How Much Does a Fractional Executive Assistant Cost?

The number one question I get asked is: how much does a fractional executive assistant service cost? It's a harder question to answer than it sounds — not because it depends on the model, though there's some truth to that, but because it depends on the scope of work.

The three pricing models you'll run into

• Hourly. You pay for the hours actually worked, nothing more. This is the most flexible model and the easiest to evaluate: the invoice reflects exactly what happened that month.
• Retainer. A fixed monthly fee for a set number of hours, whether you use all of them or not. This can work well for a business with a genuinely steady, predictable workload — and work poorly for one that doesn't, since unused hours are usually non-refundable and overages cost extra.
• Salaried. A full-time or part-time employee, with the fixed costs that come with payroll: benefits, taxes, equipment, and the cost of a slow week where there isn't a full week of work to do.

Fractional support is generally billed hourly, occasionally as a light retainer for owners who want budget predictability. Rates vary widely depending on scope and experience — generalist virtual-assistant-style hourly rates often sit well under $50/hour, while fractional executive support with real seniority, specialized reporting skills, or project-management responsibility commonly runs higher than that. There's no single industry-standard number, which is exactly why "it depends" is the honest answer rather than a dodge.

What actually drives the number

A few things move the hourly rate itself: how much judgment the work requires versus how mechanical it is, how specialized the skill set is (reporting and database work commands more than general admin, for instance), and how much of the relationship is "hand me a task" versus "hand me a problem and figure it out."

But the rate is only half of it. Once it's set, it doesn't change month to month — what changes is how many hours the work actually takes, and that comes down almost entirely to scope. A business already running on solid, organized processes needs comparatively few hours to keep things moving. One where records, communication, or workflows have fallen behind needs more hours before things run smoothly, at the same rate. That's the real reason I can't give you one number up front: the rate is knowable, the hours depend on where things stand when we start.

The ROI math against a full-time hire

A full-time hire's real cost isn't just salary — add benefits, payroll taxes, equipment, onboarding time, and management overhead, and the effective cost of a $50,000/year hire is often meaningfully higher than the salary number alone suggests. Against that, twenty hours a month of fractional support, even at a healthy hourly rate, is frequently a fraction of the cost — with none of the idle-time waste when things are quiet.

The hidden cost of doing it yourself instead

The comparison that gets skipped most often isn't "fractional vs. full-time," it's "fractional vs. the owner doing it personally." If an hour spent on admin work is an hour not spent on the parts of the business that actually make money, the real cost of DIY administration is whatever that hour of your own time is worth — which, for most owners I talk to, is a lot more than any hourly rate on this page.

How I handle it

I bill hourly, with no retainer and no minimum term, and invoices are due on receipt — no idle-hour waste, no long-term lock-in. The full process is laid out here, and specific rates come up on the onboarding call itself, once we both know what the actual scope looks like. If you're still weighing whether this is the right category of help at all, here's how it compares to a virtual assistant or a full-time hire.