How Much Does a Virtual Assistant Cost? The Real Number, Including What Nobody Bills You For
A virtual assistant costs anywhere from $5 to $15 an hour offshore, $20 to $45 an hour onshore, or $1,500 to $3,500 a month through an agency for a dedicated VA. That’s the sticker price. It’s also not the real cost, because the rate card never bills you for the hours you’ll spend training, correcting, and rebuilding what walks out the door every time someone quits.
You’ve probably already seen five different numbers for this. That’s because “how much does a VA cost” depends entirely on where they’re based, who’s managing them, and what you’re actually asking them to do. Let’s get honest about all three, and about the part of the cost that never makes it onto a rate card.
The real market rates
Offshore VAs (Philippines, most of Southeast Asia, parts of Latin America) run $5 to $15 an hour, or $600 to $1,800 a month full-time. This is where most small businesses start, because the price gap versus hiring locally is huge. English proficiency and time zone overlap vary a lot here, so you’re trading cost for a wider range in quality and communication.
Onshore VAs (US or Canada based, working remotely) run $20 to $45 an hour, sometimes higher for specialized skills like bookkeeping or executive support. You’re paying for time zone alignment, cultural fluency, and often better judgment on ambiguous tasks. Still cheaper than a full-time local hire with benefits.
Agency-provided VAs run $1,500 to $3,500 a month for a dedicated assistant, sometimes packaged with a backup VA and a manager who handles quality control. You pay a premium over hiring direct, but you skip the sourcing and vetting, and there’s usually a faster replacement if the fit is wrong.
Hourly vs. retainer matters too. Hourly gives you flexibility if the workload is unpredictable. A monthly retainer usually gets you a lower blended rate and priority on your VA’s calendar, but you’re paying for capacity whether you use it or not.
Here’s the comparison in one place:
| Type | Typical cost | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Offshore, hourly | $5–$15/hr | High-volume, low-complexity tasks |
| Offshore, full-time | $600–$1,800/mo | Ongoing admin, inbox, scheduling |
| Onshore, hourly | $20–$45/hr | Client-facing or judgment-heavy work |
| Agency-managed | $1,500–$3,500/mo | Businesses that want less sourcing risk |
Those numbers are all real and all defensible. None of them is the actual cost of running a VA in your business.
What the rate card doesn’t bill you for
Hiring time. Writing the post, screening applicants, running interviews, doing a paid trial. Figure on several weeks of your own attention before anyone touches real work.
The training ramp. A new VA arrives knowing nothing about your business. Not your clients, not your tools, not the dozen unwritten rules you’ve never said out loud because you didn’t know they were rules until someone broke one. You are the training program. Every correction is a lesson you have to teach, and until they’ve absorbed enough of them, you’re reviewing everything they touch. For the first month or two, a VA is often net-slower than doing it yourself. That’s not a bad hire. That’s just what the ramp costs.
Rework. Early mistakes on client-facing work don’t just cost the redo. They cost the apology, and sometimes the trust.
Turnover. VAs move on. They get a better offer, or the work stops being interesting, or life happens. When they leave, everything you taught them leaves with them. Not stored anywhere. Not backed up. You restart the hiring and training loop from zero, and the next person makes a fresh round of the same early mistakes the last one finally grew out of. If you’ve run a VA for more than a year, you’ve probably lived this at least once.
Management overhead. Someone has to assign work, answer questions, check output, give feedback. Usually that’s you. A VA takes tasks off your plate and quietly adds a management job in their place, and if you’re not careful the second one grows to fill the space the first one freed.
None of this means skip the VA. It means the $8-an-hour VA and the $30-an-hour VA can land at a similar real cost once you count what the invoice leaves out. And a great one, well trained and sticking around, is worth every bit of the ramp you paid to get there.
Where a VA is genuinely the right call
Be fair about it, because most comparisons like this aren’t. There’s work a human does better, full stop. A hard client conversation that needs real empathy. A judgment call in a gray area with no clean rule. A phone call where tone matters more than the words. Anything in the physical world, or anything genuinely novel that’s never come up before. A VA who’s been with you a while, who knows your world and your people, is hard to replace and shouldn’t be. If that’s your bottleneck, hire the person and treat them well.
The question you’re actually asking
Here’s the turn most cost breakdowns miss. The real question isn’t “VA or not.” It’s which of your tasks need a human’s judgment, relationships, or presence, and which ones are just your business’s knowledge getting re-explained to a new person every twelve to eighteen months.
That second category is bigger than most owners think, and it’s exactly what infrastructure is built to hold. Not “replace your VA.” Hold the part of the job that was never actually about the person, the process knowledge, the client history, the preferences, the “we do it this way because.” Read a system in once and it doesn’t forget, doesn’t ramp, doesn’t give notice.
Cost per hour is the wrong lens for comparing these two things anyway. Cost per outcome is the honest one. A $10-an-hour VA who takes three months to get proposals right and then leaves in month eight isn’t cheaper than infrastructure that gets it right on week one and keeps compounding. It just looks cheaper on the invoice.
We wrote more on that split in virtual assistant for small business and in how to build an AI workforce. If you’re trying to figure out which of your own tasks belong to a person and which belong to a system, start by writing down what you’d have to re-teach a new hire from scratch. Everything on that list is a candidate for a documented process, and everything documented is something infrastructure can hold permanently instead of you re-explaining it every time someone new sits down at the desk.
That’s the whole idea behind the Crewprint: decode where the knowledge actually lives in your business, download it into a system that keeps it, then add hires, human or AI, on top of a foundation that never resets to zero.
I broke the whole thing down in a case study walkthrough here.
Hire the VA for the work that needs a human. Just stop paying, over and over, to re-teach a system the knowledge it already had.