Try to find a real price for data recovery online and you’ll mostly find “starting at” numbers, “contact us for a quote,” and horror stories about $2,900 invoices. The opacity isn’t an accident — variable pricing against desperate customers is profitable. So here’s the actual structure of data recovery pricing, including my own numbers.
My pricing
$150 to $500, quoted as a firm flat number after a free evaluation. No hourly rates, no diagnostic fees, and no charge at all if I don’t recover your data. Where you land in that range depends on the failure type:
| Failure type | Typical range at my bench |
|---|---|
| Deleted files, accidental format | $150–$250 |
| Corrupted file system, RAW drive, partition loss | $150–$300 |
| Drive with bad sectors / degraded but readable | $250–$400 |
| Enclosure/USB bridge failures, WD Passport controller issues | $200–$400 |
| Firmware problems, weak heads, light physical cases | $350–$500 |
| Severe physical damage needing cleanroom work | Referred out — honestly quoted by the right lab |
The evaluation is what turns “somewhere in a range” into one number. I look at the drive, determine the failure, and quote the job. You approve it before anything happens.
What actually drives the cost
The failure type, overwhelmingly. A deleted-files job is careful software work on a healthy drive. A weak-head drive is hours of managed imaging on specialized hardware that reads failing drives gently. Those are different jobs, and honest pricing reflects that — which is also why anyone quoting you a precise price without seeing the drive is guessing or baiting.
Time and equipment, not data volume. Whether you need 5GB or 500GB back barely changes my work. Be suspicious of per-gigabyte pricing; your files don’t cost more because there are more of them.
Urgency, sometimes. Rush service exists legitimately, but it should be a choice you make, not a pressure tactic applied to you.
The national lab comparison
The big mail-in operations typically run $300–$700 for logical work and $700–$2,000+ for physical recoveries, plus attempt fees or evaluation fees at some shops. Some of that premium pays for real capability — Class 100 cleanrooms, head-swap inventories — which genuinely severe failures need. If your drive needs that, I’ll tell you and refer you. But most failures aren’t that: the majority of what I see is logical damage, degraded drives, and enclosure failures, and paying cleanroom prices for a file system repair is how a $200 problem becomes an $800 invoice.
Free evaluation. Firm quote before any work. No data, no charge.
The one policy that protects you
Whatever service you choose — me or anyone — insist on no data, no charge. Recovery outcomes are genuinely uncertain, and that policy puts the risk on the person with the equipment instead of the person with the emergency. A shop that charges for failed attempts has no financial reason to be honest with you about your odds. I wrote more about the pricing tricks to avoid in this guide.
The bottom line
Real-world data recovery runs $150–$500 for the large majority of failures at an independent bench, and several times that at national labs whose capabilities most cases don’t need. The number you should never pay: anything, for a recovery that didn’t happen.
Want an actual number for your actual drive? Start a case — describe what happened, and the evaluation and quote cost you nothing.