What BitLocker recovery costs. £800 + VAT for a single disk, half on acceptance and half no fix, no fee, and the reason it works this way.

Single-disk BitLocker decryption is £800 + VAT. That covers a single drive: imaging it at the sector level, decrypting the image with your recovery key or password, repairing any file-system damage on the clone, and returning your files on fresh media. It covers both the straightforward case, a healthy drive whose key you hold but which you would rather we decrypted cleanly, and the failed-drive case, where the drive is recovered first and then decrypted.

The price is split in two halves, and the reason is honesty about what we control. The first half, £400 + VAT, is taken when you accept the job, and it is not refunded. It pays for the forensic effort of the decryption and, where needed, the attempt to recover a password or extract a key from memory, work that depends on your key existing or your password being recoverable, not on how hard we try. The second half is on a no-fix-no-fee basis: it is due only if your data is actually recovered. So if the recovery succeeds you pay the whole £800 + VAT; if it does not, you have paid the non-refundable half for the work attempted, and nothing more.

This is different from ordinary hardware data recovery, where the whole fee can be no-fix-no-fee because success depends on fixable hardware. BitLocker breaks that model, because we can image and work on a drive but cannot conjure a lost key or break a strong password, so the forensic effort has to be paid for whether or not it ends in recovery. We set this out plainly before you accept, and the free look gives you an honest read of the odds first, so you are never spending the non-refundable half blind.

When finding your key solves it, you pay us nothing. The most common BitLocker lockout, a machine asking for a key after an update, with the drive perfectly healthy, is solved by entering the recovery key, and that key is free and in your own account or your organisation's directory. We will point you to it before you send anything. No drive, no job, no fee.

When we find it cannot be recovered, you pay nothing. If, at the free look, we determine that a drive cannot be opened, a modern AES-256 drive with a genuinely lost key, no weak password and no memory capture, you are told so with nothing to pay, before you have committed to anything. We do not take the non-refundable half for a job we can see at the outset cannot succeed.

When recovery is attempted and fails, the balance is never due. If you accept a job where recovery is possible but not certain, say a password attack with reasonable but not guaranteed odds, and it does not succeed, you have paid the non-refundable half for the attempt, and the no-fix-no-fee half is not charged. You never pay the full fee for a recovery that did not produce your data.

More than one disk, or a RAID set. The £800 + VAT price is for a single disk, which is what a BitLocker job almost always is: a laptop with one drive. A two-disk system, or BitLocker on a RAID set where the members must be reassembled before decryption, is rare and is quoted as extra on its facts. Tell us how many drives and how they were arranged.

A mechanically failed drive costs the same. A hard disk that is clicking, not spinning up or has failed heads, or an SSD whose controller has died, is recovered within the single-disk price. There is no surcharge for a physical fault: £800 + VAT covers the recovery of the drive and the decryption of the image, however the drive failed.

A soldered-SSD machine. Where the storage cannot be removed, a Surface or similar with a soldered SSD, the whole unit must come in; the work is still a single disk and the price is the same.

In every case the figure is given to you in writing before anything chargeable begins, and nothing starts until you accept. VAT is added to every figure at the standard rate.