A local full time executive assistant in the UK carries a fully loaded cost well beyond salary once employer costs, recruitment fees, equipment and management time are included. Remote and fractional support typically lands at around a third of that, with no recruitment fee.
Most cost comparisons for executive support are unfair in both directions. A salary figure is compared against a monthly fee, and the two are not the same thing. Here is a more honest way to run the numbers.
Added together, the fully loaded figure is materially above the headline salary. That is the number worth comparing against.
Task marketplaces quote a low hourly rate because the work is transactional and the person changes. For scheduled admin that can be fine. For anything requiring context, discretion or access to your systems, the turnover cost outweighs the saving quickly.
The useful measure is cost per hour returned. If support costs a fraction of a local hire and reliably gives a leader back a day and a half each week, the rate stops being the interesting number.
A salary figure is not a cost. The fully loaded cost of a local hire includes employer contributions, holiday and sick cover, equipment, software seats, recruitment fees and the management time that never appears on a budget line.
Comparing like for like usually narrows the gap in perceived quality and widens the gap in price.
Two remote assistants can differ in price by a factor of three, and the difference is almost never geography alone. Seniority, timezone overlap, sector context and technical range explain most of it.
The cheapest end of the market is task execution: you specify, they complete. The upper end is ownership, where the assistant holds an outcome and decides how to reach it, including whether the work should be automated away entirely.
Cost per hour is the wrong measure. Cost per hour returned to you is the right one, and it improves over time as automation removes work permanently rather than simply moving it.
A useful benchmark: if an assistant returns eight hours of your week and your time carries any meaningful commercial value, the arrangement pays for itself several times over before you count the automation benefit at all.
Pricing pages in this market are not comparable at face value. Some quote hourly for pooled capacity, some quote monthly for dedicated time, and some quote a headline rate that excludes onboarding, tooling or anything resembling technical work. Two proposals that look thirty percent apart can be twice as far apart in reality.
Normalise before comparing. Ask what is included in the number, whether the assistant is dedicated or shared, what the timezone overlap is in practice, who covers holiday and sickness, and what happens if the fit is wrong in the first month. Ask specifically whether automation work is included in the rate or billed separately, because that single answer often explains most of the price gap.
The other question worth asking is who owns what gets built. If an automation lives in the provider's account rather than yours, you are renting a dependency and the price of leaving is higher than the monthly fee suggests. Anything built for you should sit in your systems, under your credentials, documented well enough that another person could maintain it.
Finally, discount any proposal that will not talk about outcomes. A provider confident in their people will happily agree what should be true at day 30, 60 and 90, and will not object to that being written down.
Is a remote executive assistant cheaper than hiring locally? Typically yes. Once employer costs, recruitment fees and cover are included, remote support usually lands at around a third of the fully loaded cost of a local full time hire.
Are there recruitment fees? No. Engagements run on a rolling monthly basis rather than a placement fee.
What is the minimum commitment? Fractional engagements start from a few days a month and run rolling monthly with 30 days notice.
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