Virtual executive assistant rates in London vary widely by seniority. Offshore task-based support sits at the low end, UK-based senior executive assistants at the top, and specialist AI-trained assistants in between while covering a broader remit. The rate matters less than the fully loaded comparison: a virtual EA carries no employer national insurance, pension, recruitment fee, equipment or cover cost.
Rates for virtual executive assistants in London span an uncomfortably wide range, and the published numbers rarely explain why. The gap is not arbitrary. It reflects three things: where the assistant is based, how senior they are, and how much of the work they own rather than complete.
At the lower end you are typically buying offshore, task-based support: clearly defined jobs handed over with clear instructions, often through a platform that allocates whoever is available. It works well for repetitive work with low context.
At the higher end you are buying a UK-based senior executive assistant with a decade of experience supporting executives, working in your time zone, exercising judgement on your behalf. The rate reflects that they resolve things rather than escalate them.
In between sits the newer category: assistants trained on AI and automation tooling. They cost more than task-based support and less than a comparable in-house hire, and the argument for them is that the same hours cover a wider remit because the routine layer gets automated rather than repeated.
A full time London executive assistant does not cost their salary. The real figure adds employer national insurance, pension contributions, recruitment fees, software licences, equipment, holiday and sickness cover, and the management overhead of the role.
A virtual arrangement removes almost all of that. You pay for the work and nothing around it. That is usually a larger saving than the difference in headline rate, and it is the number to put in front of anyone questioning the spend.
Hourly pricing looks transparent and quietly works against you. If a supplier bills by the hour, the invoice shrinks every time they make something faster, so nothing ever gets faster. The recurring report takes the same three hours in month twelve as it did in month one.
Outcome or allocation-based pricing changes the incentive. The assistant is paid for owning an area of your week, so automating the routine part of it is in their interest as well as yours. That is why the remit widens over time while the cost stays flat.
The arithmetic is simple enough to do in five minutes. Take your own effective hourly value, which for most founders is best approximated by what an hour spent on customers, fundraising or hiring is worth rather than a salary division. Then count the hours currently going to administration.
If ten hours a week of your time is being spent on work an assistant could own, and that time redirects to revenue-generating activity, the engagement usually pays for itself well before the hours question becomes interesting. The failure case is not the rate, it is delegating the hours and then filling them with more meetings.
Write down the number of hours a week currently spent on work an assistant could own. Multiply that by your effective hourly value, using the value of the work you would do instead rather than your nominal salary. Then compare the result with the monthly fee, including the cost of any onboarding time.
It is only a directional calculation, but it stops the conversation being reduced to a rate card. Ten hours returned to customer work is not equivalent to ten hours returned to scrolling through a better organised inbox.
A professional arrangement should make the cost predictable and the boundaries obvious. The written scope should name the allocation, the person responsible, the systems they can access, response expectations, notice period and what happens if the match is not right.
For AI-assisted work, add one more line: the assistant builds in your accounts and documents the workflow, and you retain the data and the automation. That turns a lower-cost support model into a compounding operational asset rather than a cheaper pair of hands.
What is a typical hourly rate for a virtual executive assistant in London? Rates range from budget offshore task support at the low end to senior UK-based executive assistants at the top. Rather than anchoring on an hourly figure, compare the monthly cost against the fully loaded cost of employing someone with the same experience.
Is a virtual executive assistant cheaper than hiring in-house in London? In almost all cases, yes. You avoid employer national insurance, pension, recruitment fees, equipment, software and cover costs, and you can scale the allocation up or down without a redundancy process.
Do London-based clients need a UK-based assistant? Not necessarily, but you do need reliable overlap with your working day and fluent written English for anything client facing. Agree the overlap hours in writing before the engagement starts.
Should I pay hourly or a fixed monthly fee? A fixed allocation is generally better value. Hourly billing removes any incentive to make recurring work faster, whereas a fixed arrangement rewards the assistant for automating it.
More insights | Alvara Partners