What UK firms actually pay for admin: the hiring index

What this number covers, and what it does not

This is a live count of what UK employers are advertising, not a survey and not an estimate. Every figure comes from adverts we collected and can point back to. When the sample is too small to say something, this page says so rather than filling the gap.

Four role queries make up the sample: office manager, office administrator, bookkeeper and admin assistant. They are the roles a growing firm reaches for when the paperwork stops fitting around the actual work.

• ·Advertised salary, not accepted salary. Offers land where they land, and the gap is usually downward.
• ·Direct employers only in the headline figures. Agency listings are counted separately because the fee changes the economics.
• ·UK-wide. Regional cuts are not published yet, for the reason given further down.
• ·One month of collection. The sample grows every month and so does what it can support.

The headline is £31,616, and the real cost is higher

A salary is the part of the cost that appears in the advert. The part that does not appear is employer National Insurance at the prevailing rate, the minimum three percent auto-enrolment pension contribution, paid holiday, and cover for that holiday if the role is the only person who knows how the invoicing works.

Then there is the cost of getting someone in the chair. Two in five of these adverts went through an agency, and an agency fee is normally a percentage of the first year's salary, payable whether or not the person stays. On top of that sits the ramp: the weeks where the new person is learning your suppliers, your certificates and your quirks, and the owner is still doing the work while also answering questions about it.

None of that is an argument against hiring. It is an argument for knowing the full number before you commit to it, because the advertised salary is the smallest part of what you are agreeing to.

The four roles are not the same job

Treating admin as one category hides a spread of nearly twenty thousand pounds between the medians. The role title you advertise is the single biggest lever on what you pay.

• ·Office manager: median £44,860, from 36 adverts. The highest of the four by a distance, and the query also catches operations manager and HR hybrids, which lifts it. If you advertise this title you are competing at the top of the range.
• ·Bookkeeper: median £30,021, from 20 adverts. The narrowest role of the four and the most obviously replaceable by process, because the work is defined by the books rather than by your firm.
• ·Office administrator: median £27,500, from 20 adverts.
• ·Admin assistant: median £26,736, from 11 adverts. The smallest sample here, so treat this median as indicative rather than settled.

Two in five adverts go through an agency

63 of the 155 adverts we collected were placed by recruiters rather than the employer. That is worth sitting with, because it says two things at once.

The first is that these roles are hard enough to fill that a meaningful share of employers pay someone else to fill them. The second is that the true market cost of getting an administrator into a growing firm is higher than any salary figure on this page, including ours.

What this sample cannot tell you yet

Being straight about the limits is the only thing that makes the rest of it worth reading.

We collect a short description snippet with each advert, and across all 92 direct-employer adverts the snippet text is too brief to support any claim about what these roles actually do day to day. Ten mentions of VAT and four of payroll across the whole sample is not a finding, it is noise. So this page makes no claim about duties, software, or which tasks dominate. When the corpus is deep enough to support that honestly, it will appear here and it will say how many adverts it rests on.

The same applies to geography. The largest single location in the sample has ten adverts, which is nowhere near enough for a regional median that anyone should act on. Regional and per-trade breakdowns stay unpublished until each cut clears thirty adverts. At the current rate of collection that is a few months away.

How to use this if you are weighing up a hire

Start with the hours, not the salary. Count what the admin actually takes from the business each week, including the evening and weekend hours that never get logged because they are yours. Put an honest hourly value on the owner's time. That gives you the cost of doing nothing, which is the number the hire is really competing against.

Then set the fully loaded cost of the hire beside it: the salary from the relevant row above, plus employer costs, plus any placement fee, plus the ramp. Now you are comparing two real numbers instead of comparing a salary against a feeling.

Sometimes the hire wins outright and you should make it. Sometimes the work turns out to be four recurring processes that never needed a full time person. The point of the exercise is that you find out which before you commit to thirty thousand pounds a year.