What the US government pays for colocation.

Iron Mountain's GSA schedule: rates by fiscal year

Iron Mountain holds GSA Multiple Award Schedule contract GS-03F-049GA under SIN 518210 ERM, Federal Data Center Colocation Services. The current option period runs through March 9, 2027, and GSA eLibrary shows an ultimate contract end date of March 9, 2037. The published price list sets rates for each government fiscal year in advance, so the current year's number is a matter of public record rather than negotiation folklore.

The cabinet specification, in the contract's own words: FISMA High, cabinet with two 208V 30A circuits (A and B feed), 4.99 kW maximum electrical consumption against a 6.24 kW rating. That is a real, comparable spec, which is what makes these numbers useful as a benchmark.

Source: Iron Mountain GSA price list, Modification 0061, rate tables at pages 141 to 147. Contract status confirmed active in GSA eLibrary. These are published schedule rates, not transaction prices: a task order can be negotiated below schedule. How that rate is billed, committed against metered and the derating that shrinks a circuit, is covered in how colocation power is billed.

Nine carriers, one identical rack spec

GSA's Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions vehicle (GS00Q17NSD3000) publishes awarded unit prices for Colocated Hosting Service by vendor. Every price below buys the same defined thing: a full rack of six shelves at 72 by 19 by 32 inches, including basic power, for the year running October 1, 2025 to September 30, 2026.

Same specification, same buyer, same year, and a 41% spread between the cheapest and most expensive vendor. The prior year is published too, which shows the escalation directly: AT&T was $1,329.11 and MetTel $1,121.29 in the FY2025 band. Note also that the vendor with the highest monthly rate has the lowest install charge, which is exactly the tradeoff a normalized comparison is supposed to catch.

Source: GSA EIS Public Pricer, CLIN CH12003 (monthly) and CH11003 (install).

Cross-connects, circuits and remote hands

The extras are where quotes diverge most, and both vehicles price them explicitly.

The fiber cross-connect line deserves a second look: fifteen times the price from the most expensive vendor to the cheapest, for a physically identical connection. On a deployment with a dozen cross-connects that single line item outweighs the difference in rack rate.

Nine years of federal rack prices for the same spec

The EIS pricer publishes every awarded price back to the start of the contract in July 2017. Nothing else in colocation gives you a nine-year price trend for a fixed, defined specification from named vendors. Here is the full run for the same full rack.

Two things stand out. Seven of the nine vendors moved by an identical 9.5%, which is a contract-wide escalation factor rather than nine separate pricing decisions. Only AT&T and Lumen priced up on their own, and both did it in the first four years of the contract.

Nine and a half percent over nine years is about 1% a year. Set that against commercial market movement over the same period and the contrast is the useful part: a federal buyer who signed in 2017 has absorbed almost no rack-rate inflation, while commercial asking rates in the major metros have moved in double digits year over year recently. Locking a defined spec to a published escalation is worth more than shaving the opening number.

Source: GSA EIS Public Pricer, CLIN CH12003, all available years, retrieved August 1, 2026. Prices include the GSA access fee. The tool's own date range ends September 30, 2026, so no FY2027 rate is published yet. Percentages are ours, calculated from the published figures.

A state's awarded cabinet rates, from a named provider

Everything above is federal. State governments almost never publish what a colocation provider charges them, but Michigan does, because the signed contract itself is posted. This is a commercial operator billing a government at competitively procured rates, which is the only kind of public sector number that reflects an actual market.

The buyer is the Michigan Department of Technology, Management and Budget. The provider is Switch, Ltd., the Nevada operator, and the cabinet identifiers in the contract place the space at its Grand Rapids campus. The contract took effect May 11, 2016 and the cabinet classifications above come from a November 20, 2023 amendment that repriced the estate by cabinet width.

Two details make this more useful than a headline rate. First, the pricing is banded by physical cabinet width rather than by power, which is unusual and worth asking about: a 24 inch cabinet costs 40% less than a 40 inch one for the same facility. Second, the contract is available through MiDEAL, Michigan's extended purchasing program, so other public buyers including local governments, schools and nonprofit hospitals can ride it at these rates.

Source: Michigan DTMB, Lights-Out Co-Location Data Center, contract 071B6600080, rates from the Monthly Recurring Charges schedule in amendment SO-065894. Figures were read directly out of the posted contract PDF. Quantities in that schedule include negative line items where cabinets were reclassified, so the unit costs are the figures to use, not the subtotals.

The same state also publishes what it charges its own agencies

Michigan law requires the same department to file its full fee and rate schedule with the legislature every year. That report shows the other side of the transaction: not what Michigan pays a provider, but what it bills a state agency for space in its own data center. Both housing rates below were unchanged from FY2025 to FY2026.

Do not multiply the $125 by 42 and call it a cabinet rate. That would produce a number several times higher than anything else on this page, and Michigan publishes no cabinet or per-kW line to check it against. The gap between the two housing rates is the tell: switch room space at $9.60 a rack unit is close to what universities charge for bare space, while server housing at $125 clearly carries facility, power and support cost inside it. Quote both, name both, and leave it there.

Source: Michigan DTMB, Section 822(d) Service Rate Report, filed under Public Act 22 of 2025 and dated December 22, 2025. The report carries FY2025 and FY2026 columns side by side with the reason for every change.

Four more states publish a rack rate, and one of them lets cities buy at it

Michigan is not alone. Four other states run their own data center as an internal service fund, which means the legislature or the budget office requires them to publish a rate for every service they bill. A rack is one of those services. These are schedule rates, not negotiated ones, and they are the closest thing in American colocation to a posted price for a defined cabinet.

Sources: Indiana Office of Technology FY27 rate sheet dated August 6, 2026, with the billing period and the physical specification stated in words in the FY27 services catalog; Wisconsin Division of Enterprise Technology rates, non-state rate sheet effective July 1, 2025; California Department of Technology FY2026-27 rate package; North Carolina Department of Information Technology hosting rate schedule. Wisconsin's rate sheet heads its column "Rate" without naming a period, so read those two as monthly with that caveat attached. North Carolina's own marketing page claims "less than $600 per month for a full cabinet"; the rate table says $707.85, and the rate table is the document to quote.

Indiana is the one to know, for three reasons. Its rate sheet carries FY2024, FY2025, FY2026 and FY2027 side by side, and the rack lines are the same number in all four columns: no increase in four years, over a period when commercial asking rents rose about 6.6% in the most recent year alone. Its catalog states exactly what $350 buys, quoted in full: "a server rack and 2 (30Amp) PDU's with fully redundant power feeds that both have UPS and generator backed up included. Cooling. State of the art fire suppression system. A secure facility with 24/7 onsite staff." And the service exists, in the state's own words, to let state agencies "or other municipalities" host racks there. A city or a county can buy at $350.

How government rates compare to commercial pricing

Set the public numbers beside the commercial ones on our colocation pricing page and the picture is consistent rather than contradictory.

• Equinix reported average monthly recurring revenue of $2,538 per cabinet worldwide in Q2 2026, and $2,743 in the Americas. The federal 4.99 kW cabinet at $1,895.96 sits below both, which fits: Equinix's figure is total recurring revenue divided by billed cabinets, so it carries denser deployments and interconnection revenue inside it.
• Published commercial list prices for a full cabinet run roughly $600 to $2,325 depending on metro and power. The EIS band of $1,147 to $1,614 lands inside it.
• At the far end of the same market, the SEC-filed NYSE colocation schedule charges $16,500 a month for a 2 kW partial cabinet at Mahwah, New Jersey. Federal buyers pay roughly a ninth of that ($1,895.96) for two and a half times the power. Both numbers are published; the gap is entirely about latency, not about who negotiates harder.
• Government pricing is not automatically cheaper. It is knowable, which is the actual advantage. A quote you can compare against a published federal rate for a defined spec is a quote you can argue with.

What the public record does not contain

Honesty about the gaps matters more than a longer table.

• No public sector per-kW or per-square-foot rate exists. On EIS, 15 of the 41 Colocated Hosting line items are Individual Case Basis with no published price, and they are precisely the ones that would yield those rates: non-basic power, custom build-out, SCIF space, per-cabinet and per-cage items.
• Federal award records carry no unit pricing. SAM.gov contract data became the sole public federal award repository when GSA decommissioned the public FPDS site and ezSearch on February 24, 2026. It publishes agency, vendor, contract number, dates and aggregate dollars, with no unit price, quantity or line-item detail.
• State and local records are usually silent on price. Tarrant County, Texas lists the value of its colocation contract as "Per Contract Terms." Pennsylvania Treasury's colocation RFP publishes the full rate structure with every dollar field blank.
• Cooperative purchasing schedules do not carry colocation unit rates. A signed contract like Michigan's above shows what a provider actually charges. A purchasing vehicle only lists who is eligible to sell. The obvious place to look is Texas DIR, which runs the largest state IT purchasing program in the country. Its Data Center Services program is a managed outsourcing arrangement rather than a rate card, and the only prices DIR publishes are its own administrative fees: 2.75% of a customer's monthly invoice for data center services, and 1% for staff augmentation. We also checked NASPO ValuePoint, Pennsylvania COSTARS, California CMAS and Virginia VITA. None of them publishes a colocation rate card.
• Only one vendor on the federal records-management schedule sells colocation. SIN 518210ERM lists 121 contractors in GSA eLibrary. We read the full list. Iron Mountain is the only colocation provider on it, so the GSA schedule rates above are not one price among many, they are the price.

Texas DIR fee structure confirmed at the DIR Data Center Services program page. Contractor list confirmed at GSA eLibrary, SIN 518210ERM. If you have seen a state cooperative contract that does publish per-cabinet or per-kW colocation rates, we would like the contract number.

Named public sector colocation contracts

Useful for seeing who buys colocation and from whom, even where pricing is withheld.

Records verified at SAM.gov, the Tarrant County public notice portal, and Pennsylvania Treasury RFP25-002. Historically the FAA bought colocation as a subcontracted line item under FAA Cloud Services contract DTFACT-15-D-00003 (General Dynamics IT, 2015), with Equinix as subcontractor, which is why no per-cabinet rate appears in the prime award record.