How Much Should a Virtual Assistant Charge Per Hour? Setting Your Floor

By Reese Calloway · Updated 2026-06-15

Almost every “VA pricing” article is written for the person hiring a VA — it tells a business owner what they should expect to pay so they don’t overspend. I’m writing the other one. If you’re the virtual assistant, your job isn’t to find the market’s price ceiling. It’s to find your own floor: the number below which taking the work actually costs you money. Get that wrong and you’ll do what I watched a friend do — quote a confident-sounding $25 an hour, stay fully booked for a year, and end up with less in the bank than her old part-time retail job.

The $25 felt fine because it was bigger than her old hourly wage. The trap is that “$25 an hour” as a freelancer and “$25 an hour” on a payslip are not the same money, and not even close.

Your nominal rate is not your effective rate

The first leak is utilization — the share of your working hours a client actually pays for. You’ll send invoices, chase the late ones, do discovery calls, manage your own inbox, learn a new tool a client suddenly needs. None of that bills. So the $25 on your invoice gets diluted across all the hours you worked but couldn’t charge.

Here’s the same $25 nominal rate at two honest utilization levels, assuming a 40-hour working week:

At 55% utilization, your real earn per hour of effort is $13.75 — barely above many entry wages, and that’s before a dollar of tax or expenses leaves the account. Push utilization to 75% and the same nominal rate becomes $18.75 effective, a 36% raise you got by tightening your admin, not by charging a cent more. New VAs almost always run closer to 55% in year one because the pipeline isn’t full yet, which is exactly why pricing against your nominal rate is so dangerous. I dug into where those unbillable hours actually go in how many hours can a freelancer bill — count yours before you set anything.

Build the floor backward from take-home

Utilization tells you why $25 isn’t $25. Now let’s find the number that actually pays your life. The honest method runs in reverse: start from the take-home you need, add back the costs that come out before it’s yours, then divide by the hours you can realistically bill.

Say you want $45,000 to actually land in your account for the year. You can’t bill that, because two things eat it first.

1. Self-employment tax. As a U.S. sole proprietor you owe SE tax of 15.3% (12.4% Social Security + 2.9% Medicare) on 92.35% of your net profit. It kicks in once net self-employment earnings hit $400 — below that you owe no SE tax, but you’re well above it here. On roughly $45k of profit that’s about $6,400, and half of that SE tax is deductible against your income tax. (The 15.3%, the 92.35% base, and the $400 floor are fixed federal figures; everything about income tax below is illustrative.)
2. Business expenses. Scheduling tools, a password manager, project-management seats, your accountant, a faster laptop. For a lean VA that’s easily ~10% of gross.

Grossing the $45,000 take-home up by roughly 15.3% for SE tax and ~10% for expenses lands you near $58,000 you need to bill. Now the denominator. A solo VA who bills ~25 hours across ~52 weeks lands around 1,300 billable hours a year — not the 2,080 a salaried year implies.

$58,000 ÷ 1,300 ≈ $44.62, call it $45/hour. That’s your floor — the rate at which the work merely keeps you whole. Notice how far it sits above the $25 that felt safe. If you’d rather not run this by hand, drop your own take-home target, expense estimate, and billable hours into the freelance hourly rate calculator and it does the SE-tax gross-up and the division in one pass.

This is the same backward-from-income logic I use for any freelancer in how to set your freelance rate; the only thing that changes for a VA is the service-tier ceiling, which is next.

The service-tier ladder: name the skill, justify the jump

A floor is what you need. What the market will bear depends on what you actually do, and VA work spans a wide band. The jumps between tiers aren’t arbitrary — each one is paid for by a specific, nameable skill the client can’t easily hire cheaper.

Look at where your $45 floor falls: smack in the middle tier. If you’re pricing general-admin work, $45 may sit above what that market pays — which is the market telling you to either move up a tier or accept a thinner take-home, not to pretend your costs vanished. If you can credibly do bookkeeping or automation, $45 is your floor and $60–70 is a fair ask. The fastest raise most VAs get isn’t negotiating harder at $25 admin work; it’s learning the one specialized skill that moves them up a rung.

Pricing a 20-hour monthly retainer

Most steady VA income arrives as a retainer — a block of hours reserved each month — and the instinct is to discount it for the security. Resist that. A retainer reserves capacity you can’t sell to anyone else, so it should carry a small premium, not a cut.

Say you’ve settled on $45/hour and a client wants 20 hours a month. The naive price is 20 × $45 = $900. But those 20 hours are now blocked off your calendar whether or not the client uses them, and that protected slot is worth something. Add a 10–15% capacity premium:

So you quote $990–$1,035/month, not $900. Frame it honestly: the client gets guaranteed priority access and a predictable monthly number; you get reserved, reliable income worth protecting. Two house rules keep retainers from leaking margin — set hours to expire at month-end so unused time doesn’t roll forever, and bill overflow at your standard hourly rate so a “quick extra task” every week doesn’t quietly become free labor.

Before you send the number

This is an informational planning estimate, not financial or tax advice. The SE-tax figures (15.3%, the 92.35% base, the $400 floor) are exact federal constants, but the income-tax assumptions and the 10% expense load are illustrative — your real numbers depend on your situation and state. Check the IRS or your state revenue department, or run it past an accountant, before you build pricing on it.

The one-line version: figure your effective rate after utilization, set your floor backward from the take-home you need plus SE tax and expenses, then place yourself on the tier ladder by the skill you actually sell. Quote from your floor up — never from the wage that merely sounds bigger than your last job.