What this costs
if you do it yourself.

Wherever you trade, somebody has to read the rules, write the documents and keep the records. Here is what that costs when it is one of your own people doing it, against what we charge to do it for you — in every market we write for.

718

pages of law to read
before anybody writes a word

12

documents that then
have to exist

162

hours of your staff's time,
before the first renewal

Every published figure below carries its source. Every estimate we have made is labelled as one, with the reasoning, so you can disagree with it and redo the sum.

First, find out which rules apply.

Not a summary of them — the instruments themselves. A summary is somebody else's judgement about what mattered, and it is your business that carries the consequence if they were wrong.

The instruments below are the ones behind a United Kingdom framework, counted page by page from the official PDFs so you can check every one in about ten seconds. Every market has its own list; ours are counted, never estimated.

718 pages, at 10 an hour 72 hrs

That excludes the regulator's guidance, which is not law but is how the law is enforced, and it excludes working out which parts apply to a business of your size.

Then 12 documents have to exist.

Knowing the rules is not compliance. Compliance is a set of documents saying what your business does, and records proving it did. Every one of these would be written from nothing:

  1. 1 UK GDPR Gap Analysis for AI Tools
  2. 2 AI Acceptable Use Policy
  3. 3 Employee AI Guidelines — Practical Dos and Don'ts
  4. 4 Self-Assessment against the ICO's AI Guidance
  5. 5 Compliance Roadmap
  6. 6 Data Classification Matrix
  7. 7 Data Access Request and Justification
  8. 8 Data Access Register
  9. 9 AI Test Cases — What to Check Before You Trust It
  10. 10 Where a Person Must Look
  11. 11 GDPR Compliance Position
  12. 12 Employee AI Policy Acknowledgement Form
12 documents, at 7.5 hours each 90 hrs

That is the rate of somebody who already knows what belongs in a gap analysis. The reading above is counted separately because the person doing this does not yet.

And then it never stops.

A framework written once and left alone is worth less than none at all: it is a signed document stating that your business does things it has stopped doing. Two jobs run for as long as the business does.

15

records a year

The control schedule names the evidence for every promise your policy makes. Somebody produces each one, files it, and knows when it has gone stale.

24

dated milestones to watch

Across the jurisdictions we cover. Commencement dates shift, and a date missed is the entire risk you were managing.

Every year, for as long as you use AI 76 hrs

What an hour of your staff's time actually costs.

Salary is the number every business owner has in mind, and it is never the number they pay. The median full-time salary in the UK is £39,039. Add employer's National Insurance and the minimum pension and the same person costs £45,129 a year.

Take off the statutory 5.6 weeks of holiday and they are available for 1,740 hours. One hour of their time: £25.94.

Getting it in place

£4,196

Your own staff — 162 hours of their time

£797/year

Ops Intel — in your inbox by the end of the business day

Every year after

£1,982

Your own staff — 76 hours a year

£797/year

Ops Intel — renews annually, legal updates included

Getting it in place costs about 5 times more in staff time than buying it, on assumptions chosen to be unflattering to us.

And the second pair is not flattering us either. Those in-house hours cover keeping records and watching the law — they do not include rewriting the documents when the law moves, which the renewal does include. The honest comparison is better for us than the bars show. We would rather publish the number we can defend.

There is also one thing no amount of staff time buys: if the work is wrong, it is your own member of staff who was handed a job they were never trained for.

Every market, every framework.

The shape of the job does not change wherever you trade: somebody reads the rules, somebody writes the documents, somebody keeps the records. What changes is which statutes you are reading, how many documents your framework runs to, and what it costs.

So the same arithmetic runs for all of them — your own staff's hours at £25.94 each, against our price:

Australasia AI Compliance pages being counted
  • Foundation 6 documents 45 hours in-house — £1,167+ £797/year
  • Complete 11 documents 83 hours in-house — £2,140+ £1,497/year
Canada AI Compliance pages being counted
  • Foundation 9 documents 68 hours in-house — £1,751+ £797/year
  • Complete 14 documents 105 hours in-house — £2,723+ £1,497/year
EU AI Act Compliance 144 pages of law
  • Foundation 10 documents 89 hours in-house — £2,319 £997/year
  • Complete 14 documents 119 hours in-house — £3,097 £1,997/year
Far East AI Compliance pages being counted
  • Foundation 6 documents 45 hours in-house — £1,167+ £797/year
  • Complete 11 documents 83 hours in-house — £2,140+ £1,497/year
Middle East AI Compliance pages being counted
  • Foundation 6 documents 45 hours in-house — £1,167+ £797/year
  • Complete 11 documents 83 hours in-house — £2,140+ £1,497/year
UK + EU Combined Compliance Framework 862 pages of law
  • UK + EU Combined Compliance Framework 24 documents 266 hours in-house — £6,904 £2,400/year
UK AI Compliance 718 pages of law
  • Foundation 12 documents 162 hours in-house — £4,196 £797/year
  • Complete 19 documents 214 hours in-house — £5,558 £1,297/year
US AI Compliance pages being counted
  • Foundation 9 documents 68 hours in-house — £1,751+ £797/year
  • Complete 14 documents 105 hours in-house — £2,723+ £1,497/year

Every hour figure is what it takes to write that framework's documents and keep its records — both counted from the framework itself, so they are real for every market and every tier. Where a row is marked +, the reading is not in it yet: we have measured some of those statutes and will not publish a partial list as a whole one. Those rows are therefore understated, and the true figure is higher than the one shown — never lower.

The four numbers you can argue with.

The page counts, the salary, the National Insurance and the pension are published facts, cited below. These four are our judgement — the only arguable part of the sum, which is why they are here rather than buried inside a total.

10 pages an hour reading speed for primary legislation
Generous. It assumes a straight read with no cross-referencing to a second Act, which is not how any of these are written.
7.5 hours to write one document
A full day of somebody who already knows what belongs in a gap analysis. The reading time above is counted separately because the person in this comparison does not yet.
2 hours to produce and file one piece of evidence
Per item the control schedule calls for, not per document. The schedule asks for 15 a year.
1 hour a week to keep up with changes in the law
The least it can honestly be. 24 dated milestones sit in our register and they move.

Every published figure, and where it came from.

Read on 17 September 2026. If one of these has moved since, the arithmetic above is out of date, and we would rather you told us than trusted it.

  • Median gross annual pay, full-time employees, April 2025 (provisional) Source ↗
  • Employer's Class 1 National Insurance rate, 2025/26 Source ↗
  • Secondary threshold — employer NI starts above this Source ↗
  • Minimum employer pension contribution under automatic enrolment Source ↗
  • Lower limit of the qualifying earnings band, 2025/26 Source ↗
  • Statutory paid holiday entitlement Source ↗

Or skip all of it.

12 documents, written against your own answers and the law as it stands today. in your inbox by the end of the business day.

See what is in the framework
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