processes and RFPs (requests for proposals) in Canada already name CyberSecure Canada or CAN/DGSI 104 as a requirement or a scored criterion, particularly from public-sector and larger enterprise buyers. For a company that already sells into procurement-driven clients, the honest way to frame the certification is closer to the cost of staying eligible to bid than an investment with a calculated payback period. Whether that math works for your company depends on how much of your revenue already runs through that kind of buyer, and that is a question only you can answer.
There is a quieter payoff too, harder to attach a figure to. Going through the file forces a company to actually look at its own backups, its own access controls, its own incident response plan, often for the first time in years. Some of that work would eventually happen anyway, after an incident made it unavoidable. Certification just moves the timing forward, on your terms instead of an attacker’s.
What changes when Rev 2 lands, for renewal costs?
Renewal costs under Rev 2 are not yet settled, because the revision itself is not finalized. CAN/DGSI 104’s revised version, referred to as Rev 2, went through a public consultation that closed in May 2026; whether it has been published by the time you read this, and exactly what it changes in the control set, is worth confirming directly with your certification body before you budget a renewal.
A standard revision can shift what evidence an audit expects without changing the program’s basic cost structure. The CB still sets its own fee. Your own team still does the evidence-gathering work. Build that uncertainty into your renewal planning rather than assuming next year’s audit looks identical to this year’s.
How do you get a real number for your company?
No search engine can name your exact CyberSecure Canada certification cost. Getting a real number takes three steps, in order.
- Read the current CyberSecure Canada program page directly, rather than a summary of it, and confirm your organization fits the program’s scope for a small or mid-sized organization.
- Pull the Standards Council of Canada’s current list of accredited certification bodies and request a written quote from at least two or three, not just the first one a search engine surfaces.
- Ask each CB directly what a renewal costs and how the Rev 2 revision, once finalized, is expected to affect that price, before you sign anything.
Factero holds this certification itself, sells no managed services, and has nothing to gain from talking you into a bigger project than you need. If a client or an RFP has just put CAN/DGSI 104 in front of you, you can book an exploratory call to get a straight read on your likely gap and the kind of quote you should expect.
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Frequently asked questions
Does the Canadian government charge for CyberSecure Canada certification?
No. Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) launched the program, but the Standards Council of Canada (SCC) has been its program authority since 2023 and accredits the certification bodies that carry out the actual audits. The fee you pay goes to the certification body you hire, not to any government office.
Is CyberSecure Canada the same thing as CAN/DGSI 104?
CAN/DGSI 104 is the national standard itself, the document that defines the baseline cybersecurity controls a small or mid-sized organization has to meet. CyberSecure Canada is the certification program built around that standard, so the two names describe the same certificate from two different angles: the technical standard and the program that audits against it.
How can I verify that a company is really CyberSecure Canada certified?
Search the company’s name on IAF CertSearch, the public registry run by the International Accreditation Forum. A genuine CyberSecure Canada certification against CAN/DGSI 104 shows up there with the certification body that issued it and the certificate’s current status. If a vendor claims the certification but you cannot find it in that registry, ask directly for the certificate number and the certification body’s name before relying on the claim.
Does CyberSecure Canada certification come in levels, like « level 1 »?
CyberSecure Canada certifies against one national standard, CAN/DGSI 104, and the program’s own pages do not describe separate certification levels. If a certification body, a vendor, or an internal document you have seen uses a « level 1 » label, confirm directly with that certification body what the label refers to before relying on it. The status that matters is what shows up on the public IAF CertSearch registry.
