Support through Nira starts at $10 an hour. That is the number.
It is probably not the number you are trying to work out, though. Nobody searching this question really wants one figure — what you want to know is whether it stacks up against the thing you are living with right now: the job advert you keep not placing, the hire you cannot quite justify, or the four hours every week you are still absorbing yourself. So here is the whole picture: what moves the rate, what the alternative really costs once you count all of it, and where paying less starts costing more.
What moves the rate
Three things, roughly in this order.
Seniority. Someone who keeps a calendar, an inbox and a document trail in order is not priced like an executive assistant who runs the follow-up after a board meeting, or a CRM specialist you are handing your pipeline data to. The work is different and so is the market for the person.
Committed hours. A set number of hours every week is a different proposition to ad-hoc work, for both sides. It means one person in one role rather than fragments of several — and somebody working the same fifteen hours for the same business every week gets genuinely good at that business in a way that piecemeal hours never allow. Our three levels are 15, 30 and 40 hours a week, and they are priced accordingly.
Specialism. Named software counts. HubSpot, Salesforce, Xero and the rest are not general admin with a login attached, and somebody who already knows the system does not spend six weeks learning what not to touch in it.
The comparison you are probably actually making
Nine times out of ten the real question is not “what does a virtual assistant cost” but “what does this cost compared with hiring somebody”.
And a salary is not the cost of hiring somebody.
In the United States
An employer pays Social Security and Medicare on top of the wage. The IRS puts the employer’s share at 6.2% for Social Security and 1.45% for Medicare — 7.65% combined. That is a floor, not an estimate, and it lands before anything discretionary.
On top of it: federal and state unemployment insurance, which vary by state and by your own claims history; whatever you contribute to health coverage; paid leave, which is time paid for and not worked; equipment; software seats; and the cost of finding the person in the first place.
In the United Kingdom
Same structure, different names. Employers pay secondary Class 1 National Insurance on earnings above the secondary threshold, at 15% for most employee categories in the 2026 to 2027 tax year. Then pension auto-enrolment, statutory leave, statutory sick pay, the laptop, the recruiting.
What that does to the arithmetic
Say you are paying an in-house administrator $45,000 a year. That figure is an illustration rather than a benchmark — put your own number in, because it is the shape of the sum that matters, not the answer.
The Social Security and Medicare contribution alone is $3,442.50 on that salary. Before health coverage. Before a laptop. Before the two months of a manager’s attention it takes to recruit somebody, onboard them and settle them in. The wage line in your budget says $45,000. The cost line does not.
Contracting through Nira removes that second column entirely. No employer payroll tax on our side of the arrangement, no benefits administration, no equipment to buy, no recruitment cost — the matching is ours. The hourly rate multiplied by the committed hours is what you pay.
What the sector data says
South Africa’s industry body, BPESA, publishes a cost advantage of 55% to 65% for South African delivery, benchmarked against Dallas, Manchester and Sydney. We like that figure because it names the cities it is measured against, which is what makes a percentage mean anything. The rest of the sector data — English proficiency, the fixed time zone, how fast the sector has grown — is collected with its sources on why South Africa.
Where cheaper stops being cheaper
There is a floor beneath which the sum reverses, and it is worth being direct about where it sits.
A rate that looks remarkable usually means one of three things. The person is junior and is being put into work they have not done before. The person is carrying four clients and yours gets whatever hours are left. Or the rate is real and somebody is being underpaid — in which case they will leave, and you will pay the replacement cost you thought you had dodged.
The expensive outcome here is almost never the hourly rate. It is turnover. Every handover costs what the first onboarding cost, and it costs it again in a business that never wrote down how it does things — which is most businesses, including well-run ones. Somebody who stays three years at a fair rate is far cheaper than two years of churn at a remarkable one.
Our entry rate sits at the accessible end of the South African market, and it sits there because the model is efficient, not because anyone is being paid badly for it.
Why the rest of the pricing isn’t on this page
We publish the tier names, the weekly hours, what each level includes and the entry rate. We do not publish a rate card.
That is deliberate, and it is not a negotiating tactic. A rate card puts a price on the work before anybody has worked out what the work is — and the number of hours you actually need moves your bill far more than the rate does. A business that would be well served at fifteen hours a week and buys forty has overpaid by a margin no hourly discount will recover.
So it goes: a fifteen-minute call first, a recommended level second, a price third. The call is free, it really is fifteen minutes, and the recommendation is often a smaller level than people arrive asking for.
If you would rather write it down than talk it through, the enquiry form asks the same things. And if what you are really weighing is where to hire rather than whether to hire, that one is here.