What does a virtual assistant actually cost in Australia in 2026?
Real pricing data for AU virtual assistants in 2026. Admin VAs from $12/hr, specialists from $18/hr, bookkeeping from $25/hr. Compared honestly to a local hire, other agencies' published rates, and direct hire.
The first question every founder asks on a discovery call: what does it actually cost?
Here is the honest, AU-specific answer in 2026. Every external claim on this page links to a source you can check yourself, and the competitor rates below were pulled from their published pricing pages in June 2026.
Headline numbers
DotVA prices (and the wider AU agency market) sit in three tiers:
| VA tier | Hourly rate (AUD, excl GST) | Monthly @ 15 hrs/wk | Monthly @ 20 hrs/wk |
|---|---|---|---|
| General admin | $12-17/hr | $780-1,105 | $1,040-1,470 |
| Specialist (CRM, content, ops) | $18-25/hr | $1,170-1,625 | $1,560-2,165 |
| Bookkeeping / finance | $25-35/hr | $1,625-2,275 | $2,165-3,030 |
Rates current as at June 2026.
Add 10 per cent GST on top if you are a registered business; most AU businesses claim it back through their BAS.
The most common DotVA placement is a 15-20 hour-per-week general admin or specialist VA at $1,200-2,200 AUD per month.
What is in the rate
The hourly rate covers:
- The VA’s pay. The rate is the whole cost to you: no setup fee, no recruitment fee, nothing on top except GST
- Recruiting, screening and placement, typically within 7-10 days (here is how we vet)
- A signed confidentiality agreement from day one, before any access is granted
- A 1Password Teams seat and role-scoped access to your software, so the VA only ever sees what their role requires
- An APP-mirroring data handling addendum, on request
- A VA working your Australian business hours, not a graveyard-shift handover
- The 30-day recalibrate-or-replace guarantee: if the fit is wrong in the first month, we fix the scope or replace the person
The rate does not cover:
- Software you provide (Shopify seat, CRM seat, etc) – your existing licences
- Hardware (the VA uses their own equipment)
- GST (added on top, claimable for AU businesses)
The honest local-hire comparison
This is where most founders undercount.
For the base wage we use $32/hr, a deliberately conservative figure for an entry-level admin assistant. For context, the ABS Employee Earnings and Hours survey (May 2025) puts average hourly total cash earnings for non-managerial clerical and administrative workers at $42.90. Real admin hires often cost more than the table below suggests.
| Cost line | Amount | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Base hourly | $32/hr | Conservative entry-level admin wage (ABS clerical and administrative average: $42.90/hr) |
| Superannuation | +12% | SG rate from 1 July 2025 |
| Annual leave + sick leave | +9% effective | 4 weeks AL + 10 sick days loaded across 50 working weeks |
| Recruiter fee | $3,000-6,000 one-off | Amortised over an 18-month average tenure |
| Workstation + IT | $1,200-2,000/yr | Laptop, screens, software seats |
| Workers comp | +1-3% | Varies by state |
| Management overhead | +5-10% effective | Your time managing them |
| Total loaded cost | ~$44-49/hr | Excl payroll tax for larger employers |
A note on the super line, because half the pricing pages on the internet still have it wrong: the super guarantee reached its final legislated rate of 12 per cent on 1 July 2025. It was 11.5 per cent in 2024-25. If a cost comparison you are reading still says 11.5 (or 11), it has not been updated.
At 20 hours per week, wages and super alone run about $37,000 a year. Fully loaded you are at roughly $41,000-44,000 in cash, before you price your own management time. A DotVA managed placement at 20 hrs/wk on a $15/hr blended rate is $15,600 a year. Same hours, roughly 60-65 per cent less, no employer obligations.
The saving is the headline; the operational win is the sleeper. No recruiting, no super admin, no leave calendar, no IT setup. Those jobs never show up in a spreadsheet but they reliably show up in your evenings.
The reason an offshore managed placement carries none of those employer on-costs is a compliance one, not an accounting trick. For why a foreign-resident VA engaged through an agency attracts no super, PAYG or payroll tax, see do you pay super and tax on a virtual assistant in Australia?.
What other agencies charge
We would rather you compare us properly than take our word for anything, so here is what other providers publish. All figures are published rates as at June 2026, in AUD.
| Provider | Model | Published rates (as at June 2026) |
|---|---|---|
| Virtual Coworker | Offshore (Philippines), agency-managed | Per-role rates from $8/hr (general VA, data entry) to $20/hr (mobile developer) |
| VirtualStaff365 | Offshore (Philippines), agency-managed | Role bands from $12-15/hr (VA/PA) and $16-26/hr (bookkeeping) to $20-35/hr (senior technical), excl GST |
| DotVA | Offshore (Philippines), agency-managed, AU business hours | $12-17 admin, $18-25 specialist, $25-35 bookkeeping, excl GST |
| The Virtual Assistant | Onshore, Australian-based VAs | $39.90-50/hr + GST depending on prepaid block (the 50-hour block at $1,995 is the $39.90 rate) |
| Onshore freelance VAs | Independent Australian contractors | Commonly advertised at $50-90/hr; varies widely with specialisation |
Two honest observations.
Cheaper bare rates than ours exist. Virtual Coworker’s published starting rates sit below our admin tier. If the bare hourly number is your only criterion, we are not the cheapest offshore agency in Australia. We are, like every offshore option, far cheaper than any onshore one.
The bare rate is not the comparison. Published rates differ partly because the service behind them differs. Before you sign with anyone, including us, ask: who employs and pays the VA? What is the replacement process if it is not working at day 30, and what does it cost? Who manages performance week to week? What hours will the VA actually work, theirs or yours? What is the standard security setup: password manager, scoped access, signed confidentiality? Is the quoted rate the entire cost, or are there setup or exit fees? The answers move the real cost more than a few dollars an hour ever will.
We will not characterise what competitors do or do not include; their pages speak for themselves. What our rate includes is listed above, and the rate is the whole of it.
Direct hire vs agency: the underrated trade-off
You can hire a Manila VA directly off OnlineJobs.ph or a similar marketplace. Headline rates are $8-12/hr. So why use an agency?
Total cost of ownership for direct hire usually lands within 10-15 per cent of an agency placement once you count:
- Your recruiting time: 8-15 hours screening, interviewing, testing. At your billable rate, this is real money.
- Your onboarding time: 5-10 hours in the first week building the SOP and walking the VA through your systems.
- Your replacement risk: this is a pattern we see, not an industry statistic (be wary of anyone quoting one as fact), but a meaningful share of direct hires fall over in the first 90 days, and every replacement restarts the whole recruiting cycle on your time.
- Management overhead: 2-4 hours a week of your time on direct line management.
- Payroll, contracts, and Philippine tax compliance: 1-3 hours a month with an Australian-friendly Philippine payroll provider.
A managed agency placement adds roughly $4-7/hr on top of the direct-hire VA’s base rate, in exchange for absorbing all of the above.
If your time is worth more than $50/hr, the maths usually favour an agency. If your time is worth less, or you genuinely enjoy being your own recruiter, direct hire works.
Why our prices are higher than Upwork
Upwork lists Filipino VAs at $5-8/hr USD. The DotVA equivalent is $12-17/hr AUD ($8-11 USD-equivalent). What you are paying for is the difference between a marketplace and a managed service: pre-screened candidates instead of anyone with an account, a 30-day recalibrate-or-replace guarantee instead of a refund dispute, day-one confidentiality and credential security instead of hoping, Australian business hours instead of whenever, and no platform fees on top of the headline rate.
If you have placed 20 VAs on Upwork and have a working playbook, you do not need us. If this is your first VA hire or your tenth, the agency premium pays for itself in fewer bad placements.
How pricing has moved
Our read of the market over the last 24 months, for what it is worth:
- Rates are up roughly 15-20 per cent. Manila wages are rising and demand for English-fluent VAs from US and AU buyers has compressed supply. The genuinely good $8/hr VA is mostly a memory.
- AI-fluent VAs cost the same and produce more. Hourly rates for AI-capable VAs have barely moved, but their output per hour is visibly higher than it was in 2024. Per-output cost is down.
- The specialist premium has widened. A VA who can run Xero or Klaviyo confidently now costs 60-100 per cent more than a general admin VA. True specialists are thin on the ground.
How we would quote you: a worked example
Pricing is abstract until it is your scope, so here are three typical quotes built the way we build them on a discovery call. The VA cost calculator does the same maths interactively.
A solo mortgage broker drowning in loan file admin: loan processing and lender follow-up, CRM hygiene, appointment setting, inbox triage. That is specialist-tier work at around $20/hr for 20 hours a week: $400/week, about $1,730/month + GST. See the mortgage broker VA page and the loan processor role for the full scope.
A two-clinician allied health practice: intake packs, diary, reminders and billing follow-up. General admin tier at $14/hr for 15 hours a week: $210/week, about $910/month + GST. Detail on the allied health page.
A trades business behind on the books: Xero bookkeeping, invoice chasing and expense categorisation. Bookkeeping tier at $28/hr for 10 hours a week: $280/week, about $1,210/month + GST. The bookkeeper role page covers what sits inside that scope.
In each case, placement runs 7-10 days from the discovery call, the confidentiality agreement is signed before any access is granted, and the 30-day guarantee applies.
Run your own numbers
The VA cost calculator is the fastest way to model your specific scope; drag the rate and hours sliders to your scenario. For a typical AU founder spending 15-20 hours a week on admin, the output usually lands between $900 and $2,500 AUD per month. For the market picture by tier and by state, including how the loaded cost of a local hire is built, see the 2026 VA cost benchmark.
For the wider hiring playbook, see How to hire your first VA in Australia. For the onboarding rhythm, Onboarding a VA week by week. The pricing page has the tier detail, and every industry we serve is on the by-industry index.
For a precise quote calibrated to your scope, book a discovery call. 30 minutes, no card, no obligation.