Type "how much does a virtual assistant cost" into Google and you will get an answer between $3 an hour and $75 an hour, which is to say you will get no answer at all. That range is wide enough to be useless, and every provider quoting a number inside it is technically telling the truth.
The rate is not the confusing part. What is confusing is that the same three words — "virtual assistant" — describe two entirely different purchases, and the price tag alone will not tell you which one you are looking at.
The Real Range, and What It's Actually Pricing
Here is roughly how the market breaks down once you sort it by what you are buying rather than by the sticker price:
Offshore VAs booked through a managed provider run $3 to $15 an hour — the Philippines and parts of Latin America and South Africa sit at the low end of that band. US- and UK-based virtual assistants run $18 to $60 an hour. Independent research puts the global average around $31 an hour, with a wide split between roughly $11 an hour for offshore talent and $35 an hour for US-based talent.
On a monthly basis, the same spread shows up differently: per-task plans start around $35 a month, hour-bucket plans for 10 to 60 hours run $390 to $2,600 a month, offshore dedicated full-time support lands around $2,000 to $3,000 a month, and US-based full-time support runs $4,000 to $8,000 a month.
Every number in that paragraph is a real, defensible price. None of them tells you whether you are hiring someone who clears a task list or someone who runs part of your business for you.
What the $4-an-Hour Listing Doesn't Say Out Loud
The bottom of that range is not a discount on the same product. It is a different market entirely — one with almost no vetting, minimal accountability, and turnover high enough that "your VA" often means a new person every few months.
The warning signs there are well known to anyone who has hired at that end before: no verifiable references, vague answers about what they have actually delivered, pressure to decide immediately, or a rate so low it should raise the question of what corners are being cut to hit it. None of that shows up in the hourly rate. It shows up three weeks in, when you are re-explaining the same context for the third time.
That re-explaining is the real cost, and it never appears on the invoice. It is your time, spent training and correcting and eventually re-hiring, and your time was the thing you were trying to buy back in the first place.
Virtual Assistant vs. Employee vs. Executive Partner
The comparison most founders actually need is not "VA or employee." It is closer to three tiers:
A task-based VA is the equivalent of a per-task rate: fast, cheap, and fine for a discrete, well-defined job with no ongoing context required. A W-2 employee gets you full-time presence and direct oversight, at the cost of a fixed salary, benefits, payroll taxes, and the multi-week hiring process to get there. An Executive Partner sits in between on cost and above both on leverage: one dedicated person who learns your business well enough to exercise judgment, not just close tickets, without the overhead of a full-time hire.
The question worth asking is not "what's the hourly rate." It is "does this person still need me in the room to make a decision." A task-based VA almost always does. That is not a knock on task-based VAs — it is simply what the model is built for.
What This Actually Costs at Advocata
We are not going to pretend a number in this post would mean much without context, because the honest answer depends on how many hours a week you need and what you are handing off. What we can tell you plainly: it is priced as a dedicated partner, not a per-task VA, and it is a fraction of a fully loaded US employee.
If you want the actual number for your situation, that is a five-minute conversation, not a pricing page buried in fine print.
The rate is not the risk. The mismatch between what you're paying for and what you actually needed is the risk. Get that part right first, and the rate takes care of itself.