The short answer

  • Freelance marketplace VAs look cheapest (£5–15/hour) but the true cost lands higher once you account for turnover, management time and inconsistent quality.
  • A UK-based full-time VA costs around £39,000–£45,000 a year once you add employer NI, pension, holiday, equipment and recruitment.
  • A UK VA agency typically runs £25–50 per hour, or £3,000–£7,000 a month for dedicated time.
  • A dedicated offshore VA through a managed provider is from around £11,400 a year (£950/month, all-inclusive) for a full-time, dedicated person — a saving of up to 66% versus a comparable UK hire.
  • The cheapest hourly rate rarely wins. The real number is cost per reliably-completed hour of work, and that flips the maths.

"What does a virtual assistant cost?" is one of those questions where the honest answer is "it depends" — but that's not much use when you're trying to budget. So let's make it concrete. There are four realistic ways a UK business hires VA support, and they sit at very different price points for very different things. Below is what each one actually costs in 2026, including the costs that don't show up on the invoice.

Freelance marketplace VAs (£5–15 per hour)

Platforms like Upwork, Fiverr and PeoplePerHour list virtual assistants from around £5 an hour. On paper that's the cheapest option by a distance, and for one-off micro-tasks it can genuinely be the right call. The headline rate, though, is the start of the story rather than the end of it.

The freelancer is, by definition, working for several clients at once. Your task joins a queue, and when a higher-paying client appears, your work can slip down it. Turnover is high: you invest hours explaining your systems, your tone of voice and your processes, and three months later the person moves on and you start again with someone new. That re-training time is a real cost — it just doesn't appear on the platform invoice. Quality varies widely, and the admin of posting jobs, screening applicants, managing disputes and chasing deadlines falls entirely on you.

For a business that needs an hour here and there, none of this matters much. For a business that needs consistent, ongoing support — the same person who knows your customers, your CRM and your way of doing things — the marketplace model tends to cost more than it first appears once you price in the churn and the management overhead. A "£8/hour" VA who needs replacing twice a year, and whose work you have to check carefully, is not really an £8/hour VA.

UK-based VAs (£25–50 per hour, or £39k+ full-time)

Hiring a UK-based virtual assistant — whether freelance at £25–50 an hour or as a permanent employee — buys you proximity, native-level English and someone in your time zone by default. For some roles, particularly client-facing ones where a British accent on the phone matters, that's worth paying for.

The full cost of a permanent UK VA is higher than the salary suggests. Take a £28,000 salary as a baseline. On top of that sits employer National Insurance (15% above the £5,000 threshold from April 2025), the workplace pension contribution, 28 days of holiday that you pay for but don't receive work during, equipment, software licences, and the recruitment cost of finding them in the first place. Fully loaded, a £28,000 VA costs a UK employer comfortably north of £39,000 a year — and a more experienced executive-level VA pushes past £45,000.

That's a genuine, dependable option. It's also a significant fixed cost for what is often, honestly, administrative work that doesn't require a UK salary to perform well. Which is exactly the gap the next two options exist to fill.

UK VA agencies (£3,000–£7,000+ per month)

UK VA agencies — the Time Etcs and Boldlys of the world — sit between freelance and in-house. You pay the agency, the agency provides a vetted VA, and you avoid the recruitment and HR burden. Pricing is usually either hourly (£25–50) or a monthly retainer for a block of dedicated hours, which works out around £3,000–£7,000 a month for something approaching full-time support.

The advantage is convenience and a layer of quality control: the agency has screened the person and will replace them if it doesn't work out. The trade-offs are cost and, often, dedication. Many agency models give you a share of a VA's time rather than one person exclusively yours, and "dedicated" can quietly mean "dedicated for the hours you've bought" rather than a full-time team member who's part of your business. For some businesses that flexibility is perfect. For others it reproduces the exact problem of the freelance marketplace — a person split across clients — just with a more reassuring invoice.

Dedicated offshore VAs (from £950 per month, all-inclusive)

The fourth option is a dedicated offshore VA through a managed provider: a full-time person, based overseas, who works exclusively for your business, on your hours, inside your systems — with the recruitment, office, HR and equipment handled for you. With Aspire Offshore that's from £950 a month, all-inclusive, which is roughly £11,400 a year for a full-time hire.

Set that against the £39,000+ fully-loaded cost of a comparable UK hire and the saving is up to around 66%. The reason it's so much lower isn't a lower standard of work — it's the difference in local salary expectations and overheads between the UK and India, passed through to you. The person is a full-time graduate professional, dedicated to one client, not a shared resource or a per-task freelancer.

The honest trade-offs: they're not in the UK, so for the rare role that genuinely needs someone physically present or a native British phone presence, this isn't the fit. And as with any hire, the quality depends on the screening — which is why a managed provider that runs proper multi-stage vetting matters more than the headline price. But for the large majority of VA work — inbox, diary, CRM, research, scheduling, follow-up — a dedicated offshore VA delivers the consistency of an in-house hire at a fraction of the cost.

The comparison that actually matters

The mistake almost everyone makes is comparing hourly rates. A £5/hour freelancer looks ten times cheaper than a £50/hour agency, so the freelancer "wins." But you're not buying hours — you're buying reliably-completed work. The real number is cost per hour of work that actually gets done, to the standard you need, without you having to re-do it, re-explain it, or re-hire for it.

On that measure the picture inverts. The marketplace VA's low rate is eroded by churn, management time and quality-checking. The UK hire is dependable but expensive. The agency is convenient but often shared and costly. The dedicated offshore VA tends to come out strongest for ongoing, consistent support: one accountable person, full-time, who learns your business and stays — at the lowest fully-loaded cost of the four.

That's not to say one option is right for everyone. If you need two hours of help this month, use a freelancer. If you need a British voice answering your phone, hire locally. But if you need what most growing businesses actually need — a dependable person who takes the recurring admin off your plate, every day, without breaking the budget — the dedicated model is usually the one that adds up.

A quick worked example. Say you need 35 hours of admin support a week. A UK freelance VA at £30/hour is roughly £4,550 a month. A UK permanent hire is around £3,250 a month fully loaded. A dedicated offshore VA is from £950 a month for full-time. Same work, very different numbers — and the offshore figure includes the recruitment, HR and equipment you'd otherwise carry yourself.

The most reliable way to see your own figure is to compare against the specific role and salary you'd otherwise hire for. That's exactly what our savings calculator does — put in the UK role and it shows your annual saving against a dedicated Aspire hire.