The real cost of a private personal assistant, and when to outsource instead
Hiring a private personal assistant costs a good deal more than the salary you advertise. Once you add employer National Insurance, pension contributions, a recruitment fee, cover for holidays and illness, and the hours you'll spend managing them, a £45,000 PA realistically costs upwards of £60,000 a year to keep. For some people that money is well spent. For others, a retained service that does the same work without the headcount makes far more sense. Here's how the two actually compare, with the real figures rather than a sales pitch.
What a private PA costs to employ
The headline salary is the part everyone quotes. Across the market, PA salaries run from around £28,000 to £75,000 and above, and private household roles sit higher, roughly £40,000 to £80,000, with London paying 20 to 30 percent more than the rest of the country. A capable private PA in London, then, is rarely under £50,000.
What the salary guides skip is everything stacked on top. Employer National Insurance adds around 15 percent above the threshold. Auto-enrolment pension adds at least another 3 percent. If you hire through an agency, the placement fee is commonly 15 to 25 percent of the first year's salary, so several thousand pounds before they've started. Then there's the part with no invoice: when your PA is on holiday or off sick, the work simply doesn't happen, because there's no one behind them. And someone has to direct, review and manage the role day to day. For a private hire, that someone is usually you.
Put a real number on it. Take a £50,000 private PA in London. Add roughly £6,000 in employer National Insurance and £1,500 in pension. Add a one-off agency fee of £7,500 to £12,500. You're past £60,000 in year one before counting equipment, training, or the time you'll spend covering and managing them. You've also taken on an employee, with the contracts, obligations and HR responsibilities that come with being someone's boss.
What that buys, and where it runs out
A good PA is genuinely valuable when the work is steady and sits within one person's range. You get someone who knows your world, works to your direction, and is yours alone. The limit is structural. One person can only hold so much, has no cover when they're away, and walks out with everything they know if they leave. As life gets busier, more travel, another home, a growing family, you reach a point where the PA becomes the bottleneck and you're either overloading them or hiring a second person and starting the costs again.
What outsourcing looks like instead
A retained lifestyle service does the same work, supplied as a service rather than carried as an employee. You pay a fee for the support itself, not a salary plus on-costs. There's no recruitment, no National Insurance or pension, no HR, and no managing absence, because a team holds your account and covers each other. The scope flexes with your life rather than being fixed at one person's capacity, so a quiet month costs less effort than a frantic one, and you're never paying a full salary for work that isn't there.
The things that never appear on a salary line
Continuity is the big one. An employee can resign at a month's notice and take their knowledge with them. A service has cover and handover built in, so the relationship survives any one person moving on. Range is the second. A single PA has one skill set, where a service brings in specialists across travel, household, schools and health and manages them for you. And risk is the third. Employing someone carries legal and HR obligations that a service contract simply doesn't put on you.
When hiring is still the better call
To be fair about it, employing a PA wins in some situations. If you need someone physically present in your home or office every day, embedded in one specific world, and the workload is steady and genuinely full-time, a dedicated employee can be the better fit and will feel more personal. Outsourcing earns its place when your needs are broad, variable, and spread across more than one area or location, which is most people whose lives have outgrown a single set of hands.
How to decide
Count the areas of life you need covered, and how predictable they are. Be honest about whether you have the time and appetite to manage an employee, and ask what actually happens the week that one person is off. If it comes down to one steady area and you want someone in the building, hire. If it's several areas, changeable, across homes and travel, and you'd rather not run a payroll, outsource.
How Ten Ahead works
We're the outsourced option done properly. You work with one lifestyle manager who learns your life and runs it, with a team behind them for cover and range, and none of the salary, recruitment or HR that comes with employing someone. The support scales with your life rather than sitting at a fixed cost.
Common questions
Is outsourcing more expensive than employing?
Usually the opposite, once you count the true cost of an employee. You pay for the work rather than the overhead around it.
Can I have one named person, the way I would with a PA?
Yes. You deal with one lifestyle manager day to day. The team behind them is your cover, not a call centre.
What if I already employ a PA?
Plenty of clients keep theirs and bring us in for everything beyond what one person can hold, or hand us the personal side while the PA looks after work.
Do you replace my existing staff?
Only if that's what you want. We're just as happy working alongside people you already trust.
