Hire a Virtual Assistant: What It Costs to Hire a VA, How to Hire One, and Where to Post the Role

A virtual assistant handles the recurring, rules-based work that eats an owner or executive's week without needing their judgment. The test for whether a task belongs to an assistant is simple: could you write down how you do it in under a page, and would someone else reach roughly the same result? If yes, delegate it. If the task requires your relationships, your pricing authority or your professional license, keep it.

The work that gets delegated most successfully falls into a handful of buckets. Inbox and calendar management, which is the classic starting point and usually the highest-relief hour. Scheduling and travel booking. Data entry, CRM hygiene and list building. Invoice preparation, expense coding and chasing receipts. Customer email triage and first-line replies from a template library. Research and vendor comparison. Social media scheduling and content formatting, though not usually strategy. Document formatting, meeting notes and follow-up tracking.

What a virtual assistant is generally not is a specialist in disguise. If the job is really bookkeeping, hire a bookkeeper, because a generalist assistant working in your ledger will cost you more in cleanup than you saved. The same applies to design, paid advertising and anything requiring a credential. Where the line falls is worth deciding before you write the listing, because a role advertised as a catch-all attracts applicants who are a weak fit for all of it.

Start by logging your own week for five working days and marking every task that meets the write-it-down test. Most people find between six and twelve hours. That log becomes your job description, your trial task and your first month of instructions, and it is the single best predictor of whether the hire sticks.

A US-based virtual assistant costs roughly $22 to $36 an hour to employ directly, which works out to about $42,000 to $68,000 a year for a full-time assistant. The reliable anchor here is the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook: the median wage for secretaries and administrative assistants was $47,460 a year, or $22.82 an hour, in May 2024. The lowest 10 percent earned under $33,840 and the highest 10 percent over $76,550. Executive assistants sit meaningfully higher, with executive secretaries and executive administrative assistants at a $74,260 median.

Those are wage figures, not what a vendor charges you. The routes differ a lot:

• Direct hire through a job board. You pay the wage plus employer costs, and a flat $299 to list the role. No ongoing markup, and the assistant is yours.
• Managed VA agency. Commonly quoted at $1,200 to $3,000 a month for part-time hours. Industry guidance puts the agency premium at roughly 20 to 40 percent over the assistant's own rate, which buys vetting, account management and usually a replacement guarantee.
• Freelance marketplace. Free to post, but the platform skims 5 to 20 percent of every hour billed, for as long as the engagement lasts.
• Offshore providers. Widely advertised at $3 to $15 an hour. Genuinely cheap, and a reasonable fit for high-volume documented work. The costs that do not appear on the invoice are time zone lag, more onboarding, and higher turnover.

Two numbers people forget. First, employer costs on a US hire: payroll taxes, any benefits, equipment and software typically add 20 to 30 percent on top of wages, and we break that down in what it costs to hire a remote employee. Second, your own management time. Budget five to ten hours a month supervising an assistant, more in month one. An assistant who saves you eight hours and costs you six in oversight has not helped much, which is an argument for documenting the work properly rather than for hiring more cheaply.

The process that works is short, and most of the value is in the first step.

1. Write the task list before the job post. Use the week-long log described above. Six to twelve specific recurring tasks, with rough hours against each. This is the difference between a role someone can succeed at and a vague request for help.
2. Decide hours and employment type. Part-time at 10 to 20 hours a week is the most common shape for a first assistant. Decide now whether this is a W-2 employee or a contractor, because it changes the listing, the pay and your obligations.
3. Write the listing with the salary or hourly rate in it. Publishing pay is the single biggest lever on application quality, and in a growing number of states it is legally required. State the time zone overlap you need and the tools you use.
4. Screen on writing, not on resume length. Nearly all of an assistant's output is written. Ask for a short written response to a realistic scenario, such as how they would handle a double-booked calendar or a customer complaint about a late order.
5. Run one paid trial task. Two to three hours of real work, paid at the offered rate. This predicts performance better than any interview, and it is fair to the candidate.
6. Onboard with documentation, not conversation. Write down the recurring processes, give system access properly, and set a weekly check-in for the first month. Our remote onboarding checklist covers the pre-boarding and first-week structure.

One thing to resist: hiring the most impressive resume rather than the best fit for the actual task list. A former chief of staff will be bored coding receipts within six weeks, and you will be back to hiring in the spring.

The titles overlap in casual use, and employers routinely advertise for one and describe another. The practical distinction is scope and judgment, not location: all three can be fully remote.

A virtual assistant is usually a remote generalist working across a defined task list, often part-time, sometimes for more than one client. The work is broad and mostly executional: inbox, calendar, data, research, scheduling.

An executive assistant supports one or a few senior people and is expected to exercise judgment on their behalf: deciding what reaches the executive, protecting their calendar against competing priorities, handling confidential material, and managing relationships with the board or key customers. That judgment is what the pay gap reflects, and the BLS median of $74,260 for executive administrative assistants against $47,460 for administrative assistants generally is a fair picture of it.

An administrative assistant traditionally supports a team or an office rather than an individual, covering scheduling, records, documents and coordination. In a remote company the role increasingly looks like an operations assistant.

Hire against the work, not the title. If you need someone to run a task list you have written down, advertise a virtual assistant and you will get a better applicant pool at a fair rate. If you need someone to make decisions in your absence, advertise an executive assistant and pay for it, because the person who can do the second job will not stay in the first. If the role is drifting toward process ownership and vendor management, you may actually be hiring into operations, which we cover on remote operations jobs.

This is the question small employers get wrong most often with assistants, partly because the whole VA market is marketed in contractor language.

Match it to control and hours. If you want someone available during set hours, working in your systems, following your processes, and doing whatever comes up that week, that is an employee under IRS and state tests, whatever the contract calls them. If the person works on their own schedule, uses their own tools, serves other clients and delivers defined outcomes rather than availability, a contractor arrangement is genuinely appropriate.

The risk is not theoretical. Misclassification exposes you to back payroll taxes, penalties and unpaid overtime claims, and several states apply tests stricter than the federal one. Assistants are a common target precisely because the arrangement so often looks like employment in practice. The trade-offs for both sides are laid out in 1099 vs W2 remote work.

One consequence worth planning for before you make an offer: hiring an assistant as an employee in a state where you have no other staff creates payroll registration, withholding and unemployment obligations in that state. It is manageable and it is routine, but it is neither free nor automatic, and it is the reason many remote listings restrict which states they hire in. See hiring remote employees in another state for the registration sequence, and our guide to working remotely from another state and where the taxes land for the full state-by-state map.

Assistant roles attract enormous application volume, and most of it is unqualified. The board you choose is mostly a filter problem: you want fewer, better applicants rather than four hundred resumes you will never read.

Two rules cut the noise. Post where the audience is specifically looking for remote work, so you are not fielding applications from people who want an office job and will leave when one appears. And publish the pay, which removes the largest single category of wasted interviews and is increasingly required by state pay transparency law anyway.

On this board a listing is a flat $299 for 30 days, with the salary requirement and employer verification built in, and applicants come to your inbox or your ATS link. There is no placement fee and no per-hour markup, so a long-tenured assistant costs you the same $299 they cost in month one. Compare the options on our remote job posting pricing page, or read how employers hire remote workers for the wider process. If you want the listing itself to do more of the screening, how to write a remote job description covers the structure that works.