Every conversation about offshore virtual assistant cost starts in the wrong place: an hourly rate compared against a salary. Those two numbers are not comparable, and the comparison always flatters the offshore option by roughly a third.
Here is the honest version. What a local hire actually costs, where the saving genuinely comes from, and the four costs that never appear in anybody’s quote — including ours.
Compare total cost, not hourly rate
A salary is not what an employee costs. It is roughly two thirds of it.
US median pay for secretaries and administrative assistants was $47,460 in May 2024, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That is the number people compare against. It is not the number that leaves the business.
| Line | Typical range | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Base salary | $47,460 | BLS median, May 2024 |
| Employer payroll taxes | +7.65% and up | Social Security and Medicare, before state unemployment |
| Benefits | +20–30% | Health cover, paid leave, retirement contribution |
| Equipment and software | $1,500–3,000/yr | Laptop, phone, seat licences |
| Recruitment | 15–25% of salary | Amortised, and paid again on turnover |
| Space | Varies | Zero if remote, which is worth saying out loud |
Add the middle three and the real annual figure lands substantially above the headline. The BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation series tracks this directly, and the pattern is consistent: wages are around 70 percent of total compensation, benefits are the rest.
That is the number to compare against. Anything else is arithmetic designed to reach a conclusion.
Where the saving actually comes from
This is the part worth being precise about, because there are two very different claims and only one of them holds up.
The defensible claim: it is a cost-of-living arbitrage. A competitive, comfortable salary in Manila, Lahore or Colombo costs fewer dollars than a competitive, comfortable salary in Chicago, while buying comparable talent in that local market. The assistant is well paid where they live. You pay less because the dollar goes further there. Nobody is worse off.
The claim that does not hold: that offshore is cheaper because the work is worth less, or the people are less capable. If a provider is cheap because they underpay relative to their own market, that shows up as turnover — and turnover is comfortably the most expensive item on this page. You will pay for it in retraining, in context lost, and in the three weeks where nothing gets done properly.
When a rate looks implausibly low, the question worth asking is not “how do they do it” but “what is the retention rate”. The second question is much harder to answer with marketing copy.
~70%
Wages as a share of total employee compensation, per BLS. The remaining 30% is the part that quietly disappears from most cost comparisons — and the part that makes a like-for-like offshore saving look smaller than it is.
BLS · Employer Costs for Employee Compensation
The four costs nobody quotes
Including us. These are real, they are survivable, and you should budget for them.
01 — Onboarding time, which is yours
The first two weeks cost you several hours a week in explaining, reviewing and correcting. This is not a sign anything is going wrong; it is the actual price of transferring context. Businesses that skip it get an assistant who guesses, and guessing is expensive in a different and less visible way.
02 — Timezone overlap
Three to four hours of overlap covers most working relationships. Full overlap is rarely necessary and almost always costs more, either in premium rates or in somebody working a shift that will not be sustainable past month four.
What matters more than the hours is a written rule about what can wait until tomorrow and what cannot — agreed in advance, rather than discovered at 11pm during something urgent.
03 — Process documentation
The work you have never written down has to be written down. This is the cost people resent most and benefit from most, because it turns out roughly a third of any undocumented process is a step that only one person knows and nobody has questioned in four years.
Budget a few hours per workflow. You are not doing it for the assistant. You are doing it because a process that exists only in somebody’s head is a business risk you had already accepted without noticing.
04 — The bad first hire
Sometimes the match is wrong. Skills, communication style, or simply the work not being what either side expected. The cost is not the fee — it is the six weeks before you admit it and the context that leaves with them.
This is the strongest argument for going through a company rather than hiring direct off a marketplace: replacement is somebody else’s problem and somebody else’s cost. Whether that is worth the margin is a real question with a real answer either way.
When cheap becomes expensive
One pattern to watch for.
The hourly rate is low, so you hire three assistants instead of one, because at that price why not. Now you are managing three people, three sets of context, three onboarding curves and three sets of questions — and management time is the most expensive hour in your business.
One assistant who knows the work beats three who each know a third of it, almost every time. The exception is genuinely parallel work with no shared context, which is rarer than it sounds. Most small businesses do not have three separate jobs; they have one job that is too big, which is a different problem with a different solution.
This is why we place one dedicated assistant rather than routing work through a pool. Not because pools cannot work, but because the context is the asset, and pools are structurally bad at accumulating it.
The honest summary
Compared like for like — total cost of employment against total cost of engagement, same scope of work — a substantial saving is real and achievable. Compared dishonestly, as an hourly rate against a headline salary, the saving looks even bigger and the number is meaningless.
The saving is also not the main reason most people end up doing this. The main reason is that the work was not getting done at all. An unfilled admin role costs 100 percent of the value of the work, which makes it comfortably the most expensive option on the table — and it is the option most small businesses are currently running.
Where to start is usually the inbox, because that is where the hours are hiding: how to delegate email without losing your voice. And before adding a person to a process, it is worth checking which parts of it should not involve a person at all — the six automations to build first.
For what this actually costs against your specific scope, a twenty-minute call will get you a real number rather than a range. You leave with a scope and a start date, or you leave knowing it is not worth doing — both are useful outcomes.