It is the first question everyone asks, and most answers online are useless — either an hourly rate scraped from a freelancing marketplace, or a vague promise of “up to 70% savings” with nothing behind it. Here is the actual arithmetic.

Start with what a UK assistant really costs

The number in your head is probably the salary. In the UK, a competent administrative assistant or EA is somewhere around £26,000 to £30,000 depending on where you are and what the job involves.

That is not what they cost you.

On a £28,000 salary you also pay employer National Insurance at 15% on everything above the £5,000 secondary threshold — about £3,450 — and the auto-enrolment pension minimum of 3% on qualifying earnings, roughly £650. So your £28,000 hire is a shade over £32,000 before anyone has switched on a laptop.

Then there is the cost of finding them. A recruitment agency will typically charge 15–20% of first-year salary, so £4,000–£5,500 if you use one. Add a laptop, a phone, software licences, and a desk if they are office-based.

A realistic first-year cost for a £28,000 UK assistant is £36,000–£40,000.

What the same person costs in India

A skilled English-speaking administrative professional in India — three to five years of experience, used to working with Western clients — typically earns somewhere between ₹35,000 and ₹55,000 a month. At current exchange rates that is roughly £330 to £520 a month, or £4,000 to £6,300 a year.

On top of their salary sit the statutory employment costs any Indian employer carries: provident fund contributions, insurance or medical cover, and gratuity accrual. Depending on how the package is structured these add meaningfully to the base figure.

Then there is the cost of whoever is handling the arrangement. If you are hiring through an agency or an Employer of Record, you are paying a management fee for recruitment, employment, payroll and ongoing support — commonly a few hundred pounds a month.

Put together, a full-time virtual assistant in India working your hours generally lands somewhere around £8,000 to £11,000 a year, all in. For most UK businesses that is roughly a third of what the equivalent hire costs here.

Why the range is that wide

Three things move the number more than anything else.

Experience. Someone who has spent five years supporting UK executives and knows how to handle a diary across time zones costs materially more than a first job out of university. They are also worth it, and the gap in monthly cost is smaller than the gap in output.

Specialism. A general administrator is at the bottom of the range. Add bookkeeping in Xero, or a marketing toolset, or genuine phone-facing customer service, and the salary band moves up.

Location. Salaries in Bangalore, Mumbai and Gurgaon are noticeably higher than in Pune, Kochi or Jaipur. This is one of the few areas where a remote arrangement works in your favour: you are not restricted to the expensive metros.

What people forget to budget for

Onboarding time. Not money, but real. Expect to spend meaningful time in the first fortnight recording how you do things. The businesses that skip this are the ones who conclude six weeks later that it did not work.

Equipment. Some arrangements include a laptop, some do not. Ask before you sign, because it is a real cost either way.

Your own management time. A remote hire needs a proper check-in rhythm, at least at first. Budget twenty minutes a day for the first month.

Freelancer or employee?

You can find someone on a freelancing platform for less. Sometimes considerably less. What you get is someone working across several clients, with no obligation to your hours, no notice period, and no continuity if a better-paying client turns up.

For a defined project, that is fine. For the person managing your inbox and knowing how your business runs, it usually is not. There is also a classification question: paying an overseas freelancer full-time hours indefinitely, directing their day and treating them as staff, is not really a freelance arrangement — and that gap is your risk to carry, not theirs.

The short version

Budget around £8,000 to £11,000 a year for a full-time, properly employed virtual assistant in India, against £36,000 to £40,000 for the UK equivalent in year one. Even at the top of the Indian range and the bottom of the UK one, it is not a close comparison.

The honest caveat: the saving is real, but it is not free money. It buys you a person who needs managing, training and including in your team like anyone else. Businesses that treat it as a hire do well. Businesses that treat it as a shortcut do not.

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