Virtual assistant agency labour costs: wages, overheads and benchmarks

What to take away

The wage figures you can cite, and where they come from

The BLS occupational employment and wage statistics tables publish employment and wage estimates by occupation, industry, state and metropolitan area. Three occupation lines matter to a virtual assistant agency.

The May 2024 tables put customer service representatives at a national median near $40,000 a year, with a 10th to 90th percentile range of roughly $28,000 to $60,000. Secretaries and administrative assistants sit near $44,000, ranging about $30,000 to $63,000. Executive assistants run near $68,000, ranging about $45,000 to $95,000.

Treat those as planning ranges. The metro table is the one you cite, and the percentile you hire at is a decision, not a discovery.

Agencies serving Seattle and Denver clients tend to hire at the 60th to 75th percentile because their clients expect coverage in those time zones.

Agencies running a Chicago or Atlanta bench often hire at the 40th to 60th because the local labor pool is deeper.

Typical 2026 metro medians for customer service representatives run $48,000 to $55,000 in Seattle, $44,000 to $50,000 in Denver, $42,000 to $48,000 in Chicago, and $36,000 to $42,000 in Atlanta. Use the BLS table for the exact figure.

Pull the current numbers yourself. They are revised annually, and a figure copied from a blog post is a figure you cannot defend to a client or a lender.

What a loaded hour actually costs

Take one delivery person. Suppose their pay is P per month. The other six components are usually expressed as percentages of P, so the model travels between hires.

For a hire paid $3,000 a month, employer payroll taxes at 7.65 percent add about $230. Workers comp for clerical staff commonly runs $0.50 to $2.00 per $100 of payroll, or $15 to $60 a month. A small-group health plan contribution typically runs $300 to $700 a month if you offer one.

Add the ranges and the loaded monthly cost lands between 1.35 and 1.70 times P. At $3,000 a month, that is $4,050 to $5,100 loaded. Pay is the majority of the cost and nowhere near all of it.

Divide the loaded monthly total by the hours that person actually delivered on client work. At 110 delivered hours, a $4,500 loaded month costs about $41 a delivered hour. At 130 hours, it falls to about $35.

That is your cost of a delivered hour, and it connects labor to price. The pricing floor built on it is worked through in the pricing and profit guide.

Three benchmarks that tell you whether pay has drifted

Offer acceptance rate. Above 90 percent, you are above market and probably paying for it. Between 50 and 90, you are close. Below 50, you are below market and losing candidates you wanted.

First-year turnover. Under 20 percent is healthy for this work. Twenty to 30 is normal churn. Above 30 means something in the role, the workload or the pay is wrong, and pay is only one of the three.

Escalation rate per person per week. A stable assistant escalates two to five questions a week. Rising escalations with falling delivered hours is a documentation gap, not a pay gap. Fix the documentation before you raise the wage.

Run all three monthly. Two hires will tell you more about your market position than any published table.

Overheads, separated from labor

Labor is not the only cost, and mixing the two hides which one moved.

Two rules keep this clean. Charge software per seat, not per agency, so a hire's cost is visible before you make the offer. And keep owner time out of the delivered-hour calculation, or every hour looks cheap and every quote looks safe.

The arrangement changes the arithmetic

Employee and contractor arrangements carry different costs, different obligations and different scheduling freedom. Which one you have is not a matter of preference.

Employee arrangements add FICA, unemployment insurance and workers comp. Contractor arrangements shift those costs but narrow your control. The FLSA exempt salary threshold is $684 a week, or $35,568 a year; below that, overtime rules usually apply.

The Labor Department's compliance assistance for new and small businesses is the starting point for wage and hour obligations. The EEOC's small business resource center covers the employment requirements that attach as an agency grows.

Two practical points follow. An arrangement that requires fixed coverage hours and close direction is worth examining carefully with advice. And your cost model has to be rebuilt if the answer changes, because employer costs move and paid non-delivery time moves with them.

What turnover costs, in figures

When somebody leaves, five costs land at once:

Put ranges on it for one departure. For a hire paid $3,000 a month, recruiting runs 3 to 8 percent of annual pay, or $1,080 to $2,880. Ramp costs 4 to 10 percent of annual pay, or $1,440 to $3,600 in reduced output.

Supervision during ramp adds 5 to 10 percent, or $1,800 to $3,600. Three empty weeks of billed hours at $35 an hour and 25 billable hours a week costs $2,625.

A single departure commonly lands between $3,000 and $6,000 all in. The upper end fits a senior executive assistant client. Estimate it once, honestly, for one departure, and it changes how you think about the things that make people stay.

Retention levers that are not pay

Three recur, and all three are cheaper than a raise. A raise of $1 an hour costs about $2,080 a year per full-time person.

A route to more interesting work. Assistants leave when the next twelve months look identical to the last twelve. A second service line to learn is worth a great deal.

Being defended from an unreasonable client. This is the one owners most often decline to pull, and the one people remember longest. An assistant who watches you take a client's side against them is already looking.

Visible workload. People burn out silently when nobody above them can see how much they are carrying. A work-in-progress limit is a retention tool as much as an operational one.

Pay matters, and it is not sufficient. Ask leavers one question, what would have had to be different, and read the answers over a year rather than reacting to each.

Where labor cost meets the client

What you can promise a new client depends on delivered hours your bench produces, the arithmetic above run in reverse.

At a $41 delivered-hour cost, a $60 hourly client rate leaves a 32 percent gross margin before overheads. At $75, it leaves 45 percent.

The selection process that fills that bench is in the guide to hiring reliable staff for an agency. The training system that raises delivered hours per person is in the hiring and training guide.

An account that loses its assistant is at risk no matter how well the handover goes. Practices in the renewal and reporting playbook treat a documented second person as a retention measure, not staffing.

And the reason any of this is affordable is the demand you can generate against it, which is the subject of the marketing and growth guide.

A monthly review that takes twenty minutes

Four figures, per person, per month.

Read them together. Rising escalations with falling delivered hours is usually a documentation gap. Idle time concentrated in one person is a scheduling problem. Rework concentrated in one account is a client-standard problem, not a personnel one.

Twenty minutes a month, and it will catch a cost problem two quarters before the accounts do.

Common questions

Should I pay by the hour or a fixed monthly amount?

That depends on the engagement basis, which is a legal question rather than a preference. Whichever applies, model the cost as a monthly total so the seven components stay visible.

How do I compare pay across different locations?

Compare against local markets separately, using the published tables for each area, and expect the answers to differ. A single global rate either overpays in one place or fails to hire in another.

Is offering more the fastest way to stop turnover?

It is the fastest and rarely the most durable. Find out why people leave first; if the answer is pay, raise it, and if it is not, you have bought nothing.

What is a reasonable non-delivery share?

Ten to 20 percent of pay is the working range, and the part caused by rediscovery is the part worth cutting. Measure yours, then work to reduce that part rather than the part caused by rest.