The Real Cost of Hiring an Executive Assistant in the UK – and What Founders Are Doing Instead

By Filip Pesek

When UK founders start thinking about hiring an executive assistant, the conversation usually begins with salary. They look at job boards, find a range that feels manageable, and start thinking about whether the timing is right.

What they rarely calculate – until the invoice arrives – is everything else.

Filip Pesek, founder of DonnaPro, has spent years helping founders understand what executive support actually costs. The gap between the number on the contract and the number coming out of the business is almost always larger than expected. For UK businesses specifically, the employment cost structure makes this gap significant.

What a Top-Tier EA Actually Costs to Hire in the UK

Let’s be specific, because vague salary ranges don’t help anyone make a real decision.

A strong, reliable executive assistant in the UK – someone capable of working closely with a founder, managing complex workflows, and operating with genuine initiative – commands a gross salary of around £87,180 per year in the current market. That’s not a senior chief of staff or a corporate EA at a FTSE 100 firm. That’s a competent, trusted hire for a growing SME.

From there, the employer costs stack up quickly:

• Employer National Insurance at 15%: approximately £14,210 per year
• Pension auto-enrolment contributions (minimum 3%): added on top
• Recruitment agency fees if used: typically 10-20% of first-year salary
• Equipment, software licences, and onboarding costs

Salary and National Insurance alone bring the minimum annual employer cost to £101,390. Monthly, that’s £8,449 before pension, before recruitment, before a laptop has been ordered.

And that’s before the new EA has answered a single email.

The Part of the Calculation Founders Always Miss

Cost is only one side of this. The other side is time.

The average UK hiring process for a senior support role runs between one and three months from brief to start date. During that window, the founder is still doing everything themselves – plus managing the hiring process on top. And once the EA starts, realistically allow another four to six weeks before they’re operating independently.

That’s potentially five months between deciding you need help and actually having it. Most founders don’t have five months to wait.

There’s also the concentration risk that rarely gets discussed. A full-time, in-house hire is a single point of failure. If they’re ill, on holiday, or hand in their notice, the gap lands back on the founder immediately. There’s no backup, no continuity, and no one already trained on how the business operates.

What the Alternative Actually Looks Like

This is the problem DonnaPro was built to solve. As a UK executive assistant agency working exclusively with founders and CEOs, the model is straightforward: founders get a trained, EU-based executive assistant working in UK timezone, without the employment overhead sitting on their side of the ledger.

DonnaPro offers both part-time and full-time support options. Part-time covers core recurring work – calendar management, inbox triage, research, and stakeholder follow-ups. Full-time provides daily, embedded support across all operational areas. Both come in at a fraction of what an in-house hire costs – typically more than 70% cheaper on the part-time option when measured against the full employer cost of a direct UK hire.

Both options include a dedicated Quality Manager monitoring performance, a nine-day onboarding process rather than a one-to-two month ramp, and a support structure that doesn’t collapse if one person has an off week.

The in-house hire costs a minimum of £101,390 in year one – and that’s before recruitment fees or equipment. Neither DonnaPro option carries employer NI, pension obligations, or the hidden costs of a lengthy hiring process. The gap is significant regardless of which support tier a founder chooses.

This Isn’t About Cutting Corners

The assumption that in-house always means higher quality is worth examining. A full-time hire who takes two months to get up to speed, works alone without a performance framework, and leaves after eighteen months has delivered less value than the numbers suggest.

What founders actually need from executive support isn’t presence in an office. It’s reliable, proactive execution – someone who manages outcomes rather than waits for instructions, and who understands the rhythm of a founder’s working life well enough to stay ahead of it.

The EA model that delivers that doesn’t have to be the most expensive one. It has to be the right one.

The Decision Framework

A full-time in-house hire makes sense when a founder genuinely needs more than 30 hours of dedicated support per week, requires physical presence in a specific location, or is at a stage where deep organisational integration outweighs the cost and time premium.

For everyone else – founders who need 10 to 20 hours of high-quality executive support, who can’t wait three months for someone to start, and who don’t want the employment liability on their books – the calculation has shifted.

The question worth asking isn’t “can we afford an EA?” It’s “what is the most effective way to get the support the business actually needs, at a cost that reflects what it’s getting?“

Those are different questions. And for most UK founders right now, they lead to different answers than they did five years ago.

Filip Pesek is the founder of DonnaPro, an executive assistant agency working exclusively with founders and CEOs across Europe. He previously founded Spark, a marketing agency, and is the author of the Slovenian bestseller Pisma za Leona.