How much does a virtual or personal assistant cost?

Dated 2026 numbers for a virtual assistant, a personal assistant and an executive assistant: hourly and monthly rates, fractional and part-time plans, what an in-house hire costs once benefits are counted, and which parts of the job actually need a person.

Ask what an assistant costs and the honest answer starts with a question back: which kind? "Virtual assistant", "personal assistant" and "executive assistant" cover at least five different purchases: a freelancer by the hour, a dedicated remote assistant on a weekly plan, a managed full-time remote EA, a fractional EA sold in blocks of hours, and a full-time hire on your own payroll. Depending on which one you mean, the answer runs from about $10 an hour to around $9,000 a month for a median-paid in-house executive assistant once benefits are counted.

Every figure below is dated. Wage figures come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (the May 2025 Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics release, the latest available, and the June 2026 employer-cost data). Service prices come from the providers' own rate pages as read on September 25, 2026. They are examples of how the market prices each kind of help, not a ranking or a recommendation, and pricing pages change, so check the current page before you sign anything. Where a number is our own arithmetic on a published figure, we say so.

The short answer: 2026 assistant rates at a glance

Virtual assistant cost per hour

Freelance marketplaces are where hourly virtual assistant rates are most visible, and Upwork publishes its own:

• Headline range. Upwork's rate pages for both virtual assistants and personal assistants put typical hourly rates at $10–$20. Its footnote matters: "This data represents typical hourly rate ranges of certain historical contracts worldwide. What clients will pay is subject to negotiations with talent."
• Average by experience. The same virtual assistant page says that on Upwork, freelance virtual assistants "charge an average of $18-35/hour depending on skills and experience".
• By type of work, North America. For freelancers in North America with over 1,000 hours and a 90% success rate, Upwork lists $12–$20+ an hour for administrative and data-entry work, $20–$35+ for marketing, customer-service and accounting support, and $38–$50+ for advanced VAs and executive assistants (all read September 25, 2026).

Plans sold by the week or month have effective hourly rates too (our arithmetic on the published prices): about $13.50 for Magic's 20-hour week, roughly $17 for a $3,000-a-month full-time managed EA at 40 hours a week, and $65 for Boldly's fractional hours. The spread is wide because these are different products: where the assistant is based, how experienced they are, and how much of the hiring and management the provider takes off your hands.

Virtual assistant cost per month

Monthly plans are the easier number to budget. As published on September 25, 2026:

• Magic: $270 a week for 20 hours a week or $540 for 40. "All plans are billed every 4 weeks", with no contracts, which makes $1,080 or $2,160 per four-week cycle.
• Wishup: dedicated VA plans at $1,999 (Prime) and $2,999 (Elite) a month, and $5,400 a month for a US-based assistant, all at 8 hours a day and billed quarterly; the 4-hour-a-day versions are $1,299, $1,999 and $3,000.
• Athena: $3,000 a month for "One dedicated, full-time EA", vetted, trained, equipped and employed by Athena, on its annual plan; billed monthly instead, it is $3,600 a month after an initial 90-day commitment.
• Oceans: "Starting at $3,000" a month for a full-time (40 hours a week) assistant, with a pod leader, an account manager and free rematching included; its page describes the assistants as university-educated professionals from Sri Lanka.
• Boldly: fractional plans (staff in North America or Europe, your choice) at $2,600 (40 hours), $3,900 (60), $5,200 (80) and $6,500 (100 hours) a month, outside New York State.

For comparison, a full-time in-house executive assistant paid the BLS median wage costs roughly $9,100 a month once benefits are included, and about $7,300–$11,200 across the middle half of the wage range (our arithmetic; the section on hiring in-house shows where those numbers come from).

Personal assistant cost: remote or in person

"Personal assistant" is often the in-person version of the same job: errands, household admin, organizing, being somewhere so you don't have to be. That costs more per hour than remote help because you are paying for someone local. TaskRabbit's own page says: "Rates vary by Tasker experience and location, starting around $20/hour." Its city pages show what location does: prices for a personal assistant "start at $31 per hour" in New York and "start at $32 per hour" in San Francisco (September 25, 2026). Taskers set their own rates, so these are floors, not averages. For remote personal-assistant work, Upwork's page shows the same typical $10–$20 range as its virtual assistant page.

If you hire an in-person assistant directly rather than through a platform, add employer payroll taxes, and budget for your own time finding and briefing them.

Virtual, fractional and part-time executive assistants

A virtual executive assistant is a remote EA: the calendar, inbox, travel and follow-up work of an executive assistant, done from somewhere else. You can buy that full time from a managed service ($3,000 a month at Athena on its annual plan, or from $3,000 at Oceans, as of September 2026) or part time.

A fractional or part-time executive assistant sells you a block of hours. Boldly, as a dated example, offers staff in North America or Europe with "10-15 years of experience", and sells 40 to 100 hours a month at an effective $65 an hour (our arithmetic). Notice what that rate means: $65 an hour is above the roughly $53 an hour an in-house EA costs at the BLS median once benefits are counted (our arithmetic). Fractional help isn't a discount on the rate. It's a discount on the hours: you buy the 10–25 hours a week you actually need instead of 40, and you skip recruiting, payroll and employer paperwork.

If what you need is lighter, a part-time dedicated plan (Magic's 20-hour week at $270) or a freelancer booked for a fixed number of hours a week is the part-time end of the same market.

Hiring an executive assistant in-house: what the salary hides

The salary is the visible half. For executive secretaries and executive administrative assistants, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports (Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025):

• A median annual wage of $76,590 ($36.82 an hour), and a mean of $79,140, across 459,910 jobs.
• A middle half from $61,390 to $94,390, with the 10th percentile at $50,560 and the 90th at $109,850.
• Higher mean wages in the highest-paying areas: $92,220 in California, $91,590 in the District of Columbia, $89,380 in New Jersey, $87,360 in Connecticut and $87,060 in Massachusetts.
• For comparison, a general administrative assistant (secretaries and administrative assistants, except legal, medical and executive) has a median of $47,540. The word "executive" is worth about $29,000 a year.

Then the hidden half starts:

• Benefits. In BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation data for June 2026, private-industry employers paid an average of $32.82 an hour in wages and $14.07 in benefits, so benefits were 30.0% of total compensation, about 43 cents on every wage dollar. That is an average across all private-industry jobs, not EAs specifically, but applied to the EA wage figures it puts the loaded cost at roughly $109,000 a year at the median (about $53 an hour), and about $88,000–$135,000 across the middle half (our arithmetic).
• Recruiting. An agency fee, or weeks of your own sourcing and interviewing, for a role where a bad fit is expensive precisely because it sits so close to you.
• Ramp time. A new assistant spends their first months learning your clients, your threads and your preferences. You pay full rate while that context builds.
• Your management time. Delegation has a real weekly time cost: briefing, checking, correcting. It shrinks as trust builds, but it never reaches zero.
• Coverage gaps. Vacations, sick days and, the expensive one, turnover. When an assistant leaves, what they knew about how you work leaves with them, and the ramp starts again.

What changes the price

• Where the assistant is based. The biggest lever. Wishup's own price list shows it: $1,999 a month for its Prime plan against $5,400 for its US-based tier, for the same 8 hours a day. Upwork's headline range reflects contracts worldwide; its North American figures run higher.
• Hours and commitment. Marketplaces bill by the hour or task; dedicated services sell blocks (Magic in 20- or 40-hour weeks, Boldly in 40- to 100-hour months); managed full-time services ask for a commitment (Athena's $3,000 rate is its annual plan and its monthly plan starts with a 90-day commitment; Oceans starts with a 3-month trial). More committed hours usually means a lower effective rate, and more paid hours you may not use.
• Experience and the kind of work. Upwork's North American figures climb from $12–$20+ an hour for data entry to $38–$50+ for executive-assistant work, and Boldly charges $79 an hour for specialist tasks, against an effective $65 on its standard plans (our arithmetic).
• City. In-person help costs more in big cities (TaskRabbit's $31 and $32 starting rates in New York and San Francisco), and salaried EAs earn more in California, DC, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts than the national mean.
• Who employs them. A service's price bundles payroll, benefits, replacement and management. Hire directly and you carry those yourself, which is why the salary is never the full cost.

What a human assistant does that software can't

Before you pick a tier, look at what an assistant's week actually contains. Part of it genuinely needs a person:

• Calls made on your behalf: ringing a client's office, chasing a vendor, rebooking the flight while you're in a meeting.
• Representing you: negotiating a meeting time with someone else's EA, being the voice people trust when you're unavailable.
• Errands and the physical world: picking things up, setting up the room, handling logistics on site.
• Judgment: reading people, deciding what can't wait, knowing when to interrupt you and when to hold the line.
• Running your inbox and calendar in real time: accepting, declining and replying for you as things happen.

If this is the half you need, hire the human, at whichever tier above fits your hours and budget.

What a personal assistant app can take off the list

The other half is context work, and it quietly eats much of an assistant's week: keeping track of what's in every client thread, pulling up the document a client sent three weeks ago, briefing you before each call, remembering what was decided and what's still open. It's also, often, the pain that sent you shopping for an assistant in the first place. "I need someone who remembers where everything is and briefs me" is a different purchase from "I need someone to make calls and run my calendar."

That half is what Equerry is built for: executive-grade support without the hire, from your personal assistant who helps you get things done. You share your working context as it happens, and ask for it later:

• CC it on the threads that matter. Add your Equerry address (something like alex@mail.getequerry.app) to a client thread. Forwarding delivers the thread as it stands; keeping the address on CC means later replies keep arriving too. It never asks for access to your inbox, and the original stays in your own mailbox. What Equerry remembered from it is listed in Settings → Your memory, each line marked as from that email, and you can delete any line.
• Send the PDFs and screenshots. The contract PDF, the itinerary, a photo of the whiteboard: save them from the share sheet or forward them by email.
• Talk it through after a call. Record a voice note in Equerry, or type a quick note.
• Ask, and check the source. "What did the CFO say about pricing in October?" When an answer draws on a note you saved, it carries a source chip: tap it to see the passage Equerry used and open the original.
• Walk in briefed. If you allow calendar access, Equerry keeps a snapshot of your events from today through the next 14 days (titles, start and end times, locations and attendee display names, never event notes, meeting links or email addresses), so a morning brief can prepare you for the day's meetings, including a reply on a CC'd thread that landed late yesterday.

Equerry is $39.99 a month or $329 a year. To be clear about the boundary: it won't make a call on your behalf, book the restaurant, run your calendar or sit in the room, so it does not replace a human assistant. It works from what you send it, plus your calendar if you allow it. But if what you actually need is to stop losing the thread and walk into every call already briefed, that part doesn't require a hire.

See how that works for client-facing executives and management consultants, or start with why it's called an equerry.

Last updated 2026-09-25.

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