Ok, so you’ve heard about Virtual Assistants through the business world grapevine. You may have even seen an ad or two pop-up on social media. But, when you’ve had a peak and seen the £30 per hour price tag, you feel it’s an instant ‘no’ when minimum wage is less than half that!
Let us tell you why things aren’t necessarily as they seem!
If you’re interested in an easy to digest comparison, we have a pdf that breaks these down for you on our freebies page – or you can click here to have a quick look.
But for now, let’s have a look at why a £30 per hour VA could actually be a smarter choice for your business admin needs.
So, for a heads up, we’re working with 2025/26 figures for this. With 2024/25 going into its final quarter and the recently announced budget changes affecting employment costs, it makes more sense to give you a picture of what’s to come!
So, as of April 2025, minimum wage is going up to £12.21 per hour. However, we all know that’s not what an employee takes home and it’s certainly not what an employer pays.
On top of that hourly rate an employer is charged Employers NI contributions (which rise to 15% in April from 13.8%). You also have to cover pension contributions, which are a legal minimum of 3%.
Now, if you did the maths, that still only takes you to £14 per hour – still less than half the cost of a Virtual Admin Assistant right? Wrong (obviously – or this blog would be pretty pointless!)
There’s some other factors that need to be taken into account:
- VA’s on average take half the amount of time to do the work of an employee – it’s in our interest to be proactive and not drag our heels!
- Virtual Assistant’s have multiple clients – we don’t rush but we definitely don’t waste time. The work we do is not overshadowed by particular clients – each client is equally important to us.
- You can end our service at any point; there’s no red tape. If we don’t perform well for your business, we lose your business. Your business is our business!
- Did you know statistics show that employees waste approximately 15 minutes of every hour they’re paid for? Some studies show 61% of employees admitting to that number being as high as 30 minutes. We use Clockify to document all our hours; they aren’t being wasted having chats in the staff room (ahem, we don’t have one…)
- A full-time position of 37 hours a week, 52 weeks a year equates to 1,924 working hours. Or does it? (No! it doesn’t, but you saw where that was going). Employees are entitled to a minimum of 28 days paid holiday. There are 8 Bank Holidays in 2025. In 2023 (2024 figures aren’t available at the time of writing this) the average number of sick days was 7.4 days per employee. So the 1,924 hours a year that you pay an employee to work has now gone down to 1,600 hours being worked (but 1,924 hours are still being paid for). Take off the 400 hours a year that employees waste and you’re now paying your employee for 724 hours a year (which equates to 60 hours a month) that they aren’t even working!
- There’s also the chance of having to pay for staffing cover if a member of staff is out on training, compassionate leave, sick leave, annual leave, maternity leave, jury service etc, etc.
- Add in their portion of the costs toward; IT equipment purchases, maintenance and repair, software licences, training, Employer Liability Insurance, payroll fees, phone contracts, water rates, tea and coffee, toilet roll (the list goes on!).
- The price of recruiting them in the first place. For example, advertising costs, DBS checks and other pre-employment costs. Or the fees to the recruitment agency if you used one.
As you can see, it all gets very pricey, very quickly. Add to that the responsibility of being an employer. As well as your time spent shortlisting and interviewing people, doing appraisals, identifying training needs, perhaps warnings and disciplinaries, all the general headaches that come with employing people and the cost becomes more than just financial.
And the last thing to point out is – you have to pay your employee for the whole year, if that’s what they’re contracted for. If it gets quiet around Christmas, you still have to pay them. If they’re off sick, you still have to pay them. If the work is just not there for a few months, but it will pick back up – that’s right – you still have to pay them.
With a VA, you use us when you need us and you only pay for what we do. We manage our own training. Sick days aren’t a thing – if we’re in an agreement to carry out 20 hours of work a month for you – those 20 hours will be carried out. If you don’t need our services then you don’t buy our services.
It’s a ‘pay for what you need’ set up that works for both parties, and it’s our job to alleviate the headaches of your day – not add to them!
So, again we ask …… does £30 per hour still sound too expensive?