Should you hire a private PA, or retain a lifestyle office?

Most people arrive at the same conclusion at roughly the same moment, which is that this has become too much to run alone. What tends to happen next is a search for a private PA, on the entirely reasonable grounds that hiring somebody is the obvious solution and the only one most people have heard of.

Sometimes it is the right one. Frequently it is not, and the reasons have almost nothing to do with the calibre of the person you would be hiring, which is usually excellent. They have to do with structure, with what a single employee can and cannot absorb, and with a set of costs that do not appear anywhere in the salary you agreed.

What follows sets out what each option genuinely costs, what each one buys, and how to work out which suits your life. We have an obvious commercial interest in the conclusion, so we have tried to be straightforward about the circumstances in which hiring is plainly the better answer, because those circumstances exist and pretending otherwise would waste an afternoon of your time and rather more of our credibility.

What hiring actually costs

The salary is the figure everybody plans around, and it is almost never the figure they end up paying.

A capable private PA in London commands somewhere between £45,000 and £65,000 in 2026, with genuinely senior private PAs and household chiefs of staff running considerably beyond that. Take a mid-senior appointment at £65,000 and the real cost of the first year looks like this.

Item	Cost
Base salary	£65,000
Employer National Insurance, at 15% above the £5,000 threshold	£9,000
Pension auto-enrolment, 3% employer minimum on qualifying earnings	from £1,300
Recruitment agency fee, typically 15% to 25% of first-year salary	£13,000
Payroll service, employer's liability insurance, contract and HR setup	£1,000 to £2,000
First-year total	approximately £89,000
Ongoing annual cost	approximately £76,000

Rates move and none of this constitutes tax advice, so confirm the current figures with your accountant. The shape, however, holds reliably: employing somebody costs between fifteen and twenty per cent more than their salary before a recruiter has been paid a penny.

Three further costs sit outside that table, and they are the ones consistently underestimated.

The first is the search itself, which takes two to four months and a meaningful quantity of your own time in interviews. Should the first appointment prove wrong, and roughly a third of private hires do, the exercise repeats in full, minus the agency fee if you remain inside the replacement guarantee and plus it if you do not.

The second is your own management time, because you are now an employer. Somebody has to set priorities, give feedback, approve holiday, conduct the occasional difficult conversation and be the person this individual escalates to when they are uncertain. That somebody is you, and it does not stop being you.

The third is the one that matters most, and it is that a single employee is a single point of failure. One person means one holiday allowance, one immune system and, eventually, one letter of resignation. While your PA is away your life is unstaffed. When they leave, and average tenure in private roles runs to two or three years, every piece of accumulated context departs with them, and you begin again from nothing with somebody who does not yet know which consultant your father sees or which of the three boilers is temperamental.

The honest case for hiring anyway

Having said all of that, there are three circumstances in which employing somebody is straightforwardly the better decision.

If you need a person physically present in your home or office most days, opening post, taking deliveries, meeting contractors and doing the school run, then you need an employee, and no retained arrangement is a substitute for somebody in the building. If your life generates constant, unpredictable, high-volume demand across every day of the week, the exclusivity of somebody whose entire working attention belongs to you alone is worth paying for. And if what you want above all is total immersion, somebody in your house daily absorbs the texture of a household at a depth that is genuinely difficult to match at a distance.

Where those describe your situation, hire. Hire well, pay properly, and disregard the remainder of this article with our blessing.

What retaining a lifestyle office offers instead

A private lifestyle office is a team you retain rather than an individual you employ, and the differences that matter are structural rather than a question of degree.

You get seniority you could not otherwise justify, since the person running a retained relationship typically operates at a level, and a cost, that no single household would employ full time. You get continuity through absence, because holiday, illness and departure become the firm's problem rather than yours, and because context lives in a team and in systems rather than in one person's head; your August is not unstaffed because somebody is in Cornwall. You get depth on demand, which is to say education specialists, travel, household and estate management, healthcare navigation and event planning as and when they are required, rather than hiring five people or quietly accepting that one person will be superb at two of those things and merely adequate at the rest. You get a decade of accumulated relationships with schools, clinics, contractors, hotels and agencies, where a newly appointed PA is building all of that from scratch, on your time and using your name.

You also get none of the employer obligations. No payroll, no auto-enrolment, no employer's liability insurance, no right-to-work checks, no contracts, no performance management and no exit process. If that last item reads as an odd thing to weigh in the balance, it is worth asking anybody who has ever had to dismiss a member of household staff.

And you get an arrangement that flexes, which matters more than people expect. Life is not evenly demanding. A relocation, a new baby, a difficult diagnosis or a house purchase produces months of real intensity followed by long quiet stretches. An employee costs precisely the same in both. A retained relationship absorbs the surge.

As to what it costs, we do not publish a rate card, because engagements genuinely differ in scope and any published figure would be misleading for most of the people reading it. What we will say plainly is that the entry point sits meaningfully below the true cost of employing a senior PA, and that a full private lifestyle office, doing rather more than any individual could, sits in a broadly comparable range. You are for the most part choosing what to buy rather than how much to spend, and scope is agreed openly in a first conversation. There is more on this in our FAQ.

The distinction underneath the money

Cost is the easier comparison to make. The more important one concerns what the role actually is.

A PA supports your tasks. Task in, task out. The thinking, the prioritising and the remembering all remain firmly with you, which is why capable people with genuinely excellent assistants still describe themselves as carrying everything, and are often slightly embarrassed to admit it. We have written about this distinction at length in lifestyle manager versus personal assistant.

What we do differs in kind rather than degree. A Chief of Life takes ownership, holding the whole shape of your world, anticipating rather than waiting and coordinating the other professionals already around you. The test remains the same one: if you said nothing for a fortnight, what would happen? Where ownership genuinely sits with the firm, the renewals go through, the school deadline is met and the trip in six weeks quietly gets built. That is what people are actually attempting to buy when they begin looking for a PA, and it is not, unfortunately, what the job title describes.

The arrangement most people settle on

It is worth saying that this need not be a choice at all.

A common structure, and often the best available, pairs an excellent PA handling the present-tense and in-person work with a lifestyle office sitting above and around them, holding the strategic load, covering absence, supplying specialist depth and taking on everything a single person cannot reasonably carry. We work alongside existing PAs and household staff constantly and it is among the more productive arrangements we have. Nobody is replaced or displaced. The gaps between people simply stop being the place where things fall.

How to decide

Four questions, answered honestly, will usually settle it.

Do you need somebody physically present most days? If so, hire, and consider a retained office alongside them rather than instead of them. Is your demand steady, or does it surge? Steady and high suits employment; surging suits retaining. What happens to your life if this person is unavailable for three weeks, and how serious is that answer, because if it is serious then one person is a fragile structure to build on.

And then the question that actually decides it, which is whether you want to manage somebody or to stop managing things. Most people know their answer to that immediately. Hiring adds a person to lead. Retaining removes an entire category of work from your life. They feel completely different to live with, whatever the spreadsheet says.

If you are somewhere in the middle of this decision, we are glad to talk it through even where the conclusion is that hiring suits you better. We have said exactly that to people before and will again. Our founder was a Chief of Staff long before she built this, which is why the company exists at all, and you can see how a retained relationship runs in practice on our How it Works and Private Lifestyle Office pages.

Start a conversation whenever you are ready. Every enquiry is read personally by Georgie.