SOC 2 is an independent auditor's report on a company's security controls. It comes in two forms: Type I assesses whether controls are designed appropriately at a single point in time; Type II assesses whether those controls actually operated effectively over a period of months. Type II is the stronger signal, and the one most enterprise buyers are really asking about when they say "do you have a SOC 2."
The report itself isn't the point — what it demonstrates is
A SOC 2 report is verification, not disclosure: an accredited third party independently confirmed your controls exist and work, rather than you simply stating that they do. That distinction is why buyers weight it heavily — it's evidence a security team doesn't have to take on faith.
Waiting until a buyer asks means doing it under deadline pressure
A Type I audit typically runs 3–6 months end to end once you count preparation, and costs roughly $5,000–$60,000 depending on company size and auditor — smaller companies and boutique auditors sit at the low end, larger organizations and Big 4 firms at the high end. Type II takes meaningfully longer, because the audit itself has to observe a real operating period — typically 6–12+ months all in, including a 3–12 month observation window — and costs roughly $7,000–$150,000+ for the audit alone (total compliance spend, including remediation and ongoing maintenance, commonly runs higher). These are industry-typical ranges, not a quote for any specific company — Drata and Secureframe both publish more detailed breakdowns by company size if you want to narrow it down further. On deal stage: there's no single hard threshold, but the pattern compliance vendors report consistently is that once you're closing mid-market or enterprise deals, buyers increasingly ask specifically for Type II — a Type I alone is often no longer enough to satisfy their security review (Secureframe).
What's already clear without needing more precision than that: a SOC 2 report — Type II in particular — takes real lead time to produce, because Type II is specifically an assessment of how controls performed over a period, not a one-time snapshot you can produce on demand. If the first time you start thinking about SOC 2 is when a buyer's security team asks for one during a deal, you're starting the clock at the worst possible moment: after the deal is already waiting on it.
It doesn't unfairly penalize a company that isn't ready yet
A scoring system that only rewards expensive certifications biases toward well-funded incumbents — a real tension worth naming plainly, not glossing over. That's part of why Entropy's own rubric separates "has a certification" from "discloses honestly": a company with no SOC 2 but a clear, honest privacy policy and disclosed subprocessors can score meaningfully better than one with neither. Not having a SOC 2 yet isn't the same failure as refusing to disclose anything at all.
What Entropy does with a SOC 2 report once you have one
Credit is earned only through independent verification, never from your trust page's own prose. If an Entropy admin independently confirms your SOC 2 directly with the issuing firm, that earns partial credit. If you claim your profile and upload the actual report, an Entropy admin reviews the document, and if it checks out that certification moves to full credit within a few minutes. A SOC 2 mention on your public trust page that hasn't been independently confirmed earns nothing on its own — and uploading a document doesn't earn any bonus points either; only this review does. See reading your own Entropy score for how that fits into the rest of your grade.