"Should I Charge Hourly or Package Your Services as a Virtual Assistant?"

Nov 11

One of the most common questions I get when it comes to starting your business as a virtual assistant is how you should price yourself. I want to spend today telling you about the different ways you can price yourself and then what I would recommend. But before we dive in, I wanted to tell you about our Black Friday sale that we have coming up. We are doing Five Days of Deals, which is happening in just a couple of weeks. Starting November 24th until November 27th, which is Black Friday. We will have a deal a day on our most popular programs, including Beginner to Booked VA, as well as some of our digital products, our Your Behind the Scenes BFF membership, and even our VA readiness audits for those of you who are business owners looking to hire a VA in 2026. Plus, if you jump on the wait list, you'll not only get all the details sent to you via email so you can plan ahead, but you'll get early access to the deals and the spots because some of them are limited the week before. You don't have to worry about it between hosting and last-minute Costco runs the week of Thanksgiving, shead to yourBTSBFF.com/deals and we will send you all the details.

Okay, so there are a bunch of different ways that you can price yourself as a Virtual Assistant. I'm gonna talk about three of the main or most common ways, and then give you kind of my reasoning on why I would or wouldn't do that in your business.

First, we have hourly, and for the sake of this blog, that is defined by you doing the work, you are tracking your time, and then you're invoicing your clients after the fact, whether it's like every week or every two weeks or every month, even. Then you also have monthly retainers, which I categorize or define monthly retainers as your client pays you X amount on the first of the month, and that reserves X amount of hours for that month. Let's say your rate is $30 an hour, your client needs 10 hours a month, they're gonna pay you $300 for those 10 hours on the first of the month to use those 10 hours. Then the third way is package-based pricing. Package-based pricing is where you're not doing hourly anymore. It's not directly time that you're working for an hourly rate, but it's more focused on deliverables. We're gonna get into that a little bit more, but it's basically like for X amount of money, you're going to get X, Y, and Z.

So 99% of the time, I am not going to recommend that you do hourly, and here is why. With hourly, where you are tracking your time and then you are invoicing the client after you've done the work, you're working, and then you're getting paid. I have seen some really horrible situations where VAs have done all this work ahead of time for their clients, and then they go to invoice them, and the clients ghost them. Obviously, you can have things in place like contracts. If you do not have a contract in place, you need to have a contract in place. We actually have one if you're a VA that doesn't have a contract. It’s an attorney drafted contract from my business attorney that you can use as a template here. You can use it for all your clients. This is so crucial to have in your business. Even still, some people will try to get away with not paying you, and in order to avoid that, I just really don't recommend tracking your time, doing the work first, and then invoicing unless there's a really specific reason for that. There's a time and a place for hourly. I will say that. That's why I said 99% of the time, I won't recommend it. It's just unsustainable. I don't think it's the best way you can structure your business. It's also really unpredictable. It's unpredictable for both you and the client because you don't really know how many hours you're gonna be working that week for that client. Your client doesn't really know how long things are gonna take you. I just find that hourly is a sticking point for a lot of people, even if they don't realize it at first, so I just would not recommend it unless the most ideal time for hourly is when you have a monthly retainer and maybe they want to add more hours or they're gonna go over an hour, then you could track that hourly and invoice them for the extra. You just would have that in your contract as well.

Okay, monthly retainers. This is actually where I recommend starting. With a monthly retainer, like I said, your client is going to reserve X amount of hours per month to work with you every month. They're gonna pay you on the first of the month, and then you have those hours reserved for them. The reason that I love doing this is that it is predictable. It allows you to see this is how much time I have, this is how much capacity I have. Can I bring on a new client or not? Those 10 hours are reserved for that client, and you're getting paid for them, whether they use them or not. That's a whole rabbit hole that we could go down. It's something that I talk about in depth with Behinder to Booked VA, but the hours are given to the business owner. And the business owner, it's their responsibility to make sure that they're using them. Make sure that their business is also prepared ahead of time so that they can delegate in a way that allows for you to do your best work and take over those hours. It's predictable for both you and the business owner, not just with time, but also with finances.

If you're doing a monthly retainer, I would recommend starting with like a three-month contract. Then the business owner knows I'm paying her $500 a month for the next three months. If you're going to continue the contract, still $500 a month versus with hourly, you don't really know. It could be anything because it just depends on how long it takes you. It's not as predictable. Then, for you as the VA, you know I'm getting $500 from this client, and then I'm getting $350 from this client, and then I'm getting $750 from this client. You're able to project your income for the next three months at least. You could also have agreements that are six months. You could also have rolling agreements that are just indefinite with a cancellation policy. Whatever that looks like for you. It just makes it a lot easier for you to have predictable income because people's biggest hesitation sometimes with starting a business is not having predictable income.

That's one of the things that I love about being a virtual assistant, and teaching you how to be a virtual assistant is because you can actually structure it in a way where it's very predictable. You can have that income every single month coming in and be able to see what that's gonna look like and project that. So that's why I really recommend the monthly retainers. It obviously is also still directly trading time for money, right? You're still tracking hourly in a way, but it allows you to figure out how much time something's gonna take you, and also what things you like doing for people. It's a great starting point for someone. I don't want you to be in hourly retainers forever because I don't want you to constantly be trading time for money. I don't want you to also get faster at things, and then make less money because you're more efficient. I don't think that's fair.

That's why we want to eventually move into package-based pricing. This is the ultimate goal. It's not necessarily something you can do right out the gates as a VA. You're in a more generalist kind of role because it is deliverables versus time. For example, it's X amount of money per month for whatever the package is. For that, the client is going to get X, Y, and Z. It's deliverable-based versus hourly based. Now, when you are creating these packages, you obviously want to take time into consideration, but that's not all of what you're taking into consideration when you're building a package. This is really the way that I want you to start pricing your services after like a few months working with a client, you can move to packages. Also, once you've niche down and you have a specific service or an industry that you love and you want to stay within. But this isn't what I would recommend starting out with. This is something that we're going to work up towards.

Even after three months of working with someone, you'll be able to create a package for them if that's the direction that you want to go. Packages are much more scalable, they're much more effective when it comes to growing your income without working more. It's still predictable and fair to the client because they are paying X amount, and they are getting certain deliverables from that. Honestly, as someone who has had VAs, I currently have a VA. I started as someone who had a VA before I actually ever became a VA. I much prefer the monthly retainers or the package-based pricing because of that predictability. If you're someone who's like, oh I'm worried that my clients won't like moving from a monthly retainer to package-based pricing, I would actually challenge that thought because more often than not, business owners would rather pay you a package versus being worried about time all of the time. Have I used my hours? Have you used the hours? Do I need to give you more stuff? Instead of just for X amount every single month, I'm gonna take care of these things. Most business owners would prefer that. I'm just telling you that right now. So hopefully that helped you kind of wrap your head around pricing and how you can structure your VA services. It's a question I get asked a lot, so I'm hoping that this gives you a little bit more clarity around what that looks like. We dive into a lot more around rates and pricing and services and packages and all the things. But hopefully, this answered a lot of your burning questions that you might have had.

Don't forget to jump onto our wait list for five days of deals! You're not gonna want to miss it, especially if you're someone who wants to start your business as a virtual assistant or you're a virtual assistant who wants to grow your business. You're gonna want to be on the list. Alright, I will chat with you in the next blog post, and as always, I am rooting for you!