Homepage / Virtual Assistant vs Employee: Which Does Your Business Actually Need?
Most small business owners know the moment. The inbox has got away from you, invoices are going out a week late, and you’ve just spent Sunday evening tidying a spreadsheet you promised yourself you’d hand over months ago. You need help. The real question is what sort.
For a long time the answer was simple: hire someone. Write an advert, sit through a few interviews, find a spare desk. Today there’s a serious alternative in the virtual assistant, and the decision is less clear-cut than either camp’s marketing would suggest. Below we’ve set out what each option genuinely costs in 2026, what you gain and give up with each, and how to work out which one fits the work in front of you.
An employee works for you under a contract of employment. You set their hours, decide how the work is done, pay them through PAYE and take on the legal duties that come with being an employer.
A virtual assistant (VA) is a self-employed professional, or a small firm, providing administrative, organisational or specialist support remotely. You’re buying a service rather than hiring a person. The VA invoices you, sorts out their own tax and National Insurance, uses their own equipment and usually works with several clients. Some charge by the hour; many prefer monthly retainers or fixed-price packages.
It’s worth saying early that the difference isn’t really about location. Plenty of employees work from home. What separates the two is the nature of the relationship, and that drives almost everything else in this article.
Salary is the figure everyone focuses on. On its own it’s also the least helpful, because the cost of putting someone on the payroll has risen noticeably over the last two years.
In April 2025 employer National Insurance went up from 13.8% to 15%, and the threshold at which you start paying it dropped from £9,100 to £5,000 a year. Both changes still apply for 2026/27. The National Living Wage rose to £12.71 an hour from April 2026. On top of that sits the workplace pension: under auto-enrolment, employers must pay in at least 3% of an eligible worker’s qualifying earnings, which for 2026/27 means earnings between £6,240 and £50,270.
Here’s how that looks for a full-time administrative assistant on £27,000 a year.
| Cost | Annual amount |
|---|---|
| Gross salary | £27,000 |
| Employer National Insurance (15% above £5,000) | £3,300 |
| Employer pension (3% of earnings above £6,240) | £623 |
| Total before any other costs | £30,923 |
And that’s before you’ve recruited anyone. Agency fees of 10–15% of first-year salary are typical, which on this salary means somewhere between £2,700 and £4,050. You’ll also need a laptop, software licences, a phone, employer’s liability insurance (a legal requirement for most employers in Great Britain), training, and a fair chunk of your own time for onboarding and day-to-day management.
Now think about what you’re actually buying. A full-time employee is entitled to 5.6 weeks’ paid holiday a year, which is 28 days for someone working five days a week (bank holidays can be counted within that). On a 37.5-hour week, that leaves roughly 1,740 working hours a year. Sickness comes off that too, and since April 2026 Statutory Sick Pay has been payable from the first day of absence rather than the fourth.
Divide £30,923 by 1,740 hours and you get about £17.77 for every hour of work you actually receive. Add recruitment, kit and management time, and the figure climbs past £20 without much effort.
One caveat. Eligible employers can claim the Employment Allowance, which reduces the annual employer NI bill by up to £10,500 and would cancel out the NI on a single hire like this. It isn’t open to everyone, though. A limited company whose only employee is a director can’t claim it, for instance, so check with your accountant before you count on it.
VAs set their own prices, so rates vary widely. Experience, specialism and the way you buy all make a difference. Someone handling general inbox and diary management will charge differently from a VA who specialises in bookkeeping, events or executive support. As a rough guide, UK-based VAs commonly charge somewhere between £15 and £35 an hour, with specialists and very experienced VAs above that and offshore assistants well below it.
The hourly rate will nearly always look higher than an employee’s hourly wage. That’s to be expected. A VA’s rate has to cover their own holidays, sick days, pension, equipment, software, insurance and all the unpaid time that goes into running a business. You aren’t paying for any of that. You pay for the hours of work you receive, and nothing else.
So comparing a wage with a rate tells you very little. The better question is: what will it cost to get the work I genuinely have done?
We’d rather be straight about this. If you have a steady, predictable workload that fills a full-time or substantial part-time role week in, week out, a well-managed employee will usually cost less per hour of work than a VA. That’s simply how the economics work.
The VA starts to make more financial sense when:
Taking on an employee is a long-term commitment, and the law is moving in that direction too. The Employment Rights Act 2025 is being phased in over 2026 and 2027. Paternity leave and unpaid parental leave became day-one rights in April 2026, and from 1 January 2027 the qualifying period for ordinary unfair dismissal claims is set to fall from two years to six months.
None of that is a reason not to hire. It does mean hiring carefully, writing a clear job description and using the early months of employment properly.
A VA relationship is governed by the service agreement you sign. Notice periods are usually short, and you can scale the hours up or down as the business changes. If it isn’t working, ending it is a commercial matter rather than an employment one.
This is where employees often come out ahead, and it’s worth weighing honestly.
An employee is part of your team. You can train them in your way of doing things, they build up knowledge of your customers over time, and they can deal with anything physical: post, deliveries, a visitor at reception, the printer that’s jammed again. For many businesses, that sense of someone who is fully invested in the place is worth more than the spreadsheet suggests.
A VA works to agreed outcomes and agreed availability. They’ll have other clients, so you can’t expect them to drop everything at a moment’s notice unless that’s built into your agreement (and priced accordingly). On the other hand, a good VA brings experience from lots of businesses, often knows the software better than you do, and may well spot ways to make your processes slicker. Many VAs work within a small team or agency, which helps with cover for holidays and illness. If yours works alone, ask what happens when they’re away.
Calling someone a virtual assistant doesn’t make them self-employed. Employment status depends on how the relationship works in practice, not what the contract calls it. HMRC and employment tribunals look at questions such as:
If your ‘VA’ works fixed hours that you set, uses your laptop, attends your team meetings and has no other clients, you may have an employee or worker on your hands, with the tax and employment rights that go with it. HMRC’s free Check Employment Status for Tax (CEST) tool is a sensible first check.
If the VA trades through their own limited company, the off-payroll working rules (IR35) may also apply. Medium and large private sector clients have to decide the VA’s status for each engagement themselves. Small companies are exempt, in which case the responsibility stays with the VA’s own company.
Data protection deserves a mention too. A VA who handles your customers’ details will usually be acting as your data processor under UK GDPR, which means you need a written contract that includes the terms the law requires. Ask any VA how they store and secure data, which tools they use, and whether they are registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office.
| Virtual assistant | Employee | |
|---|---|---|
| How you pay | Hourly rate, retainer or package | Salary plus NI, pension and benefits |
| Holiday and sick pay | Not your cost | Your cost |
| Equipment and software | VA provides | You provide |
| Time to get started | Often days | Often weeks or months |
| Scaling up or down | Usually easy | Contract changes, consultation |
| Day-to-day control | Agreed outcomes and availability | You direct the work |
| Physical, on-site tasks | Not possible | Possible |
| Best value for | Small, irregular or specialist workloads | Steady, full-time workloads |
Many growing businesses use both, one after the other. They begin with a VA, get the routine tasks written down as processes, and find out how many hours the work really takes. When those hours reach the point where a role makes financial sense, they hire, and the VA’s process notes go a long way towards writing the job description. Others keep a VA alongside in-house staff for specialist tasks, overflow work or holiday cover.
Answer those honestly and the right choice usually becomes fairly obvious.
For small or irregular workloads, usually yes, because you only pay for the hours you use and avoid employer NI, pension contributions, holiday pay, equipment and recruitment fees. For a steady full-time workload, an employee often works out cheaper per hour of work.
No. A genuinely self-employed VA covers their own holidays, sickness and pension. That’s one of the reasons their hourly rate is higher than an employee’s wage.
You can agree availability, for example being on hand for calls between 9am and 1pm. Be careful, though: the more you dictate exactly how, when and where they work, the more the arrangement starts to look like employment.
Almost anything that can be done on a computer or phone. Common examples include inbox and diary management, invoicing and credit control, data entry, CRM updates, travel and event arrangements, customer enquiries, document formatting, research and social media scheduling.
It should be, provided you choose carefully. Put a written agreement in place that covers data protection, ask how information is stored and secured, and limit their access to the systems they actually need.
If you’re weighing up whether a virtual assistant could take some of the load off, have a think about the first three tasks you’d hand over. Then get in touch and we’ll talk you through how it could work for your business.
