Virtual Assistant Cost in the UK: Full 2026 Pricing Guide

A UK-based virtual assistant charges £15 to £35 an hour. A UK employee doing the same work costs £26,000 to £34,000 a year in salary, and considerably more once you add employer National Insurance, pension contributions, holiday, and the rest. A dedicated Filipino VA through VA Masters costs $6.50 to $17 an hour depending on the role, which is up to 80 percent less for work that is genuinely indistinguishable.

This guide gives you the real numbers for all three options, explains what the fully loaded cost of a UK hire actually is once you count everything, and is honest about where a UK-based person genuinely wins. VA Masters has placed 1,000+ virtual assistants, including many with UK businesses.

The Short Answer

A dedicated Filipino VA through VA Masters costs $6.50 to $17 per hour depending on the role. For a full-time position, that is roughly $1,100 to $2,900 a month, with no recruitment fee, no setup fee, and no employer obligations.

The comparison most UK businesses run badly is against salary rather than against total cost. A £30,000 administrative hire is not a £30,000 commitment. Add employer National Insurance, pension auto-enrolment, statutory holiday, sick pay, equipment, and any recruitment fee, and the honest figure is closer to £38,000 before you have paid a penny of overhead.

The uncomfortable fact underneath the entire comparison is that the rate difference has nothing whatsoever to do with the quality of the work. It reflects where the person lives, and nothing else.

Your Three Options, Priced

There are three realistic ways for a UK business to get this work done, and they are priced on completely different logic. Comparing their headline numbers directly is a category error, which is why so many businesses feel they were quoted wildly inconsistent prices for what they assumed was the same thing.

The marketplace row deserves a word, because the rate looks irresistible and the outcome frequently is not. At $3 to $8 an hour you are buying access to a very large pool and doing every piece of the screening yourself, which is a real job requiring a real skill. Plenty of businesses have found excellent people this way. Plenty of others have burned four months and three hires discovering that they were not good at it, which is not a failing of character, it is simply a skill they had no reason to possess.

What Actually Drives the Price

Six things move the number, and the role is the biggest of them.

**Role complexity.** Administrative and e-commerce support sits at the bottom of the range. Data, analytics, and technical roles sit at the top, and the gap between them is the same gap you would see in a UK salary band, simply scaled differently.

**Experience.** A VA with five years inside your specific systems commands more than one learning them, and is worth considerably more than the difference, because ramp-up is a real cost that nobody quotes you.

**Hours and continuity.** Full-time dedicated roles price better per hour than fragmented part-time work, because the person is not context-switching between several clients.

**Timezone commitment.** A VA covering full UK hours from Manila is making a genuine commitment, and it is reasonable that the rate reflects it.

**Specialist skills.** UK bookkeeping conventions, Xero, or a specific CRM all raise the rate and all reduce the time before the person is useful.

**How you hire.** A marketplace gives you the lowest headline rate and all of the screening burden. An agency gives you the highest and does all of it. Recruitment sits between: a normal rate for the person, and somebody else has already filtered a thousand applicants.

Pricing Models, and Which One Suits You

There are four ways this role is normally bought, and they are priced on completely different logic. Comparing their headline numbers directly is a category error, and it is the reason so many businesses feel they were quoted wildly inconsistent prices for what they assumed was the same thing.

**Hourly, dedicated.** You pay for a set number of hours from one person who works only for you. Transparent, flexible, and the model we use, because it is the only one where you can see exactly what you are paying for.

**Monthly retainer.** A fixed fee for a defined package of hours or deliverables. Simple to budget, and it usually costs more per hour than it appears once you divide it out, which is rather the point of the packaging.

**Per task or per project.** Suits genuinely one-off work. Poorly suited to anything ongoing, because you will spend more time scoping and pricing each task than the task was worth.

**Marketplace or freelance.** The cheapest headline rate available and the one with by far the highest variance. You are doing the screening yourself, and the cost of getting that wrong is not on the invoice but it is very real.

The distinction people miss is between buying hours and buying a person. A marketplace sells you hours, and hours are interchangeable. A dedicated hire gives you someone who accumulates knowledge of your business month after month, and that accumulation is the entire reason the arrangement gets better over time rather than staying flat. It does not show up in a rate comparison, and it is the largest single difference between the models.

Retainers deserve one further word of caution, because the packaging is genuinely persuasive. A monthly fee feels simpler than an hourly rate, and it removes the mild anxiety of watching a timer. What it also removes is your ability to see what you are buying. Divide any retainer by the hours actually delivered and the effective rate is usually a good deal higher than you assumed, which is not dishonest but is precisely why the packaging exists.

Agency, Freelancer, or Recruitment?

These three routes are frequently discussed as though they were price points on the same product. They are not. They are different products, and the price difference reflects what is included rather than what is delivered.

An agency sells you a managed outcome. They screen, they supervise, they replace people, and they carry the risk of things going wrong. That is real value and it is priced accordingly, generally at a substantial multiple of the underlying labor cost. If you want to be entirely hands-off and you are willing to pay for it, an agency is a defensible purchase.

A freelance marketplace sells you access and nothing else. The rate is the lowest available, the screening is entirely yours, and the variance in quality is enormous. Plenty of people have found excellent long-term help this way. Plenty of others have burned three months and two hires discovering that they are not good at screening, which is not a character flaw, it is simply a skill they had no reason to have.

Recruitment, which is what we do, sits between them and is frequently misunderstood. You pay a normal hourly rate for the person, and somebody else has already narrowed a thousand applicants down to the two or three worth your time. You get a dedicated person rather than shared capacity, you manage them directly rather than through an account manager, and you are not paying an ongoing margin for supervision you did not ask for.

The Hidden Costs Nobody Quotes

The hourly rate is the number everyone compares. It is rarely the number that decides whether the hire was a good one, and treating it as though it were is how businesses end up with a cheap arrangement that costs them a fortune.

**Employer obligations.** The cost UK businesses consistently underestimate. National Insurance, pension auto-enrolment, statutory holiday, sick pay, and the administrative burden of running payroll for one more person. None of it appears in a salary figure and all of it is real money.

**Recruitment fees.** A UK recruiter will typically charge a percentage of first-year salary, which on a £30,000 hire is a meaningful four-figure sum paid before the person has done a single day of work.

**Your own hours.** The largest cost of all, and it never appears anywhere. If you are doing the admin yourself because hiring in the UK felt too expensive, you are paying the most expensive rate available in your business to do the least valuable work in it.

**Turnover.** A hire who leaves in month six costs you the ramp twice, plus the gap, plus everything they learned. This is the single largest hidden cost in any hiring decision and it is the one nobody can promise you against.

We had been putting off an admin hire for two years because a UK salary plus National Insurance and pension came to nearly forty thousand once we did the sum honestly, and we simply could not justify it for the work involved. A dedicated VA through VA Masters costs a fraction of that and does the job to the same standard. The savings are substantial, but the real change is that the work is now actually getting done, which it was not before.

Ari

Managing Director

★★★★★

Rates by Role: What Each Type of VA Costs

Rates vary by role for real and legible reasons. Here is what each category actually costs through VA Masters, in US dollars, which is how VA contracts are almost always denominated regardless of where the client is.

What to Ask Before You Pay Anyone

Whichever route you choose, these questions separate a real quote from a number designed to get you onto a call.

When It Actually Pays Back

The payback for a UK business is straightforward, and it has two components that are worth separating.

The first is simple substitution. If a task is currently being done by you, or by a UK employee at a fully loaded cost approaching £20 an hour, and it can be done to the same standard for $8, then the arithmetic resolves the moment you write it down. There is nothing clever about this and there is no catch.

The second is the work that is currently not being done at all, which is where most of the actual value hides. The follow-up nobody has time for, the bookkeeping that is always three weeks behind, the marketing that stopped, the customer emails answered late. UK businesses under a certain size are not making a considered decision to skip that work, they simply cannot afford UK labour to do it. At Philippine rates, they can, and that is a change in what the business is capable of rather than merely a saving.

The honest caveat: if the work genuinely requires someone physically in the UK, or constant spontaneous real-time collaboration across a full working day, hire locally and we will say so on the call rather than after you have signed anything.

How VA Masters Recruits for This Role

VA Masters is a boutique recruitment agency, not a marketplace. Every role runs through our 6-stage process, which narrows 1,000+ applicants down to the 2 to 3 best candidates you actually meet and choose between.

The stage that matters most is the custom skills test, built around a real task from your actual workflow rather than a generic assessment. This is where the quality assumption gets tested and, in our experience, dismantled. UK clients routinely tell us the finalists performed better than candidates they had interviewed locally at three or four times the cost, which is not a claim about nationality. It is what happens when a thousand applicants are narrowed by a process designed to find the right person rather than the available one.

What Our Clients Say

Ari

Managing Director

★★★★★

We had put off the hire for two years because UK costs made it impossible. Now the work gets done.

Ori

Founder

★★★★★

Full UK hours, no employer obligations, no recruitment fee. She comes with ideas of her own and catches issues early.

Tiffany

Operations Manager

★★★★★

The quality assumption was completely wrong. She doesn’t just execute, she comes with ideas.

Real Messages from Real Clients

Common Costing Mistakes

These are the mistakes we see most often, and every one of them is avoidable.

How to Budget for This Properly

Work out the hours the role genuinely needs before you look at any rate. Most businesses either overestimate, and buy full-time capacity for part-time work, or underestimate wildly and then wonder why the person is permanently behind.

Then budget for the first month separately. Onboarding takes your time, and the person will not be at full productivity immediately, exactly as a local hire would not be. Nobody quotes this and everybody experiences it, and the businesses that plan for it consistently report a far better first quarter than the ones who were quietly hoping it would not apply to them.

And decide in advance what a good outcome looks like in numbers. If you cannot say what the role should produce, you will not be able to tell whether it did, and you will end up judging the hire on how busy they seemed, which is the worst available proxy for whether they were useful.

One more piece of budgeting discipline, and it is the one almost nobody applies. Run the three-year number, not the monthly one. A hire who stays three years costs you one onboarding. A hire who leaves twice in that period costs you three, plus two gaps in coverage, plus everything the departing people knew about your business and took with them. Over any realistic horizon, retention swamps the hourly rate as a determinant of what this actually cost you, and it is the variable nobody puts on the comparison sheet because it is the one they cannot promise.

Why VA Masters Prices This Way

VA Masters has placed 1,000+ Filipino virtual assistants with businesses across the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and Europe. Our rate is a single transparent hourly figure, with no recruitment fee, no setup fee, no platform charge, and no minimum term.

We are deliberate about that structure, because most of the pricing complexity in this market exists to obscure something. Recruitment fees front-load your risk before you have met anyone. Setup fees charge you for work that has not happened yet. Minimum terms exist so that the provider is protected if the match is poor, which is a strange thing to protect the provider from. We took all of it out, which means we only make money if the person we found is someone you actually want to keep.

The reason we can price this way is not a trick and it is not exploitation. A strong professional in the Philippines earns a fraction of a UK equivalent because the cost of living there is a fraction of the UK’s, and we pay above the local market rather than below it, which is exactly why our people stay.

And we will tell you when we are not the answer. If the work requires physical presence in the UK, or genuinely constant real-time collaboration through a full working day, hire locally. We would rather say so on the discovery call than take your money for something that will not work.

Happy VAs Cost You Less Over Time

The most expensive VA is the one who leaves in month four, because you pay the onboarding cost twice and lose everything they learned about your business in between. That is why VA Masters invests in fair pay, training, and real support.

This is not a values statement dressed up as an argument, it is the argument. Providers who pay at the very bottom of the market have high turnover, and their clients absorb that turnover as repeated onboarding, repeated ramp-up, and repeated loss of accumulated knowledge. The headline rate looked cheaper and the three-year cost was not. Happy, stable VAs stay longer, which is not a soft benefit, it is the single largest determinant of what this actually costs you. Here is how our VAs rate the experience.

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