Schellman FedRAMP Cost: What a Schellman 3PAO Engagement Costs in 2026

Schellman & Co. is a Tampa-headquartered assurance and compliance firm that holds a long list of formal accreditations: AICPA peer-reviewed CPA firm, PCI QSA, ISO 27001 certification body, HITRUST CSF Assessor, and FedRAMP 3PAO via A2LA. The firm's commercial position is unusual in the FedRAMP market: most of its revenue comes from commercial assurance work (SOC 2 and ISO 27001 in particular), with FedRAMP as a strategic extension rather than the firm's primary identity. That mix shapes how the firm prices and delivers FedRAMP engagements.

The FedRAMP Marketplace assessor list shows Schellman as the named 3PAO on a substantial book of Moderate-impact authorizations, with a smaller but meaningful presence at High. The firm's authorization volume is enough to give its assessors broad pattern familiarity with commercial SaaS architectures, multi-cloud boundaries, and the inheritance overlap between FedRAMP Moderate and SOC 2 Type II.

The commercial origin matters for buyers. A CSP whose security program was first built to satisfy SOC 2 will find Schellman's vocabulary, control mapping, and evidence expectations familiar. The firm's FedRAMP assessors typically have SOC 2 backgrounds and can move quickly through control families where the CSP has mature SOC 2 evidence already in place. The trade-off is that Schellman's institutional depth on the deepest edges of federal-only territory (FedRAMP Tailored history, DoD IL5 boundary intricacies, certain agency-specific quirks) is shallower than firms whose practice is federally focused. CSPs whose roadmap includes both commercial assurance and federal sales often pick Schellman for exactly this reason: the firm covers the commercial assurance baseline well, and FedRAMP becomes a natural extension.

The Schellman range is generally 10 to 20 percent below the Coalfire band on a like-for-like Moderate scope. Two factors drive that gap. First, Schellman uses some of its lower-cost commercial-assurance senior staff for the parts of FedRAMP testing that overlap with SOC 2 evidence, which reduces the average daily rate across the engagement. Second, the firm's commercial customer base means it can absorb slightly thinner margins on FedRAMP without harming the underlying business, particularly when FedRAMP work cross-sells future SOC 2 renewals.

The biggest cost driver inside a Schellman engagement is the same as with any 3PAO: scope. A CSP that brings a tight authorization boundary, clean control documentation, and inheritance well-described will pay near the bottom of the band. A CSP with sprawling architecture, ambiguous inheritance, and SSP narrative that has not been internally peer-reviewed will see fees climb toward the top of the band even before remediation rework starts. The SSP cost brief covers what good SSP documentation discipline looks like.

A CSP that holds a current Schellman-issued SOC 2 Type II report enters a Schellman FedRAMP engagement with meaningful structural advantages. The firm already knows the CSP's control environment, has tested most identity, change management, and operations controls in the SOC 2 cycle, and has an internal record of the CSP's evidence quality. FedRAMP requires more controls and deeper testing than SOC 2, but the overlap is significant. Practical experience suggests SOC 2 Type II coverage maps to between 40 and 60 percent of the NIST 800-53 Rev 5 Moderate baseline, depending on the CSP's Trust Services Criteria scope.

When that overlap is in place and the assessor is the same firm, three things happen. First, evidence collection is faster: the CSP does not have to re-pull control evidence the firm already has on file from the SOC 2 audit. Second, control mapping is more accurate: the assessor knows where the gaps actually are, not just where the CSP claims they are. Third, audit-time surprises are lower: most of what would have been a "this control is not designed as described" finding in a cold-start assessment is already known and budgeted for remediation before fieldwork begins. The FedRAMP vs SOC 2 comparison page explains the overlap in detail.

The financial value of that consolidation is hard to specify precisely, but CSPs that have run it both ways (SOC 2 with one firm, FedRAMP with another vs both with Schellman) typically describe the consolidated path as saving 15 to 30 percent on FedRAMP remediation cost and 4 to 8 weeks on the overall authorization timeline. The consolidated path is not a silver bullet (a Coalfire-experienced agency sponsor may still prefer a Coalfire SAR), but for CSPs whose commercial assurance is already in Schellman's book, the inertia of consolidation is rational.

Two scenarios push CSPs toward a different 3PAO. First, agency familiarity. If the CSP's sponsoring agency has a strong working relationship with another firm (Coalfire is the most common example), the agency's internal review of the SAR will be faster with the familiar firm. For CSPs racing a fiscal-year ATO deadline, this matters more than the headline fee difference. Second, federal-only depth. CSPs whose roadmap pushes beyond FedRAMP Moderate into DoD IL4/IL5 territory often prefer Kratos / SecureInfo for the deeper SRG context. Schellman performs DoD-adjacent work, but its commercial DNA means it leans less heavily on classified or quasi-classified federal context.

Price-only decisions sometimes also push toward smaller, less well-known firms. The risk in that direction is report quality and agency acceptance: a SAR from an unfamiliar 3PAO often draws more questions from agency AOs and adds weeks to review. Schellman is large enough to be familiar to most agency reviewers, which eliminates that risk without paying the full Coalfire premium.