Executive Assistant Services: What You Get, What You Pay, and AI

The Problem

Most executives start shopping for executive assistant services during the week that stops working. Thursday has three meetings stacked on the same hour. Forty threads in the inbox all look like they need an answer today. A partner has been waiting two days on something that would take four minutes. And the restaurant still isn’t booked.

I’m Nir Sabato, co-founder of Catch. Most weeks I’m on calls with CEOs, VPs of Sales, and operations leaders at US mid-market companies, and the search story is nearly always the same one. They type “executive assistant services,” get a page of providers whose pricing pages refuse to line up, and work out somewhere around the fourth tab that the phrase covers at least five different businesses charging in at least five different structures.

So this page answers the question you actually came with. What executive assistant service providers do, how the work gets delivered, what service level you’re buying, and what it runs in 2026. Then the part that changed recently: the same scope of work now has an option that isn’t priced by the hour at all.

What Executive Assistant Services Actually Include

Executive assistant services give an executive senior administrative support without that executive hiring anyone directly. The provider supplies the person, or a pool of people, and bills you for their time.

Scope shifts by provider and tier, but a standard engagement covers:

• Calendar ownership - booking, moving, protecting time, resolving conflicts, coordinating multiple parties
• Email management - triage, prioritization, drafting, replying on your behalf, keeping quiet threads from dying
• Scheduling with outside parties - prospects, partners, candidates, investors, and the back-and-forth that comes with them
• Meeting preparation - agendas, briefs, pulling the context you need before you walk in
• Reminders and task tracking - what you owe people, what’s due, what’s about to slip
• Reservations and bookings - restaurants, hotels, appointments, and the phone calls that arrange them
• Travel logistics - flights, itineraries, ground transport, at the higher tiers
• Light research and reporting - vendor comparisons, expense summaries, CRM hygiene

The higher the tier, the more of that list gets handled without you watching. Entry level is task execution: you say what to do, they do it. At the executive tier you’re paying for judgment. They decide which meeting moves and which one doesn’t, and they’re right often enough that you stop checking.

That difference matters more than any other line on a proposal. It’s also the hardest thing to evaluate before you sign.

The Four Ways EA Services Get Delivered

Providers rarely say plainly which model they’re selling, so it helps to recognize them.

Placement and staffing

The provider recruits and screens; you employ the assistant. There’s a placement fee, commonly 20% to 30% of first-year salary, and from there you carry the salary, the payroll taxes, the benefits, the equipment, and the management. What you get is a real employee who absorbs context by sitting close to you. What you also get is the full cost of a hire and the full risk if it doesn’t work.

Managed dedicated service

One named assistant, employed by the provider, assigned to you. They handle hiring, training, quality control, and coverage on the days your assistant is out. It’s the closest thing to a hire that stays a subscription, and it’s what most people picture when they search for EA services. It’s also the priciest of the ongoing models.

Fractional and shared

You buy a block of hours per month, usually 10, 20, or 40, from either a part-time assistant or a pool. The rate drops. Three other things drop with it. Response time stretches, since your request sits behind someone else’s. Depth stops accumulating, because nobody stays on your account long enough to learn who you never reschedule. And when the block runs dry mid-month, so does your support.

On-demand and task-based

Credits or a task allotment, billed monthly, drawn down per request. Cheap to start, and workable if your admin is light and irregular. Anyone with real executive volume starts rationing the allotment by week two, then starts rationing their own delegating, which rather defeats the point of buying help.

Service Levels and Response Times

Proposals get vague here. It’s also where the gap between what you’re paying for and what you actually get tends to open up.

Three questions, before you sign anything.

What Executive Assistant Services Cost in 2026

The spread here is wide enough that two companies can both call themselves executive assistant service providers and differ by more than 50x on price.

Model	How it’s priced	Typical 2026 cost
Catch (AI executive assistant)	Flat monthly	$99/month, voice included, no per-call fees
On-demand / task-based plan	Credits or task allotment	From about $35/month
Offshore assistant, direct	Hourly	$6 - $18/hour
Managed offshore EA, full-time	Monthly	$1,000 - $3,000/month
Fractional / shared retainer	Block of 10 - 40 hours	$500 - $2,800/month
US-based EA through an agency	Hourly	$35 - $75/hour
Dedicated US-based EA, managed	Monthly retainer	$3,500 - $8,000/month
Placement / staffing	Fee, then salary	20% - 30% of first-year salary
In-house US EA, fully loaded	Salary plus overhead	$120,000 - $180,000/year

Read that table by structure, not by number. Hourly billing means you hesitate before delegating small things, and small things are where most of the time actually goes. A block of hours means rationing. A dedicated retainer takes the rationing away and costs $42,000 to $96,000 a year. An in-house executive assistant, once you add payroll taxes, benefits, software, equipment, and your own management time, lands at $120,000 to $180,000 annually.

None of those numbers are unreasonable for the work. Executive admin is genuinely valuable, and a good assistant earns their cost. The question is whether the structure (hours, shifts, queues, briefing time) is the only way to buy it.

How the Math Changed

Until recently it was. Delegating administrative work meant buying somebody’s hours, and every option was a variation on how many hours at what rate.

What changed is that the traditional executive-assistant role, meaning the calendar work, the inbox, the scheduling, the briefings, the reminders, the reservations and the calls to arrange them, can now be handled end to end without hours being the unit of purchase. Catch does that work for a flat $99 a month.

I want to be precise about “end to end,” because the AI category is full of tools that stop one step short. A tool that flags a calendar conflict and leaves you to fix it hasn’t taken the work. Neither has a tool that writes a draft you still have to review, edit, and send. Delegation means the thing gets done.

Catch contacts the other party and reschedules the conflict. It triages the inbox, works out what deserves your attention, writes what you actually meant rather than what merely sounds right, and sends it, chasing a thread that’s gone quiet when the priority genuinely warrants it. It books the scheduling link instead of handing it to you, weighing your availability against how urgent the request is. It generates scheduling links on demand with real constraints. It reminds you what’s coming and flags what needs you before you walk into the room. It places a real outbound call to book the table or arrange the late checkout. It updates HubSpot and Zoho, closes tasks in Asana, changes deadlines in Notion. End-to-end trip planning, flights and ground transport and the full itinerary, is in beta right now.

And it isn’t a rules engine. No “follow up after two days” setting to configure, no workflow to build. Catch learns your priorities, your key relationships, your meeting preferences, which days you’re in the office, and who you never move. It picks that up from your connected calendar and email, and from every correction you give it. Then it applies judgment.

On the human question, plainly. Catch fully handles the traditional executive-assistant role. That is not an argument for letting anyone go. If you already have an assistant you value, what Catch takes over is the administrative load: the calendar work, the triage, the scheduling threads. Which frees a capable person to move into operational and on-the-ground work that genuinely needs a human being. Running the office, handling events, being in the room. Catch doesn’t do physical work, and it handles the whole administrative load rather than a slice of it.

Key Capabilities

It acts instead of suggesting

The whole point of an assistant is that things leave your plate. Catch reaches out and reschedules, sends the email, books the slot, makes the call. When it does need a decision from you, it arrives with the context to make it, takes your answer, and finishes the job from there.

Autonomy that grows as it learns you

Early on, Catch checks with you before doing things on your behalf. As its picture of how you work sharpens, it handles more alone. Same arc as a good human assistant’s first ninety days, except it doesn’t reset when someone leaves, and you never have to brief it twice on the same thing.

Judgment, not rules

Catch weighs priority and importance, then decides what to handle, what to surface, and what to ignore. Say “schedule with John” when there are three Johns and it can ask, or reasonably infer the right one from what it already knows about your week. It doesn’t stop dead at every ambiguous detail, and it doesn’t guess when guessing would embarrass you.

It works the phone

Catch places real outbound calls on your behalf: booking a restaurant, arranging a late checkout, confirming an appointment. It identifies itself as an AI on the call. You can also just call Catch and talk through the day out loud, hand off tasks, add context. Voice is included in the $99 with no per-call fees. What it won’t do is answer your incoming calls, and a human assistant doesn’t pick up your personal phone either.

No shift, no queue, no coverage gap

Catch works at 2am on a holiday and responds in seconds. No block of hours to ration, no pool your request waits in, no vacation to cover. Cost is the obvious comparison against EA services, but speed and availability are what executives tend to notice first.

It lives in the channels you already use

Slack, email, text message, iMessage, a voice note, a phone call. Nothing to open before you can delegate. You message it the way you’d message a person, and it takes the work from there. It also pulls context from and acts in HubSpot, Zoho, Asana and Notion, and connects to the popular note-takers, so it sits alongside your stack instead of replacing it.

Built for sensitive information

Catch is SOC 2 Type II certified and a Google Verified app at CASA Tier 2. Your calendar and inbox are two of the most sensitive systems in the company, and the agent verifies details before doing things on your behalf.

Who This Is For

• CEOs and founders at 30 to 200 person companies losing hours every week to work nobody hired them to do
• VPs of Sales and BizDev leaders coordinating scheduling across prospects, partners, and internal teams every day
• Operations and Partnerships leaders whose calendars are mostly other people’s availability
• Executives currently quoting EA services and finding the dedicated tier priced like a hire and the shared tier too thin to rely on
• Anyone on a fractional retainer who has learned to stop delegating in the last week of the month
• Executives who already have an assistant and want that person doing something more valuable than booking meetings and clearing an inbox

If your admin load is genuinely light, skip all of it. Not Catch, and not an EA service either.

How It Works

1. Sign up. Self-serve, no sales call, 10-day free trial.
2. Connect Gmail or Outlook. Grant permissions, connect your calendar and whatever else you run.
3. Start talking to it. Text message, Slack, iMessage, email, or a phone call. Nothing to build or configure.
4. It learns you. From your connected data and from every correction you give it. The picture sharpens with use.
5. It starts acting. Handling what it can, surfacing what needs you, taking real action end to end.

Setup runs under three minutes. A new assistant ramps in 30 to 90 days.

Results You Can Expect

Conflicts resolve without you in the loop. Meetings get booked without a five-email thread. The inbox stops being the first thing you touch in the morning and the last thing at night. Nothing sits waiting for somebody’s shift to start.

So far, Catch has scheduled over 5,000 meetings, taken on more than 20,000 delegated tasks, and handled over 200,000 emails. Teams at Finout, OpenWeb, Hud, NowYouKnow, ARYA, Atlas, and Figures use it.

Then the cost line. $99 a month against $500 to $2,800 for a fractional retainer, $3,500 to $8,000 for a dedicated managed EA, or $120,000 to $180,000 a year for a fully loaded in-house executive assistant. Nobody has to be let go for that math to work. The admin gets handled, and the person moves to the work that needs them.

Frequently Asked Questions

Get Started

If you’re pricing executive assistant services right now, run both numbers. Get a proposal from a provider, then start a free 10-day trial of Catch and give it a real week: the meetings that collide, the inbox, the reservation you keep putting off.

Setup takes under three minutes. Get Started, connect your calendar, and see how much of the week comes back.