How Much Does a Personal Assistant Cost? 2026 Rates Explained

The Problem

Most people pricing a personal assistant start with an hourly rate and multiply. Thirty dollars an hour, twenty hours a week, call it $31,000 a year. That looks manageable, so the budget gets approved against that figure and the decision is made.

The number is wrong, and it’s always wrong in the same direction. An hourly rate covers hours worked. It doesn’t cover payroll taxes, health coverage, paid leave, the laptop and phone, the software seats, the recruiter’s fee, the ten weeks before the person can operate without supervision, or the two to four hours a week you’ll spend directing them for as long as they stay. Budget off the rate card and you learn about the rest one line item at a time.

I’m Nir Sabato, co-founder of Catch. We build an assistant that handles calendar, email, scheduling, reminders, bookings, and real outbound phone calls for founders, executives, and owner-operators, mostly at US companies of 20 to 300 people. I have a stake in what you decide, so the first half of this page is nothing but numbers: what personal assistants charge in 2026, what the loaded cost actually comes to, and what pushes it up or down. The comparison to what we charge comes later, as arithmetic you can check yourself.

How Much a Personal Assistant Costs in 2026

A personal assistant costs between $6 and $60 an hour in 2026, depending on where they work and how senior the role is. Full-time US personal assistants typically earn $46,000 to $73,000 in base salary, and a fully loaded US executive assistant reaches $120,000 to $180,000 a year once every employment cost is counted.

Here’s how the market looks right now, with Catch in there for reference:

Option	Typical 2026 rate	Cost per year
Catch (AI executive assistant)	Flat $99/month	$1,188
Offshore personal assistant, hired direct	$6 - $15/hour	~$12,000 - $31,000 full-time
Virtual PA, part-time (10 - 20 hrs/week)	$25 - $40/hour	~$13,000 - $42,000
Freelance or marketplace PA	$20 - $32/hour	~$41,000 - $67,000 full-time
Full-time US personal assistant	$22 - $35/hour	~$46,000 - $73,000 base
Senior or executive-level PA	$35 - $60/hour	~$73,000 - $125,000 base
Fully loaded US executive assistant	-	$120,000 - $180,000 all-in

Two rows in that table are doing different jobs. Base salary is what the person takes home. Loaded cost is what the seat costs your company. People mix those two up constantly, and that’s how a hire ends up 40% over budget in its first year.

The Loaded Cost of a Personal Assistant

The loaded cost of a personal assistant runs roughly 1.3 to 1.5 times their base salary. On a $70,000 hire, that’s $91,000 to $105,000 before a single hour of your own time gets counted.

Where the gap comes from:

Cost	On a $70,000 base salary
Base salary	$70,000
Payroll taxes (FICA, federal and state unemployment)	~$6,000 - $8,000
Health insurance and benefits	~$8,000 - $18,000
Equipment, phone, software seats	~$2,000 - $4,000
Recruiting or placement fee (one-off)	15% - 25% of first-year salary
Loaded first-year total	~$96,000 - $118,000

Then there are four costs that never make it onto a spreadsheet at all. They tend to be the ones that decide whether the hire works out.

Your hiring time. Write the role, post it, screen applications, run interviews, check references, set up a paid trial. Two to four weeks of your attention, all of it spent before anyone goes near your calendar. And if your calendar is the reason you’re hiring, it’s worth noticing what the fix costs before it starts working.

The ramp. Six to twelve weeks before a capable assistant runs your inbox and calendar without checking in. You pay full salary for partial output the whole time, plus your own hours explaining how you work, who matters, and what you’d never want said in an email under your name.

Management overhead. Two to four hours a week of briefing, reviewing, correcting, re-explaining. It doesn’t really taper off. Price your own hour at $150 and you’re at $15,000 to $30,000 a year, spent supervising the person you hired to give you time back.

Turnover. Assistant roles turn over, and when yours does, everything that person learned about how you work leaves with them. Recruiting and ramp reset to zero. This is the cost that most reliably breaks the original math, because you are not left with a partially built arrangement. You are starting the whole thing again.

Paid leave belongs here too, though it hides inside the salary instead of adding to it. Four weeks of vacation, plus holidays and sick days, and you’re paying a full year’s salary for something like 46 working weeks of coverage.

What Changes the Number

Four variables explain most of the spread in personal assistant rates.

Location

Nothing moves the rate more than location. An offshore personal assistant runs roughly 60% to 75% below a US hire, and there are genuinely excellent assistants working at those rates. The cost tends to move rather than vanish, though: limited overlap with your working day, more context to supply on US business norms, and higher turnover, which means paying the onboarding cost more than once. Within the US, a major-metro PA commands a real premium over the same role in a smaller market.

Employment model

Direct employment is the cheapest per hour and the most expensive in total, since you absorb payroll taxes, benefits, and every line in the table above. An agency charges 20% to 40% over the equivalent direct rate, and for that they take on the vetting, the supervision, and the replacement when your assistant leaves. A freelancer looks cheapest of all on paper. No coverage, no backup, no continuity.

Seniority and scope

A PA managing a calendar and an inbox is a different hire from one running board logistics, travel, vendor relationships, and confidential correspondence. Call it a $15 to $25 an hour difference. Pin down the scope before you shop rates. A job description that quietly spans both is how you end up paying senior money for junior availability, or the other way round.

Hours and coverage

Part-time is cheaper, and its limits are the easiest ones to overlook when you compare rates. Admin volume isn’t spread evenly. A quarter-end or a board week burns through twenty hours by Wednesday, and whatever’s left over waits until next week. Full-time isn’t a clean fix either, because coverage still stops at the end of a shift. Evenings, weekends, holidays: the admin just sits there.

Run the Math on a Real Hire

A concrete case. Mark, a COO at a 120-person company, hires a US personal assistant at $32 an hour for 25 hours a week. His budget line says $41,600.

Now add the rest. Payroll taxes and a partial benefits contribution push it to roughly $50,000. He used a recruiter, so year one picks up another $8,000. Three weeks of his own time went into hiring, two months into ramp at full pay. He spends three hours a week managing the arrangement, which at his own cost of time lands somewhere near $25,000 a year. Nothing gets handled after 6pm, or during the two weeks she’s away in August.

Budget line: $41,600. Actual first year, once his own hours are priced accurately: closer to $85,000. And a fair share of that value walks out the door if she takes another job in eighteen months.

None of this argues against hiring a person. It argues for pricing the whole arrangement before you commit, instead of the hourly rate on its own.

How Catch Compares on Cost

Catch costs $99 a month, flat. No credits, no usage tiers, no per-call fees, because voice is included in the price. There’s a 10-day free trial, and signup is self-serve in under three minutes.

What you get for it is the traditional executive-assistant role, handled in full. Calendar conflicts get resolved, meaning Catch reaches out to the other party and reschedules rather than flagging the clash and leaving it with you. Inbox triage, drafting and sending what you actually meant, chasing threads that have gone quiet. Scheduling runs end to end, weighed against availability and urgency the way a person would weigh it, instead of coming back to you as a link. Meeting prep, reminders on what’s coming, a flag when something needs your attention. Restaurants and hotels booked. Real outbound calls placed on your behalf. Business travel booked and managed. HubSpot, Zoho, Asana, or Notion updated when things move.

Set that against the numbers above:

• $99 a month against $96,000 to $118,000 loaded for a mid-range US personal assistant, or $120,000 to $180,000 for a fully loaded executive assistant.
• Three minutes against three months. No job post, no screening, no ten-week ramp.
• No management overhead as its own line. You correct Catch in whatever channel you’re already using, and the correction sticks.
• Around the clock, answering in seconds. Not a shift, not a queue. A conflict at 11pm on a holiday gets handled at 11pm on a holiday.
• No turnover cost. What Catch has learned about how you work stays learned.

This doesn’t require letting anyone go, and I want to be precise about that. If you already have an assistant you value, Catch taking over the traditional admin load frees up a capable person for the operational and in-person work that genuinely needs a human: running the office, handling events and vendors, being in the room. Catch does not do physical or in-person work. It does the admin, and it does all of it.

Key Capabilities

It acts instead of proposing

Delegation means the work leaves your plate. Catch sends the email, books the slot, makes the call, closes the loop. A draft sitting there waiting for your approval is still your task.

It applies judgment, not rules

Nothing to build, nothing to configure. Catch learns your priorities, your key relationships, and how you like things handled, then decides what to ignore, what to handle, and what genuinely needs you. Nothing runs on a fixed timer.

Autonomy that grows

Early on, Catch checks with you before doing things on your behalf. As it picks up context from your calendar, your inbox, and the corrections you give it, it starts taking more on independently. It earns the independence rather than having it switched on.

Real phone calls, placed for you

Catch calls the hotel about a late checkout and the restaurant about the table, and it identifies itself as AI when it does. You can also call Catch directly to walk through priorities and hand off work. It does not pick up your incoming calls. A good human assistant doesn’t do that either.

Built for sensitive information

Catch is SOC 2 Type II certified and a Google Verified app (CASA Tier 2). It verifies details before doing things on your behalf, and keeps your information away from the people it coordinates with.

Who This Is For

• Founders and CEOs at 20 - 300 person companies budgeting a first assistant hire
• COOs and Chiefs of Staff who have been asked to justify the headcount
• Executives quoted $60,000 to $120,000 for a full-time PA and unsure what they’re actually getting
• Anyone weighing offshore rates against time-zone overlap and turnover risk
• Leaders who’ve hired an assistant before and watched management overhead eat the savings

How It Works

1. Sign up. Self-serve, no demo required, 10-day free trial.
2. Connect Gmail or Outlook. Grant permissions, then add Slack, Asana, Notion, or your CRM if you use them.
3. Talk to it where you already work. Slack, email, text message, iMessage, or a phone call. No dashboard to learn.
4. Hand off something real. A calendar conflict, a morning of email, a dinner to book.
5. Let it learn you. It acts on its own once it has the context, and comes back when a decision genuinely needs you.

Results You Can Expect

Executives using Catch have delegated more than 20,000 tasks, scheduled over 5,000 meetings, and handed off more than 200,000 emails. Day to day, that looks like a calendar that resolves its own conflicts and an inbox that stops being the first and last thing you touch.

On cost it isn’t a close call: $1,188 a year against $96,000 or more loaded for a US personal assistant. On speed, Catch is working within minutes rather than the months a hire needs for recruiting and ramp. Ten days of free trial is long enough to tell whether the admin is actually getting handled.

Frequently Asked Questions

Get Started

Before you sign an offer letter, price the whole arrangement: salary, taxes and benefits, the recruiting fee, the weeks of ramp, the hours a week you’ll spend managing it. That total is the real number. Then set it against $99 a month.

If the work you want off your plate is mostly calendar, inbox, scheduling, bookings, and calls, connect Gmail or Outlook and hand Catch something real today. Ten days is enough to find out what that work was really costing you.