Putting yourself out there as a Virtual Assistant is already an amazing feat! But one of the questions you may have when you first set out on your journey is how to set your Virtual Assistant rates? It’s an important question to consider before meeting potential business owners so you can show up with confidence, and effectively sell your services. In this post, we’ll share How to Set Your Rates as a New Virtual Assistant and How to Raise Them once you gain experience, increase your skill level, and know the average amount of time specific tasks take.
There are many different ways to package your Virtual Assistant services. As a new Virtual Assistant, you may want to set a standard hourly rate for all services, but as you gain insight into your business, your pricing structure will inevitably change. You may feel more comfortable charging package rates or project-based pricing, or charging a retainer for some of your services.
My very first client as a Virtual Assistant was a coach in the Christian space, she helped launch my Virtual Assistant journey by being the first person to hire and give me the confidence to start my VA business. We agreed to $1,000 per month, to which I was to help her with social media management, manage her email, pitch Podcast guest appearances, attend her coaching sessions, take meeting notes, and any other tasks she needed help with. I truly was her assistant! Made available to her all day. In hindsight, it was probably too little money for the amount of work and value I was providing, but it was a stepping stone VA career which led me to making connections with other business owners, and ultimately getting signed on with the Virtual Assistant agency I still work for today.
So the question remains, How do you Set Your Rates as a New Virtual Assistant?
Determining Your Virtual Assistant Services
The first step in determining your rates is figuring out what types of services you want to offer in your business. There are many different types of Virtual Assistants out there, who accomplish a variety of tasks. You’ll want to consider your current skill set, and jot down a quick list of potential services. A great place to start is by offering general admin services, since all business owners need general help.
Read: Services To Provide As A Virtual Assistant
Determining Your Virtual Assistant Niche
Next, you’ll need to reflect on what type of business owner will need these services you want to offer. Just like the variety of Virtual Assistant Services available to offer, specific types of business owners will have specific needs in their businesses. Don’t stress too much about this! Your services, offerings and niche may very well shift as you continue on in your Virtual Assistant journey, and that’s ok! I simply mention it here, because knowing your niche will help give direction to your marketing efforts.
Read: Possible Niches For Virtual Assistants
How to do Market Research to Determine Your Rates
Once you’ve determined what services you would like to offer, and potential niches to market your services to, it’s time to do market research to help determine what the going rate is for those tasks. A great place to look for pricing is in Virtual Assistant Facebook groups, take a half hour to browse around and look at #jobopp virtual assistant job postings from potential clients. Most of them will indicate in their job posting how much they are willing to pay on an hourly basis. This will give you a great idea of what business owners are willing to pay for your services.
Since you are doing the research, you may want to also jot down similar services you can add to your list so you can really flush out your package options later on in this post.
Another place to gather data to Determine Your Virtual Assistant Rate is to look at what other Virtual Assistants are charging. Many Virtual Assistants will share their pricing in their portfolio, you can Google or search in Virtual Assistant Facebook groups and find many Virtual Assistants sharing their portfolios with their monthly package rates, hourly rates, and retainer pricing.
Once you’ve done the research, you have a few options for setting your rates.
How to Set Your Rates as a New Virtual Assistant
As you’ve probably observed up to this point, Virtual Assistants are billing their clients in a variety of ways. But the most common and easiest to get started with is an Hourly Rate.
Hourly Rate
An hourly rate is just as it sounds. You are billing your client for the amount of time it takes for you to accomplish tasks. In order to do this, you’ll need to track your time in order to bill your clients for the appropriate amount of hours you’ve worked. You’ll want to use a time tracking software like Clockify, Toggl, or Harvest to track your billable hours and bill your clients at the end of the month.
There are potential drawbacks to charging your clients an hourly rate, including making the focus about your time and not the full value of the service you provide. If you are an efficient Virtual Assistant, you may be losing out on potential revenue compared to other rate options that take into account the value that you provide. It can also lead to clients disputing the amount of time it took you to accomplish said tasks, many times clients don’t realize the amount of time specific tasks take, meaning you’ll need to justify the time you took.
Starting off with an hourly rate is still a great idea for a beginner Virtual Assistant, since you’ll be paid for the amount of time you do client work, and at the same time, you’ll be collecting valuable data to determine how many hours it takes you to accomplish specific tasks, helping you set your retainer or monthly packages at a later date once you feel confident changing your pricing model.
How To Determine Your Hourly Rate?
From the data you’ve collected from the exercise above, you can choose to set your hourly rate towards the middle or the lower end of the spectrum until you feel confident in charging more. Or, you can also calculate the average hourly rates from the data you collected and start there. It’s really up to you!
A popular strategy I like to use is to start charging my clients at a rate I am comfortable with, then gradually, with time, increase my pricing. Once I start feeling comfortable again, I can choose to keep increasing, or stay where I am.
Package of Hours
Another great way to set your rates as a beginner Virtual Assistant is to sell packages with a set amount of hours. For example, you could have 3 different packages with 20, 40, and 60 hours per month. This is a great option, since you can ask for payment in advance, and your clients know exactly how many hours they have purchased for the month. It also allows you to plan for the month ahead, knowing you have 120 hours available for work, you can easily determine how many packages you need to sell to make that goal.
The potential drawback for Package Pricing is pricing your packages wrong. In order to package your pricing appropriately, you need to know how long specific tasks will take in order to be able to recommend and sell specific packages to your clients. That’s why, most Virtual Assistants eventually move on to a retainer model, you get the best of both worlds, a better forecast of projected revenue for the month, with flexibility of charging your clients any overage hours.
How To Determine Your Package Rates?
If you choose to start billing your clients an hourly rate, it’s a great exercise to keep track of how much time it takes to complete a specific task. With this data, you can then determine the average amount of time it takes to complete tasks to determine your project rates. Without this data, it’s going to be difficult to do, but not impossible. Just make sure to give yourself a little extra time!
Once you’ve determined how much time you need, you multiply this amount of time by your desired hourly rate to come up with your package rates.
Retainer Pricing
The best way, in my opinion, as a Virtual Assistant, is to charge your clients on a retainer. Similar to how a lawyer or attorney functions, your client would pay you a set payment amount upfront, in exchange for a set number of hours per month, with any overage hours being charged at an hourly rate. This is a great option for many Virtual Assistants since it allows you to forecast your projected revenue for the month, without the stress of needing to determine exact project package hours, since you’ll be able to bill your clients at the end of the month for any overage hours incurred.
Most clients are perfectly happy with this pricing model since they know how many hours of work to expect from you on a monthly basis. And most are more than happy to pay any additional overage hours as long as they know what to expect, while sometimes others decide to pause services until the next month.
One of the biggest drawbacks of retainer pricing is the potential of a client not using all of their time in a retainer. Most Virtual Assistants will have a clause in their contracts indicating they will roll over a certain percentage of unused hours to the next month. A retainer agreement may not be the ideal package rate for clients whose needs vary greatly month to month.
How to Price your Retainer Packages?
It’s been my experience as a Virtual Assistant that anything under 20 hours per month doesn’t give you sufficient time to accomplish anything significant for a business. I therefore would recommend your smallest retainer package to start at 20 hours per month. From there, you could choose to offer packages in 20 hour increments (20, 40, 60) knowing that with some of your clients you may also have overage hours. Once you know your package hours, you’ll multiply this amount by your desired hourly rate.
Alright! That was a lot of information! Now you might be wondering, once your experience level increases, how do you raise your rates?
How to Raise Your Rates as a Virtual Assistant
Once you become an experienced Virtual Assistant, it’s not unreasonable to command higher rates to match the value you provide your clients. I’ve known some Virtual Assistant business owners to raise their rates by a certain percentage every year across the board, also known as a Percentage Increase.
While others decide to look at their overhead cost, business expenses, and profits to determine how much they need to increase their client pricing. There is no right or wrong way to increase your rates as a Virtual Assistant, but you’ll want to keep in mind these tips to ensure a smooth rate increase with your current clients.
Advance Notice
You’ll want to give your clients as much advance notice as possible to your rate increase, while these conversations can sometimes be difficult to have, giving your clients enough advance notice so they have time to think it over and agree to the higher costs.
This will sometimes mean that you will lose clients over a price increase, but this just means you have more than likely outgrown these clients anyway and it’s a prime opportunity to find new clients who will appreciate your advanced skills and the value you provide to them.
Send it in Writing
I always prefer to have important conversations in writing, not that I expect to have issues, but it’s always nice to have things in writing to look back to, especially since verbal conversations can easily be forgotten, or taken with a different meaning. It’s always better to have things in writing for future reference should ever you need it.
Be Transparent
Share the value you provide to your clients, the skills you have gained, how much time you save in their business, and for these reasons why you are increasing your rates. Most business owners know how much value you provide to them and their business, and will happily pay you more money if it means they get to avoid needing to find another VA and training them. Know your worth!
At the end of the day, setting your rates as a Virtual Assistant is all about starting off where you are most comfortable. Many Virtual Assistants will start by charging a lower rate or exchanging services in order to gain experience. Once they gain more confidence, gather a few testimonials, they slowly increase their rates to where they are most comfortable and are often pleasantly surprised that business owners are willing to pay for their services. The cost of a Virtual Assistant pays for itself by relieving the stress of managing all aspects of a business alone.
By taking a few moments to gather some data from job postings and from other Virtual Assistants, you can make an informed decision on whether to charge on an hourly basis, package pricing, or use a retainer model. But remember! There is no right or wrong, only what works best for you in this moment. You can also change your rates once you become more experienced and have a better idea of how many hours specific projects will take.
Dominique Déraiche is a blogger and writer passionate about helping moms build flexible, online businesses. She shares practical tips, strategies, and insights on becoming a virtual assistant, productivity, and making money online. When she’s not writing, you’ll find her spending time with family, testing new business ideas, or taking a walk with her dog Toby.
Thank you so much Alyssa for having me be a guest on your blog!