What I pay my virtual assistants
# What I pay my virtual assistants
When people find out I run my business with help from a small remote team, the first question is always the same. How much do you actually pay them? There is a second question hiding behind it, asked more quietly. Is this just paying someone overseas next to nothing?
Both questions are fair. Both deserve straight answers with real numbers, which is more than you usually get from people who would rather stay vague about what they pay. So here is my honest accounting, with the caveat that this is one small operator's experience and nothing here is financial advice.
The quiet question comes first
The second question shapes everything else, so I want to take it seriously instead of waving it off. What I aim for is a wage that counts as genuinely good money in the place the person actually lives, and that still fits inside a small business budget. Those two things can coexist because cost of living varies enormously between countries. A rate that would be low where I live can be a strong, sought after salary somewhere else.
When it works, both sides win on their own terms. The person gets stable, well paid work they want to keep. I get a skilled teammate I can rely on. Neither side is doing the other a favor.
Underpaying people is wrong, and I want to be blunt about that. As a completely separate point, it is also terrible business. Squeeze someone to save a few dollars and the good ones work out very quickly that they are underpaid, and then they leave. You are back to job posts, interviews and weeks of training a replacement, which costs far more than whatever you saved. Fair pay and smart business happen to point in the same direction here. That is convenient, but I would argue for the fair wage even if they pointed apart.
Hourly or monthly, part time or full time
Two structural questions get bundled together when people ask about pay, so let me pull them apart.
Hourly pay is simple and flexible. You agree a rate, the person tracks hours, you pay for what you use. It suits work that arrives in waves, and it suits the early weeks with a new hire when both of you want room to find out whether the fit is real.
A fixed monthly salary is a different arrangement. A set amount arrives every month for a set schedule, whether the week was slammed or quiet. For a long term assistant, someone woven into how I work, I strongly prefer the monthly salary, and the reason is mostly about them. A fixed number means they can plan a life around it. Rent gets paid and a family gets supported without anyone having to watch my workload nervously. That stability is a large part of why good people stay. It is simpler for me too, one predictable figure instead of a spreadsheet of hours, but the trust it builds is the real value.
The same logic runs through full time versus part time. A part time helper suits a specific, contained job. Full time makes sense once there is enough steady work to genuinely fill a week, and you want that person's focus in return.
The actual numbers
Here is the part everyone actually came for, wrapped in a disclaimer I need you to take seriously. These are illustrative ballparks from my own hiring, at the time of writing. Rates drift over time, vary by country and vary by the individual sitting in front of you. Please do not screenshot a figure from this page and wave it at someone as the going rate.
With that said, roughly how it looks for me:
An entry level general assistant, handling straightforward work like inbox triage, scheduling, data entry or simple research, tends to land somewhere around three to five dollars an hour.
Someone more experienced or specialised, with real writing ability, design skills, bookkeeping experience or anything development adjacent, is more like six to ten dollars an hour, climbing from there for genuine expertise.
Converted into a full time monthly salary, a dedicated assistant often lands somewhere around four hundred to a thousand dollars a month, depending on skill and hours.
I want to sit on the word roughly. I have paid below these ranges for very light, occasional work, and well above them when someone's skills clearly deserved it. A range is the start of a conversation with a person. It was never meant to be a price tag you stick on one.
What moves a rate up
If the range is that wide, what decides where a specific person lands inside it? Nothing surprising.
Skill and proven experience matter most. Someone who has done exactly this work for years, and can show it, earns more than someone starting out, same as anywhere else in the world.
Communication comes next, if you work closely in English all day. Clear writing and easy back and forth are genuinely valuable, and paying for them is completely fair.
Then there is the level of responsibility and judgment the role carries. A person following a checklist is one thing. A person I trust to make a call while I am asleep, talk to a customer, or catch a mistake before it ships operates on a different level, and the pay should say so.
Timezone overlap earns a premium too. If I need someone's hours to line up with mine so we can work in real time, that is a real constraint on their day and worth paying for. And the share of their week I am asking for matters. More commitment, and more of their availability locked to me, earns more.
You are never paying for a country. You are paying for a person, their skills, and what you ask them to carry.
Paying well is mostly habits
The agreed number is only half of it. How the money actually moves matters as much, maybe more.
First and most important, I pay on time, every single time. It sounds obvious and it is the thing people get wrong most often. Someone on the other side of the world, who has never met you in person, is trusting that the money lands exactly when you said it would. Make them chase their own wages even once and you have broken something that is very hard to rebuild. Payday is fixed.
Second, I pay through a boring, ordinary channel. A standard bank transfer or a money transfer service that lands cleanly in their account, in their currency, without fees eating a chunk of it. One detail people get confused about: the hiring platform where I found the person takes no cut of their wage. You typically pay the platform a small flat fee for access, and the salary goes straight from me to them. The platform is how we met, nothing more.
Third, raises happen when someone grows. If a person takes on more, gets sharper, and starts owning things I used to worry about myself, their pay should move before they have to ask. Many employers, me included, also honor the local custom of a thirteenth month bonus, an extra month of pay near the end of the year. It is expected in some places and appreciated everywhere.
The mistakes that cost the most
The first mistake is underpaying to save money, then paying for it in a worse currency. You find someone cheap, feel clever for a month, and then they leave for an employer who pays what they are worth. Now you are hiring again, training again, and losing weeks of momentum. Cheap usually turns out to be the most expensive option available.
The second is paying late or unpredictably. I said it above and it deserves saying twice, because nothing destroys trust faster. A person unsure whether the money will arrive is a person already, very sensibly, looking for their next job.
The third mistake is a mindset. Treat a person as a line item to minimise and you will make a hundred small decisions that grind them down and push them out the door. Treat them as a teammate whose life is tied to how you behave, and better decisions follow almost automatically. Those also happen to be the decisions that keep good people around.
What the money actually buys
Put the cost next to the value and the whole thing clicks. A good full time assistant might cost somewhere in that few hundred to a thousand dollars a month range. Real money for a small business. What it buys back is hours of my week, every week, plus the low constant hum of a dozen small tasks I no longer carry in my head. The handful of things only I can do finally get my full attention.
Added up honestly, the salary was never the expensive part. My own time and attention were, by a wide margin. Plenty of people get this backwards and guard the salary while their own hours drain away on work almost anyone could do.
Should you hire at all
It depends, and I will give you the real test. Hiring is worth it only if you have definable work to hand over, meaning tasks you could describe to another human being. If you can write down what needs doing and what a good result looks like, delegation can work beautifully.
If you cannot describe the work, a hire will not fix that. I have watched people drowning in overwhelm bring someone on, quietly hoping the helper will define a job the owner never defined themselves. What they get is a confused person waiting for direction, and a monthly bill for the privilege. Write the actual jobs down first. Get clear on what done looks like. Then hire, because at that point it becomes one of the highest leverage moves a small operator can make.
For what it is worth, the place I hire from is OnlineJobs.ph, and the approach above is exactly how I use it. If you want more honest breakdowns of how a small operation runs day to day, I write and film them at [xavierfok.com](/).
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