What a virtual assistant actually costs — and what moves the price

Ask what a virtual assistant costs and you will get an hourly rate. It is the least useful number in the conversation, because it tells you the price of an hour rather than the price of the work.

Here is what actually moves the figure, and where the cheapest quote tends to stop being the cheapest.

What genuinely changes the price

How specialised the work is. Inbox triage and calendar management sit at one end. Bookkeeping, cold calling to a script, or anything touching a regulated process sits at the other, because the person doing it needs training you are effectively renting.

How many hours, and how predictable they are. A steady twenty hours a week can be staffed and planned. Five unpredictable hours cannot, and that unpredictability has a cost whether or not it appears as a line item.

Whether you need cover. One person is cheaper than a team until that person is ill, on leave, or leaves. Cover means someone else already knows your account, and keeping a second person familiar with your work is not free.

Whether anyone checks the output. A quality assurance step costs money. Its absence costs more, in a way that lands on your desk rather than the invoice.

Time zone overlap. Working your hours from the other side of the world means a night shift for somebody. Providers who genuinely do it price for it; providers who claim it and quietly work their own daytime do not.

Where cheap gets expensive

The failure mode is rarely dramatic. It looks like this:

• Work that has to be checked. If you review everything before it goes out, you have not delegated the task — you have added a step to it.
• Work that has to be redone. The rate was low, but you paid for those hours and you are paying again.
• Restarting. Every time a person leaves, the context goes with them, and you spend a fortnight rebuilding it. Do that twice a year and the saving is gone.
• Your own time. The hours you spend managing, correcting and re-explaining are the most expensive hours in the arrangement, and they never appear on an invoice.

A better way to compare

Instead of comparing hourly rates, compare cost per unit of work actually delivered. For a month of the same task, ask each provider:

1. How many hours would this take you?
2. What proportion would you expect me to send back for correction?
3. How much of my time will onboarding take, honestly?
4. What happens to that estimate in month three, when the person knows my business?

A provider who answers the second question with “none” is not being straight with you. Everyone sends work back in the first fortnight. What matters is whether that number falls quickly.

What we would tell you

We quote per engagement rather than publishing a rate card, because the honest answer depends on which of the above applies to you. What we will do on a first call is tell you roughly what your work should cost — including if the answer is that a single freelancer would serve you better than we would.

If you want that estimate, tell us what the work involves.