What does a virtual assistant actually cost in the UK?

The three ways to buy virtual assistance

There are broadly three routes, and they price very differently. A UK freelance VA typically charges £25–£40 an hour, sometimes more for specialist work. You pay only for hours used, which suits genuinely small workloads, but you're sharing them with several other clients and there's no continuity if they take on a bigger contract.

A salaried UK hire gives you dedication and continuity, at £24,000–£30,000 for an administrative assistant — before the on-costs below. An offshore professional gives you a dedicated full-time person at £8.50–£15 an hour depending on the role, with the employment handled by a registered employer overseas.

The costs that don't appear in the job ad

This is where most budgets go wrong. On a £28,000 salary you should expect to add roughly £2,900 in employer National Insurance, £840 in pension contributions at the 3% minimum, and around £2,150 in holiday cover — because 28 days of statutory leave is 28 days you pay for and they aren't there.

Then there's £1,200 or so for a laptop, phone and software licences, roughly £3,000 for a desk and its share of rent, heat and insurance, and a recruitment agency fee at 15% of salary, which is another £4,200.

That £28,000 salary is a £42,290 decision in year one. And that's before you count the 20-plus hours you'll spend interviewing, or the ramp-up period before they're productive, or the cost of it not working out and starting the whole thing again.

Part-time UK versus full-time offshore

This is the comparison most owners never run. A UK part-time administrator at 25 hours a week — £17,500 salary, plus around £1,900 in NI and pension, £1,400 in holiday and sick cover, £2,200 in desk and kit, and a £2,600 recruitment fee — comes to roughly £25,600 a year for 1,300 hours.

A full-time offshore professional at £8.50 an hour costs around £18,000 a year for 2,080 hours, with no NI, no pension, no desk and no recruitment fee.

Sixty per cent more hours, for about thirty per cent less money. That's the entire arithmetic, and there isn't a catch hiding in it.

The cost nobody puts on a spreadsheet

If you're a business owner whose time is worth £60 an hour and you spend ten hours a week on admin, you're spending £2,400 a month doing work you could hand to someone for £8.50 an hour.

That's £28,800 a year, and it never appears on an invoice — which is precisely why nobody notices it. You're not saving money by doing your own admin. You're spending £60 an hour to save £8.50.

What you should actually compare

Don't compare hourly rates. Compare total annual cost per hour of work delivered, and then compare what you'd do with the difference.

The businesses that get the most out of offshore staffing don't pocket the saving — they buy more capacity with it. One firm we know replaced a £35,000 admin role with a £16,000 remote hire and put the difference into a second remote hire in marketing. Both roles together now cost less than the single role they started with, and their enquiry volume is up.