What a China factory audit costs — and what you are actually paying for

“Factory audit” is used for at least three different services with different prices, and the range you see quoted online is mostly people comparing the wrong two.

The three things people mean

A pre-shipment inspection. Someone visits the factory when your goods are ready and samples them against a specification, usually on an AQL plan. Priced per man-day. This is about the product.

A factory audit / supplier assessment. Someone assesses the facility itself: capacity, equipment, quality-management systems, social-compliance or environmental criteria, often against a client’s own questionnaire or a standard like SMETA. Priced per man-day, often multi-day, often with a report format the buyer specifies. This is about the operation.

A site verification. Someone confirms the entity exists at the address, that the sign and the licence agree, and that production is happening. Priced as a fixed fee. This is about identity, and it is the cheapest of the three because it is the narrowest.

If a quote seems unusually low, check which of these three it is. Usually it is the third being described as the second.

What moves the price

• Man-days. Almost everything in this market is priced by the day, not by the site.
• Travel. Prices quoted in Shenzhen, Dongguan or Ningbo assume the inspector is already there. A site three hours inland adds a day and a hotel.
• Scope specificity. A standard checklist is cheap. A bespoke questionnaire with document review and a client-specific report format is not.
• Turnaround. Weekends, holidays and “I need it in 48 hours” all cost more.
• Language. An English-language report from a local firm is a different product from a Chinese report you have to interpret.

What you are really buying

For an audit, you are buying an inspector’s judgement against a standard. That has value and it has a failure mode: the standard may not measure the thing you care about, and the judgement is only as good as the sampling plan.

For a site verification, you are buying presence. The deliverable is not an opinion, it is footage and photographs of a specific address on a specific day, plus a written statement of what could not be established from that visit.

Those are not the same purchase, and it is why the cheap option is not a discount on the expensive one.

The ordering question

Ask what you are trying to decide before asking what it costs.

• If the question is “should I trust this company with a deposit”, an audit is over-specified and a verification visit is enough.
• If the question is “will this production run conform”, a site visit is the wrong instrument and you need an inspection.
• If the question is “can this supplier carry a program of this size”, neither answers it, and you need an audit plus a trial run.

Buyers commonly pay for the expensive instrument to answer the cheap question, because the expensive one sounds more thorough. It usually is more thorough. It is also measuring something else.

A note on getting quotes

Ask any provider for three things before comparing prices: the exact list of what is checked, the number of man-days and where they are spent, and what the report will say when the answer is “we could not confirm”. Providers who cannot answer the third one are selling certainty, and certainty is the one thing this market cannot supply.

Last checked 2026-10