How Much to Charge as a Virtual Assistant: Rates From Your Own Year

October 19, 2026 · Freelance and creator rates

To work out how much to charge as a virtual assistant, add up the income you want to keep, the tax you will set aside on it and every cost of running the business, then divide by the hours a client will actually pay for, which is fewer than the hours you work. In the illustrative example below, that floor is $48.00 an hour. Spreading the same year over every working hour says $36.00, which is $12.00 an hour short. Every rate here comes from the example’s own inputs, not from what any other VA charges, and the retainer section shows how a package can quietly pay less than the rate it was built on.

The virtual assistant rate formula

1. Revenue needed a year = income you want to keep / (1 - tax set-aside share) + software + other business costs + self-employment costs
2. Billable hours a year = hours a week x weeks a year x (1 - share of hours you cannot bill)
3. Hourly floor = revenue needed / billable hours

Self-employment costs are the things an employer would otherwise have paid for: health cover and retirement saving, at whatever level you choose to fund them yourself. The unbillable share is your own invoicing, sales calls, onboarding and learning new tools. Take both from your own records.

Worked example: the hourly floor

Say you want to keep $45,000 a year and set aside 25% of profit for income and self-employment tax together (your own share; the tax itself depends on your return). Software runs $120 a month, other costs $1,200 a year, and you put $3,600 a year toward health cover and retirement. You work 40 hours a week for 46 weeks, and 25% of those hours are your own admin.

The floor is $48.00 per billed hour. If every hour were billable it would be $36.00; the unbilled admin adds $12.00 to every hour a client does pay for. The floor is the least that pays this year, not a price, and a rate below it means the year does not work however full the calendar looks. The freelance hourly rate calculator takes each of these corrections one at a time, and if the alternative is a salaried assistant job, the W-2 to 1099 rate calculator adds the benefits and payroll tax to the comparison.

Virtual assistant packages: pricing a monthly retainer

VA work can also be sold as a block of hours a month rather than billed by the hour. Say the package is 20 hours at $52 an hour with a 5% package discount: $988.00 a month, or $49.40 per included hour. That is at or above the $48.00 floor, so the package passes on paper.

Now the client actually uses 16 of the 20 hours. What the month pays you per hour depends on what happens to the 4 unused hours, which is your policy, not the client’s:

Under a policy where 50% of unused hours carry into next month, you still owe 2 hours, worth $98.80 at the package rate, and the month pays $54.89 an hour. If unused hours expire, it pays $61.75. If every hour carries forward, it pays exactly $49.40, the package rate, and no more. A rollover policy is a pricing decision: the more of the unused hours you owe later, the closer the package sits to the discounted rate.

Hourly billing or a retainer?

For the same client using 16 hours a month, billing by the hour at $52 brings in $832.00. The retainer brings $988.00, which is $156.00 more a month and $1,872.00 over a year. Hourly billing also carries its own admin: timesheets, detailed invoices and chasing payment. The example puts that at 2 unbilled hours a month for hourly work and 0.5 for a single fixed invoice. Counting those hours and the rolled hours you still owe, hourly billing pays $46.22 per hour of your time and the retainer $53.41.

The retainer wins here only because the client uses fewer hours than the package holds. Once usage passes 19 hours a month, billing by the hour would bring in more, so check usage every few months against the package size.

The insight: a platform rate and a direct rate are not the same number

A rate on a freelance platform is not what you keep. Say you bill 80 hours a month on a platform at $40 an hour, the platform’s commission is 20% (an example figure; use the rate in your own platform’s terms), and memberships or paid bids cost $30 a month. Against that, finding clients yourself at $48 an hour means a payment processor fee of 2.9% plus $0.30 on each of 4 invoices, and $150 a month of marketing.

You keep $32.00 of each platform hour. Over a year the commission alone is $7,680, and direct work at these figures keeps $1,047.44 a month more, $12,569.28 a year, provided you can fill the same hours yourself. The less obvious number runs the other way: direct at just $34.52 an hour keeps the same as $40 on the platform. And $40 on the platform is under the $48.00 floor this example’s year needs, so the platform hours here do not pay the year. What a platform does give you is clients you did not have to find, and this arithmetic does not price that.

When the answer is a higher rate, losing a client is less costly than it feels. Say 6 clients use 18 hours a month each at $40, and you raise the rate to $50, an increase of 25%. If 1 client leaves, monthly revenue goes from $4,320 to $4,500, $180 more, with 18 hours freed. Break-even is losing 1.2 clients, or 20% of them. How many would actually leave is your guess, not a measured rate.

How these were calculated

The hourly floor is income to keep / (1 - tax set-aside share) + software x 12 + other costs + self-employment costs, divided by hours a week x weeks x (1 - unbillable share). The package price is hours x rate x (1 - discount); the effective rate is the price divided by the hours used plus the hours rolled forward. Platform earnings are rate x (1 - commission) x hours, less membership; direct earnings are rate x hours x (1 - payment fee share), less the fixed fee per invoice and marketing. The rate-increase break-even is clients - (clients x old rate) / new rate.

Every figure on this page was computed twice, once by the code behind the calculator pack below and once by a separate implementation written from the formulas, and the two agree to the cent. The income, tax share, costs, hours, rates, discount, commission, fees and client counts are illustrative, not market rates or any platform’s terms. No official figures are used, and the tax set-aside is a share you choose, not a computed tax. None of this is financial, legal or tax advice.

If you want to run this on your own year and your own clients, with the hourly floor, package pricing and rollover, hourly against retainer, a platform against direct work, capacity, a rate increase and a monthly income sheet, the pack below does it in linked spreadsheets with every formula visible.