Straight answer: Most UK virtual assistants earn between £15 and £35 an hour, but the figure everyone quotes is the rate, not the take-home. Once you strip out unbillable hours, quiet months, and the cost of running the business, a full-time freelance VA typically nets £18,000 to £28,000 a year, with a smaller group clearing £40,000 plus once they specialise. Employed VAs earn less per hour but get paid every single week.
If you want to go deeper on this: What a Medical Virtual Assistant Job Really Involves, Day to Day.
The number everyone quotes and why it’s misleading
Search this topic and you’ll get the same figure over and over: “virtual assistants earn £20 to £25 an hour.” That number comes from surveys run inside VA Facebook groups and membership sites, filled in by people who are still active enough to bother filling in a survey. That’s a skewed sample. It leaves out the VA who quietly quit six months in because she never found a second client. It leaves out the one working 50 hours a week to bill 25 of them.
The rate you charge and the money you earn are two different numbers. Nobody writing these guides seems keen to point that out, so I will.
What VAs earn, by setup
- Employed VA, UK agency or company: £20,000 to £26,000 a year, sometimes up to £30,000 with three or more years’ experience and a specialism like executive support or bookkeeping.
- Freelance VA, generalist, first year: £10 to £18 an hour billed, but usually only 15 to 20 billable hours a week while you’re still building a client base. Real annual income: often under £15,000.
- Freelance VA, established, 2 to 4 years in: £22 to £35 an hour, 25 to 30 billable hours a week once retainers settle. Real annual income: £25,000 to £38,000.
- Specialist VA (launch support, tech VA, paid ads admin, executive PA to founders): £35 to £60+ an hour, often on retainer rather than hourly. This is where the £45,000 to £60,000 earners sit.
- US-based VA: $18 to $45 an hour depending on niche, with executive and legal admin VAs at the top.
- Offshore VA (Philippines, South Africa, parts of Eastern Europe): $4 to $12 an hour, and this is the uncomfortable part nobody wants to say out loud: this global pricing is a real ceiling on what generalist UK and US VAs can charge, because clients comparing quotes will see a £10 gap between a £15 hour and a £25 hour and pick the cheaper one unless you’ve given them a reason not to.
A real example: Sarah’s rate versus Sarah’s income
A VA I worked with a few years back, I’ll call her Sarah since she’d rather not be named, quoted £25 an hour and told everyone that’s what she earned. On paper, that’s a decent wage. In practice, out of a 40 hour week she billed around 20 hours. The other 20 went on finding new clients, chasing two invoices that were 45 days late, updating her own website, and doing a client’s onboarding call for free because “it was only 30 minutes.”
Her real hourly rate, once you divide her actual monthly income by the hours she worked, was closer to £12.50. Same skill. Same client roster. Half the number she’d tell you at a networking event. She fixed this eventually by moving three clients onto fixed monthly retainers instead of hourly billing and cutting a fourth client who was the source of most of the chasing. Within four months her real hourly figure was back up near £22, without raising her quoted rate at all. The fix wasn’t charging more. It was billing for what she was already doing.
The maths nobody does before they quote a rate
If you want your real number rather than the one you say out loud, work through this:
- Step 1: Take your quoted hourly rate. Say £25.
- Step 2: Subtract unbillable time. Most solo VAs run at 60 to 70% billable once you include admin, marketing, invoicing, and client communication that isn’t chargeable. So £25 becomes effectively £16 to £17 across a full working week.
- Step 3: Subtract running costs: software subscriptions, insurance, an accountant, a laptop refresh every few years. Budget 10 to 15% of revenue. That takes the £16 to around £14.
- Step 4: Subtract tax and National Insurance if you’re self-employed in the UK, roughly 20 to 30% depending on your total income.
- Step 5: What’s left is your real hourly wage. For a lot of generalist VAs charging £20 to £25, that real figure lands somewhere between £11 and £15.
That’s not a reason to give up. It’s a reason to charge more than you think you need to, and to get proper guidance on this before you set your first rate rather than after two years of underpricing yourself. The full breakdown of how to work out a rate that accounts for this is in how to set your rates as a new virtual assistant, which walks through the sums in more detail than I’ve got room for here.
What moves the number up
Three things separate the VAs earning £15,000 a year from the ones earning £45,000, and none of them is working longer hours.
- Specialising. “General VA” competes with every VA on the planet, including the £5 an hour offshore end. “Podcast launch VA” or “VA for e-commerce founders doing Klaviyo and returns admin” competes with almost nobody. The specific services a VA offers matter more to your income than your hourly rate does.
- Retainers instead of hourly billing. A client paying £600 a month for “10 hours a week of support” behaves completely differently to one paying £25 an hour and watching the clock. Retainers also mean you get paid in quiet weeks, which hourly billing never covers.
- Raising rates on existing clients, not just new ones. Most VAs quote a higher rate to prospects but never go back and raise it with the client they signed 18 months ago at a lower price. That client is often now your least profitable one.
Employed versus freelance: a different kind of honest
If the freelance maths above sounds like a lot of admin for uncertain money, it’s worth saying plainly: an employed VA role, whether through an agency or directly with a company, often nets more real money in year one than freelancing does, because you’re paid every week regardless of how many hours were “billable.” The trade-off is a lower ceiling and someone else setting your rate. Both paths are covered in the guide to VA jobs from home if you’re weighing up which one suits where you are financially right now.
For anyone deciding between building a client-based freelance business from scratch versus taking an employed or semi-employed route, the full guide to starting a virtual assistant business lays out both routes with the real costs and timelines involved, not just the upside.
What year one, year three, and year five look like
Year one is usually the worst-paid year of a VA’s whole career, and that catches people out because it’s the year they were promised the most. Expect £8,000 to £15,000 if you’re building from zero with no existing network, more if you’re transitioning existing clients or contacts across.
Year three, if you’ve stuck with it and specialised, is where most VAs report their income roughly doubling. £22,000 to £32,000 is common. This is also the point where a lot of people quit, right before the curve turns upward, because year two often looks barely better than year one.
Year five and beyond, the ones still going are usually either running a small team (taking a cut of other VAs’ hours rather than just their own) or working at the top of a specialism where £45 to £60 an hour retainer work is normal. That’s a different business model to solo hourly billing, and it’s the honest reason the “top earners” figures you see quoted are often not comparable to what a solo generalist VA can expect.
The uncomfortable bit worth saying plainly
A chunk of VA training courses and coaching programmes quote the top-end numbers, the £45 an hour specialist retainer figures, as if that’s the standard outcome. It isn’t. It’s the outcome for the minority who niche down hard, price on value rather than hours, and stick with it past the flat second year. For everyone else, the honest range sits closer to £15,000 to £25,000 in year one to three, and that’s fine, as long as you’re going in with that number rather than the marketing one.
Frequently asked questions
How much does a virtual assistant earn per hour in the UK?
Most UK virtual assistants charge £15 to £35 an hour depending on experience and specialism, but real take-home per hour worked is usually 30 to 40% lower once unbillable admin, marketing time, and running costs are factored in.
Can you make a full-time living as a virtual assistant?
Yes, but not usually in year one. A realistic full-time income timeline is £10,000 to £15,000 in year one, £22,000 to £32,000 by year three once you’ve specialised and moved clients onto retainers, and £40,000 plus for specialists with a stable roster.
What’s the highest paying virtual assistant niche?
Specialist and technical niches earn the most: launch support, paid ads and Klaviyo management, executive support for founders, and legal or medical admin (handled by non-clinical VAs) commonly command £35 to £60 an hour or equivalent monthly retainers.
Do virtual assistants get holiday pay or sick pay?
Freelance VAs do not unless they build it into their pricing, since unbilled days simply mean no income. Employed VAs, whether through an agency or a company directly, get standard statutory holiday and sick pay in the UK, which is one of the main trade-offs against a freelance route’s higher ceiling.
Related reading: Where to Find Genuine Remote Job Leads Online (Not the Recycled Listings) and How Do You Choose Project Management Software When You Work Alone?.
For the full picture, see my guide to the full list of work from home jobs, where I break down the pay, the growth, and where to find each one.
For the practical version of this, see write for us about finance.
