Updated October 2026
Schellman CMMC Cost: no published fee schedule
Schellman is one of the few firms accredited across SOC, ISO, HITRUST, PCI, FedRAMP, and CMMC. For SaaS vendors selling to both DoD and commercial customers, the multi-framework bundling produces meaningful efficiency. It publishes no fee schedule, and we do not invent one. This profile covers the strongest-fit scenarios, the Statement of Work levers that move assessor hours, and how to test the bundling claim in a quote.
Vendor profile
Schellman is an independent US CPA firm with a cybersecurity attestation and certification practice that has grown to over 600 staff. The firm holds accreditations across the major information-security frameworks: SOC 1 / SOC 2 / SOC 3 (as a CPA firm), ISO 27001 / 27017 / 27018 / 27701 (through registered certification body partnership), HITRUST (CSF Assessor), PCI DSS (QSA), FedRAMP (3PAO), and CMMC (C3PAO). The breadth is unusual and is the firm's primary commercial differentiator. Verify current CMMC C3PAO authorisation at cyberab.org/Marketplace.
Schellman's reputation in the FedRAMP 3PAO market is strong; the firm has performed a meaningful share of FedRAMP authorisations over the past decade. That federal-cyber muscle memory translates well to CMMC because the underlying NIST control families overlap heavily. Schellman has published several practitioner-facing notes on the CMMC-FedRAMP control mapping and on how the new 32 CFR Part 170 final rule changes the assessment landscape. These public-facing resources are reasonably good signals of the firm's depth.
On staffing, Schellman deploys named Certified CMMC Assessors per the Cyber AB authorisation requirement. The firm has invested in cross-training existing FedRAMP 3PAO assessors to add the CCA qualification, which means CMMC engagement teams typically bring strong federal-cyber experience. For contractors that value depth over price, Schellman is regularly cited as a top-three choice.
What Schellman charges, and why no page can tell you
Schellman does not publish per-engagement pricing, and this page does not estimate it. A figure attached to a named firm's undisclosed fee has no inputs you could check, and it lands with a reader as a Schellman price while being nothing of the kind. Nor will you find a claim here that Schellman sits high or low against its peers: relative pricing between firms that all withhold their rates is not knowable from outside.
What is publishable is the shape of the cost, because every C3PAO prices the same way: assessor hours times a rate. DoD's cost analysis behind the 32 CFR Part 170 final rule, 89 FR 83092 (15 October 2024) models that engagement at 120 assessor hours for a small entity and 200 hours for an other-than-small entity, at $260.28 per hour: $31,234 and $52,056. That is a federal planning figure, not a price any firm has agreed to, but it is the only published anchor. Full workings on the C3PAO cost page.
Testing the multi-framework bundle in a quote
Schellman's commercial case is breadth: one firm carrying SOC 2, ISO 27001, FedRAMP and CMMC on a shared evidence set. That claim is testable without knowing any prices. Ask for the same scope quoted twice, CMMC standalone and CMMC alongside the other framework you need, both expressed as assessor hours by phase. A real efficiency shows up as fewer hours in the combined quote.
- Ask which controls are treated as shared evidence between your frameworks, named individually.
- Ask whether the assessments run on one evidence collection cycle or two.
- Ask what triggers a change order: added assets, added sites, a re-opened finding, a second evidence round.
- Send one identical scope document to two or three authorised C3PAOs. Hours against identical scope is the only comparison that means anything.
For the standalone FedRAMP side of the picture, see the FedRAMP cost sister site.
Where Schellman is the right choice
For SaaS vendors selling to DoD plus commercial enterprise customers, the breadth argument is strongest. A typical pattern: a B2B SaaS vendor needs SOC 2 Type 2 for commercial buyers and CMMC Level 2 because some of its customers are defense contractors. Schellman can carry both attestations with substantial evidence reuse, and the reuse should land as fewer billed assessor hours on the combined engagement than on two separate ones. The overlap grows further if FedRAMP enters the picture, because the underlying NIST control set is the same. Get both options quoted in hours and check that the arithmetic actually favours the bundle.
For managed service providers (MSPs and MSSPs) selling to defense customers and operating their own cloud service, Schellman fits the dual-obligation pattern (FedRAMP for the cloud service, CMMC for the operating organisation) particularly well. The firm's federal-cyber depth means the CMMC team understands the FedRAMP-CMMC inheritance mechanics, which can save 50-100 hours of evidence collection during the CMMC engagement.
For contractors with a Schellman SOC 2 Type 2 already in place, adding CMMC to the existing engagement is almost always cheaper than starting from scratch with another C3PAO. The cost gradient is large enough that some contractors who would otherwise have chosen a different C3PAO end up with Schellman simply because the existing relationship makes the bundling math compelling.
When Schellman is not the right choice
For pure-DoD contractors with no commercial framework obligations and no FedRAMP authorisation, Schellman's bundling advantage disappears, and with it the main reason to prefer a broad firm over a focused one. A boutique C3PAO delivers exactly the same certification: Cyber AB issued, fully recognised by DoD acquisition. Since no firm publishes rates, the only way to find out whether breadth you will not use costs you anything is to put the same scope in front of both and compare the hours.
For very small contractors (under 25 employees, single CUI workload), Schellman's methodology can feel over-structured. The firm runs engagements with the same rigor whether the client is a 10-person sub-contractor or a 500-person prime, which is reassuring for risk-averse clients but can be more process than necessary for the smallest engagements.
For contractors with PCI DSS in the mix but not SOC 2 or FedRAMP, ControlCase's PCI heritage often produces a cleaner bundling story than Schellman's broader portfolio. See ControlCase CMMC cost for that comparison.
Statement of Work levers specific to Schellman
For Schellman engagements the strongest fee-mover is an explicit bundling commitment. A multi-framework Statement of Work that names SOC 2, CMMC and ISO 27001 up front lets the firm plan one evidence cycle instead of several, which is where the hours come out. Pin the shared-evidence scope and the hours in the contract; do not assume a firm will retro-apply an efficiency you did not buy up front.
The second lever is the platform choice for evidence handling. Schellman's preferred platforms include the firm's own client portal and the major commercial GRC platforms. If your organisation has existing investment in a GRC platform, confirm at scoping that Schellman will accept evidence pushed from that platform rather than requiring upload to the Schellman portal. The duplicate-upload labour can be substantial (40-80 hours over an engagement).
The third lever is the timing of the CMMC engagement relative to other framework engagements. Running the CMMC engagement at the same calendar window as the SOC 2 Type 2 reporting period maximises evidence reuse because the same point-in-time evidence satisfies both frameworks. Running them six months apart loses much of the bundling benefit. Plan engagement timing around this.