Moody's Analytics Pricing 2026: Orbis Cost

Moody's Analytics is quote-only for almost everything it sells, but one product is an exception: Orbis has a published rate card, filed by Moody's on the UK government's Digital Marketplace, that runs from £98,000 a year for a single named user to £900,000 for up to 100. On the US side, federal contract awards show agencies paying roughly $17,000 a year for a narrow CreditView research subscription up to $4.8 million a year for enterprise credit platforms, with a mid-market band of about $50,000 to $300,000. The same award record shows something no comparison page mentions: Moody's task orders carry fixed annual escalators, and three separate contracts renewed at exactly 4.5%, 5.0% and 8.0%. Every figure below is traced to a primary source and labeled. Gathered August 2026. Educational only, not procurement or investment advice.

How much does Moody's Analytics cost?

Between roughly $17,000 and $4.8 million per year, and the spread is real rather than sloppy reporting. Moody's Analytics is not one product with one price. It is three lines of business selling dozens of separately licensed products, and a single named research subscription and a bank-wide credit decisioning platform are both accurately described as "Moody's Analytics."

Here is what can actually be verified as of August 2026, separated from what is inference.

Most pages answering this question tell you to contact sales. That is true and useless. The rest of this page shows you the two public records that let you walk into that call already knowing the shape of the number.

Does Moody's Analytics publish pricing?

For one product, yes, and almost nobody has noticed. To sell into UK public-sector buyers through the G-Cloud framework, a vendor has to file a pricing document that becomes a public record. Moody's filed one for Orbis in April 2024, and it is a genuine rate card: seat bands, base prices, and module uplifts expressed as a percentage of the base.

Moody's is not alone in that catalogue, which is worth knowing if you are benchmarking a quote across vendors. S&P Global Market Intelligence has filed the same kind of document for Capital IQ Pro, with banded seat pricing from GBP 45,000 for up to five users to GBP 250,000 for up to a hundred, and add-on pricing stated as a percentage of the desktop base: API plus desktop adds 75%, API delivery alone costs 25%. The two filings together are the only published rate cards in this entire vendor tier, and comparing them is the closest thing available to a like-for-like price benchmark. The detail is in our Capital IQ cost guide. Bloomberg, LSEG, FactSet, Morningstar and Preqin have filed nothing there, checked August 2026.

Two caveats before you use it, both important. The figures are in pounds and are quoted for a UK public-sector framework, so they are not a US list price. And a framework rate card is a ceiling that buyers negotiate against, not what everyone pays. What it does give you, which nothing else in this market does, is the internal shape of Moody's pricing: how steeply the per-user rate falls with volume, and what each module actually costs relative to the base.

That shape turns out to be consistent with what US agencies pay, which is the useful part. Cross-checking two independent public records against each other is a much stronger position than repeating a single unsourced "starts at" figure.

How much does Orbis cost?

Orbis is Moody's global company database, covering more than 500 million companies with firmographic, ownership and risk data pulled from over 200 sources. It is the product most people mean when they search for Moody's Analytics pricing, because it is the one a research team buys directly. The published bands:

Source: Moody's Orbis pricing document filed on the UK Digital Marketplace, G-Cloud 14, April 2024. Unlimited reports, searches and alerts at every band. Minimum contract period 12 months, with training included.

Read the right-hand column and you can see the commercial logic. A single seat costs more than eleven times what a seat costs in a 100-user deal. Orbis is priced to make small purchases unattractive and enterprise deployments the obvious buy, which is why a two-person team asking for a quote is often quietly steered toward a different product.

Does the US price match? Close enough to be useful. In September 2025 the Department of Energy bought four Orbis Bundle licenses with additional modules for $293,000 over twelve months, about $73,250 per license. The published band for up to four named users is £244,000 base before modules, which lands in the same neighborhood at any plausible exchange rate. Treasury awards for Orbis seats over the same period sit at $513,724 and $630,122 for twelve months each, consistent with the 15 to 30 user bands. Two entirely separate public records, one British and one American, describing the same pricing structure.

How much do Orbis modules cost?

The base gets you the company database. Everything that makes Orbis a risk tool is a module, and each is priced as a percentage of your base price rather than a flat fee, which means module costs scale with your seat count.

This is the single most actionable table on this page, and it is worth doing the arithmetic before your renewal. A five-user Orbis deal with risk flags, beneficial ownership, probability of default and the API attached is not £265,000. At the mid-point of the Grid range it is closer to £265,000 plus 80%, which is roughly £477,000. Modules are where these contracts actually inflate, and because they are priced proportionally, adding seats silently raises your module bill too.

If your requirement is really the compliance workflow rather than the underlying data, that ordering matters. Screening obligations are frequently the reason a firm ends up paying for Risk Flags across every seat, when tracking those obligations and mapping them to controls is a far smaller purchase than licensing a global risk database to do it.

What do US organizations actually pay for Moody's Analytics?

Federal contract awards are public, and they are the only large set of real, audited US dollar figures for this vendor. We reviewed 93 awards to Moody's Analytics entities. A representative slice, annualized across each period of performance:

Source: USAspending.gov award records, retrieved August 2026, annualized by dividing obligated amounts across the stated period of performance. These are institutional licenses rather than list prices, and federal buyers negotiate under their own rules, so treat them as evidence of scale rather than as a rate card.

The distribution is the lesson. There is no single Moody's Analytics price because there is no single Moody's Analytics. A six-user economics research subscription costs less than a mid-size company's payroll software. A credit platform embedded in a lending workflow costs more than most firms spend on all their data vendors combined.

Does Moody's Analytics raise prices at renewal?

Yes, and the public record shows exactly how much. This is the finding that took the longest to reach and it is not published anywhere else we could find. When the same agency renews the same Moody's line for consecutive twelve-month periods, the increase is not approximate. It is an exact contractual escalator.

Three different products, three different escalators, each reproducing to the dollar. CreditEdge escalated 5.00% two years running, compounding from $259,088 to $285,644 in 24 months. Nobody renegotiated those numbers. They were baked into the contract at signing.

Moody's own filings corroborate the direction. The 2025 Form 10-K lists "cross-selling, upselling and pricing" as a named strategic growth driver, and reports Moody's Analytics annualized recurring revenue up 8% against organic constant-currency revenue growth of 7%, a gap that price increases help explain. Total Moody's Analytics revenue reached $3,599 million in 2025, up 9%.

The practical consequence: the escalator is a negotiable term and most buyers do not negotiate it. Over a five-year relationship, the difference between an 8% annual uplift and a 3% cap is roughly 25% of your total spend. That is a larger prize than the discount you will win arguing about the first-year price, and it is far easier to ask for.

How long is a Moody's Analytics contract?

One year is the default, but the paper allows much longer. Moody's Corporation states it plainly in the revenue recognition note of its 2025 Form 10-K: subscription and post-contract support agreements are "generally invoiced in advance of the contractual coverage period, which is principally one year, but can range from 3 to 5 years," with payment due within 30 to 60 days.

Two things follow. You pay the full annual fee up front, before you have used any of it, so the working-capital cost is real for a smaller firm. And a three to five year term is a standard option Moody's will trade against, which is exactly the lever to pull when you want an escalator cap.

The lock-in is visible in the financials. As of December 31, 2025 Moody's reported approximately $4.8 billion of remaining performance obligations in the Analytics segment, of which only about 55% is expected to convert to revenue within a year and roughly 25% in the one to two year window. A quarter of the contracted book stretches beyond two years.

When is the best time to negotiate with Moody's Analytics?

Autumn, well before your renewal date. The 2025 Form 10-K contains a throwaway operational detail with real negotiating value: "a large portion of these services are invoiced in the months of November, December and January."

That tells you Moody's renewal season is concentrated in a ten-week window around the turn of the calendar year, which is when its sales organization is carrying the heaviest quota load and has the least time per account. Open your renewal conversation in September or early October, when a rep can still shape a deal, rather than in the second week of December when your contract auto-renews and you have no leverage left. If your own renewal falls in that November to January band, put the diary reminder at sixty days out and treat the date as a deadline rather than a formality.

Is there a free trial of Moody's Analytics?

For Orbis, yes. Moody's published terms state that full-access free trials are available, with the export function switched off. That exclusion is deliberate and worth planning around: you can evaluate coverage, search and screening properly, but you cannot pull the data out, so design your trial to test whether the companies you care about are actually in there and correctly linked rather than to extract a dataset.

For the credit platforms, CreditLens, RiskCalc and the banking Decision Solutions products, there is no self-serve trial. Those run through a scoped proof of concept with a solutions engineer, and the evaluation is a project rather than a login.

What is Moody's Analytics, and how is it different from Moody's ratings?

They are separate segments of the same public company. Moody's Investors Service assigns the credit ratings. Moody's Analytics sells data, models and software to organizations that use credit risk in their own work, and it reports its own revenue. In 2025 it recorded $3,599 million across three lines of business:

Source: Moody's Corporation 2025 Form 10-K. Knowing which line your quote sits in is genuinely useful, because the three are sold by different teams with different discount authority, and a bundle spanning all three is negotiated as three deals wearing one cover sheet.

Why is Moody's Analytics so expensive?

Three reasons, and only one of them is data collection. Orbis standardizes filings from more than 200 national registries into comparable financials, which is genuinely expensive and genuinely hard to replicate. Second, the credit models carry regulatory weight: a bank using RiskCalc or CreditLens in its lending process is buying model documentation and validation support that will survive an examination, and that assurance is a large part of the fee. Third, and least discussed, is that the products embed themselves in workflows. Once a lending process runs through CreditLens, replacing it is a systems project rather than a procurement decision, and pricing reflects that.

The 97% of Moody's Analytics revenue that is recognized over time rather than at a point in sale tells you the business is built on renewals, not on wins. Understanding that changes how you negotiate: you are a recurring line in a forecast, and that is worth something to them.

Moody's Analytics vs S&P, FactSet and Bloomberg on price

These are not substitutes for one another, which is the point most comparison tables miss. Nobody replaces Bloomberg with Orbis. The genuine overlap is narrow: Orbis competes with S&P Capital IQ on private company financials, and CreditView competes with the credit research inside Capital IQ and FactSet. Where a firm is paying for two of these, the duplication is usually in company financials rather than in credit models.

How do you negotiate a Moody's Analytics contract down?

Four levers, in descending order of how much money they move.

Start with the escalator, because the award record above proves it exists and shows it running as high as 8%. Ask for it in writing, ask for a cap, and offer term length in exchange. A five-year commitment at a 3% cap beats a one-year deal at 8% before you have argued about anything else.

Second, audit the modules. On Orbis they are priced as a percentage of base, so an unused module costs more every time you add a seat. Pull the usage report, find the entitlements nobody opened last quarter, and drop them. This is the cleanest saving available because removing an unused module costs no user their access.

Third, right-size named users against actual logins rather than headcount. The per-user rate falls sharply across bands, which cuts both ways: sitting just above a band boundary is expensive, and trimming two seats can drop you into a cheaper band entirely.

Fourth, buy on their calendar, not yours. Start in September if you can, and never let a November to January renewal reach its auto-renew date with the conversation unopened.

What are the cheaper alternatives to Moody's Analytics?

It depends entirely on which of the three businesses you were buying from, and there is no single replacement for all of it.

For private company financials and ownership, the realistic competitors are S&P Capital IQ, and for private-markets deal data specifically, PitchBook or Preqin. None of these is cheap, and the choice is usually about coverage in your jurisdictions rather than price. For economic research and forecasting, the Economy.com subscription is the small end of the Moody's range and has genuine substitutes in bank research and public statistical agencies. For credit models used in a regulated lending process, honestly, there is not much of an alternative, and that is exactly why it costs what it costs.

For public equity research, the job most people are actually trying to do when they land on a page like this, the tooling is dramatically cheaper. Investables.ai turns a ticker into a structured research card: what the business does, the metrics that matter with peer context, an explicit bull case, an explicit bear case, comparables and labeled risk flags, from $29 a month. It carries no private company database, no credit models and no real-time market data, and it is informational research rather than investment advice. If your requirement is understanding a listed company rather than screening 500 million private ones, that is the honest comparison.

The short version

Moody's Analytics has one published price list and it is for Orbis: £98,000 a year for a single named user, falling to about £36,000 each at ten users and £9,000 each at a hundred, filed by Moody's on the UK Digital Marketplace in April 2024. Modules add 5% to 40% of base each, which is where these contracts quietly double. In the US, federal awards put real subscriptions between about $17,000 and $4.85 million a year, with most professional deployments landing between $50,000 and $300,000. Contracts are invoiced a year in advance, run one to five years, and carry fixed annual escalators that showed up at exactly 4.5%, 5.0% and 8.0% in the public record. Negotiate the escalator and the module list before you negotiate the headline price, and open the conversation in September rather than December.