Virtual assistant vs part-time hire: the real numbers

The comparison most business owners make is hourly rate against hourly rate, which is the one comparison that’s guaranteed to mislead. An employee’s hourly rate is roughly two-thirds of what an employee actually costs. A contractor’s hourly rate is the whole thing.

Here’s a more honest way to run the numbers.

Figures below are indicative for a NSW business and are current at the time of writing. Superannuation, payroll tax and insurance settings change, confirm your own position with your accountant before making a decision.

What an employee costs beyond the wage

Take an experienced administrator, someone who can be trusted with a board paper, not a school leaver, on $95,000 full-time equivalent, working three days a week. The base cost is $57,000. Then add:

• Superannuation at 12%, about $6,840.
• Workers compensation insurance, varies by industry, commonly 0.5% to 2% of wages. Call it $570.
• Payroll tax, if your total NSW wages exceed the threshold (currently $1.2 million), 5.45%, which on this wage is another $3,100. Many small businesses fall under the threshold, but once you’re over, it applies here too.
• Hardware, desk and software seats, a laptop, a monitor and a handful of licences is $2,500 in year one at the frugal end.

That lands somewhere around $66,000 for three days a week, before you’ve spent a minute recruiting.

Add recruitment. A modest agency fee on a $95,000 role is $13,000 to $19,000, and even hiring it yourself costs you fifteen to twenty hours of your own time screening and interviewing. Then add onboarding: most admin hires take four to eight weeks to reach full productivity, during which you’re paying full rate for partial output.

What that works out to per hour

Three days a week is 22.8 hours. Across 52 weeks that’s about 1,186 scheduled hours. Now subtract the days you’re paying for but not receiving:

• Annual leave, four weeks full-time equivalent, pro-rata, about 12 days.
• Personal and carer’s leave, 10 days full-time equivalent, pro-rata, 6 days.
• Public holidays, about 11 a year in NSW, pro-rata, roughly 6.6 days.

That’s around 187 hours gone, leaving roughly 1,000 hours where someone is actually at their desk. A note on method: the leave above is already inside the $57,000 salary, so it isn’t extra cash out, it’s fewer hours for the same money. Counting it twice, as a cost and as lost hours, is the most common way these comparisons get inflated.

$66,000 across 1,000 hours is about $66 an hour. And attendance still isn’t output. Take out internal meetings, the admin of being an employee, the ramp-up weeks and the quiet stretches you’re paying for regardless, and productive time lands somewhere between $80 and $90 an hour.

Nobody advertises the role at $85 an hour. But that’s the number to compare a contractor’s rate against.

Where a VA genuinely wins

You pay for worked hours only. No leave, no public holidays, no super, no payroll tax, no workers comp, and nothing for hours that turned out not to be needed. If a quiet month means you need 12 hours instead of 30, you pay for 12.

Capacity moves with you. Scaling an employee down means a difficult conversation and possibly a redundancy. Scaling contracted hours down means an email.

You can buy seniority you couldn’t afford full-time. This is the one most people miss. The comparison isn’t 1,000 employee hours against 1,000 contracted hours, because almost nobody needs 1,000 hours, they need the two to four hundred that actually matter. Senior contractor rates for this kind of support sit in the $75 to $95 range: at $85, three hundred well-chosen hours is about $25,500, against $66,000 before recruitment for the employee. And it buys someone with fifteen years of executive-level experience rather than a junior-to-mid administrator. For work where judgment matters, board papers, sensitive comms, vendor negotiation, that trade is usually worth more per dollar.

No fixed overheads. No desk, no hardware, no software seat, no onboarding period at full pay.

Where an employee genuinely wins

I’d rather say this plainly than pretend the answer is always a VA.

When you need someone physically present. Reception, deliveries, paper files, hands-on office coordination. A remote arrangement cannot do these.

When the volume is consistently high. Past roughly 25 to 30 hours a week of steady, predictable work, an employee usually becomes better value, and at that point you also want the cultural presence and continuity a permanent hire brings.

When you want deep institutional knowledge over years. A long-tenured employee accumulates context that’s hard to replicate, though good documentation narrows the gap considerably.

When the work needs constant real-time collaboration. If someone needs to be in every conversation as it happens rather than working from agreed rules, the overhead of a remote arrangement starts to bite.

The honest decision rule

Roughly:

• Under 20 hours a week, or variable, a VA is almost always better value.
• 20 to 30 hours and steady, genuinely close. Depends on whether you value flexibility or continuity more.
• Over 30 hours and steady, hire someone.
• Needs to be in the room, hire someone.
• Needs senior judgment on a small budget, a VA, comfortably.

The mistake isn’t choosing either option. It’s hiring a permanent part-timer for work that’s genuinely variable, then carrying the fixed cost through every quiet month of the year.

If you want to talk through where your own workload sits on that scale, we’re happy to have that conversation, including telling you if hiring is the better call. Get in touch.