Part-Time Executive Support vs. Hiring Full-Time: What the Numbers Actually Say

For small business owners in the UK, the question of whether to hire an assistant rarely has a clean answer. You know your time is being eaten up by admin. You know you need help. But the moment you start pricing up your options, things get complicated fast. Should you hire someone full-time? Work with a freelancer? Or consider one of the specialist part-time executive support services that have grown considerably in visibility over the past few years? This article works through the real financial comparison, with actual employer costs laid out clearly, so you can reach a decision grounded in numbers rather than gut feeling.

Before diving into the figures, it is worth flagging that this article is for informational purposes only. For advice tailored to your specific financial or employment situation, please speak with a qualified professional.

One starting point that helps frame the whole question: research consistently shows that business owners and senior leaders spend a significant proportion of their working week on tasks that do not require their direct expertise. A much-cited study published in the Harvard Business Review found that many executives spend close to a quarter of their time on administrative coordination and low-value activities. For a business owner generating £80,000 or more in revenue value from their working hours, that is a substantial chunk of time being absorbed by work that, in theory, could be handled by someone else. Services like the executive assistant agency for UK founders DonnaPro have been built precisely around this insight: that founders and CEOs often need strategic, skilled support rather than a junior admin, and that paying for a full-time hire to meet that need is not always the most sensible use of a business's resources.

What a Full-Time Executive Assistant Actually Costs a UK Business

The honest figure that many employers underestimate is how far the total cost of a full-time hire diverges from the gross salary figure. A strong, experienced executive assistant working at a strategic level with a founder or CEO in a UK small to medium-sized enterprise context, particularly in or near London, would typically command a gross salary in the region of £45,000 to £60,000 or more. That figure reflects someone capable of operating with real autonomy: managing complex diaries, handling sensitive communications, preparing for board meetings, and anticipating problems before they arrive on your desk. It is not a junior admin role, and it should not be priced as one.

But salary is only the foundation. Employers must also account for employer National Insurance contributions. Since April 2025, following changes introduced in the 2024/25 tax year, the employer NI rate rose to 15%, with the secondary threshold reduced to £5,000. The practical effect of these changes is that the NI bill on a £50,000 salary now sits at roughly £6,750 per year, before any other employment costs are added.

On top of that, employers are legally required to make pension contributions under auto-enrolment rules. The Low Incomes Tax Reform Group's guidance on auto-enrolment for employers sets out the obligations clearly: the minimum employer contribution is currently 3% of qualifying earnings. For context, on a £50,000 salary, the employer's pension contribution alone adds around £1,350 to £1,500 per year to the wage bill, depending on the qualifying earnings band used.

Beyond salary, NI and pension, there are further costs that rarely appear in the initial mental arithmetic: equipment and software licences, any contribution to office space, and recruitment fees if you are using an agency, which typically run to 10 to 20% of first-year salary. Add the time cost of onboarding, which realistically takes one to three months before a new hire can operate independently, and the all-in cost of a full-time EA hire becomes considerably more significant than the advertised salary figure would suggest.

Here is a rough breakdown for a UK employer:

In subsequent years, without the recruitment fee, the ongoing annual employer cost still lands in the region of £65,000 to £67,000 for a strong hire at this level. That equates to roughly £5,400 to £5,600 per month as a baseline, assuming no sick pay cover, no training costs, and no periods of reduced productivity.

The Part-Time Executive Support Model and How It Compares

Part-time executive support services operate on a fundamentally different model. Rather than employing someone directly, business owners work with a specialist agency that provides a trained executive assistant on a flexible retainer basis. The assistant handles a defined scope of work, typically ranging from 10 to 20 hours per week, and the employer carries none of the associated NI, pension, recruitment, or equipment costs.

DonnaPro, which focuses specifically on founders and CEOs, is one of the more established players in this space in the UK. Their model involves pairing clients with assistants who are already trained to work at a strategic rather than purely administrative level. According to the company, their monthly fees sit in the range of £2,000 to £3,000, covering the full scope of support, with no additional employment costs for the client.

Placed side by side with the full-time hire scenario, the difference is stark:

For a business where 20 hours of skilled support per week is genuinely sufficient, the cost gap often amounts to £35,000 to £45,000 per year. That is a material sum for a small business, and it reframes the question considerably.

The Risk of Getting the Hire Wrong

There is a dimension to this comparison that rarely appears in cost calculators, and that is the financial exposure of a bad hire. Recruiting, onboarding and managing a full-time employee involves legal protections that attach from day one and grow over time. If the person is not right for the role, or if circumstances change and the position is no longer needed, the process of ending the arrangement carries its own costs.

Statutory redundancy entitlements are set out on GOV.UK's guidance on redundancy payments, and the Acas explanation of redundancy pay rights offers further detail on how these are calculated in practice. Beyond the statutory minimum, there are notice periods, potential settlement discussions, and the productivity gap while the role sits vacant or is covered informally. All of this represents a real and often underestimated financial risk for small businesses that do not have a dedicated HR function.

Part-time support arrangements carry significantly less of this exposure. If the match is not right, or if business needs change, the arrangement can be wound down without the same legal and financial complexity. For founders already managing lean operations, that flexibility has genuine value.

When a Full-Time Hire Genuinely Makes More Sense

It would be intellectually dishonest to present the part-time model as universally superior. There are clear circumstances in which bringing someone in-house full-time is the right call, and understanding those circumstances is as important as understanding the cost difference.

The integration that comes with a full-time, embedded EA is genuinely difficult to replicate. Someone who works exclusively with you, over years, learns the texture of your business in ways that a part-time arrangement may not fully match. They know your clients, your preferences, the history behind ongoing relationships, and the political nuances within your organisation. For businesses where the volume of support needed consistently runs to 35 or 40 hours per week, that depth of integration delivers real operational value.

A full-time hire also tends to make more sense where physical presence is genuinely required, where sensitive information makes remote working protocols complicated, or where the pace and unpredictability of the role means that a flexible retainer model would constantly be bumping against its boundaries.

The honest test is a simple one: how many hours of support do you genuinely need each week, and does that figure justify the additional employer cost? If the answer is consistently yes, a full-time hire warrants serious consideration. If the answer is 15 to 20 hours, the economics point firmly in the other direction.

Making the Decision Based on Actual Numbers

The most common mistake business owners make in this comparison is starting from assumption rather than calculation. The assumption that a full-time hire is inherently more professional, more reliable or more invested in the business's success is understandable, but it does not automatically translate into better outcomes, particularly at the 10 to 20 hour per week support level.

DonnaPro's UK executive support model is specifically designed to address the gap between generic virtual assistant platforms, which often disappoint founders looking for genuine strategic input, and the full overhead of a direct hire. The distinction matters because the complaint most commonly heard from business owners who have tried VA platforms is not that they were too expensive, but that the support felt transactional: task completion without real engagement, and no anticipation of what was coming next.

The practical steps for any business owner working through this decision are straightforward. Start by estimating, honestly, how many hours of meaningful support you need each week on average, not in peak periods, but as a sustainable baseline. Run the full employer cost of a direct hire, including NI, pension, and recruitment, rather than just the salary figure. Compare that to the all-in cost of a specialist part-time service. Factor in your risk appetite around employment obligations. Then make the decision based on those actual numbers rather than on what feels like the more serious or conventional option.

The numbers, more often than not, tell a clear story.