“How much does an executive assistant cost” is a deceptively simple question, because the honest answer depends on which of four very different hires you’re actually pricing: a full-time employee, a managed virtual EA service, a fractional chief of staff, or — increasingly — a piece of software doing part of the job. This guide puts real, sourced numbers on each rung of that ladder, then answers the harder question underneath it: whether an executive assistant is worth it for a founder at all, or whether the job you need done is one software can now do at a fraction of the price.
What an executive assistant actually costs
There is no single number, because “executive assistant” covers a wide range of commitment levels and price points:
- Full-time, in-house. A salaried hire, benefits, a desk, and a recruiting cycle before they start.
- Managed virtual EA service. A company like Athena assigns you a dedicated assistant for a flat monthly fee, with the hiring and management overhead absorbed by the vendor.
- Fractional or part-time. Someone splitting their week across several clients, usually priced per hour or per day.
- Software. AI tools that automate a slice of the job — triage, scheduling, drafting — for a subscription price, with no headcount at all.
The rest of this guide prices each rung with public, current numbers, so the comparison is concrete rather than a guess.
The full-time hire: salary plus everything around it
In the US, a full-time executive assistant typically costs $36,000–43,000 a year in base salary. That figure is the listing price on job boards, not the fully loaded cost: payroll tax, benefits, equipment, a workspace, and the management time it takes to onboard and direct someone all sit on top of it and rarely show up in the salary line a founder budgets against.
In Germany, a fully loaded executive assistant runs roughly €5,100–6,100 a month — already inclusive of the employer-side costs that the US figure above excludes, since German payroll overhead is typically folded into the “fully loaded” quote from the start.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks this occupation under secretaries and administrative assistants in its Occupational Outlook Handbook, which is the primary public source for pay and demand data on the role if you want to verify current figures before budgeting a hire.
The alternatives: virtual, fractional, and part-time
Between “no help” and “full-time hire” sit three options most founders never price out before defaulting to one or the other:
Managed virtual EA services. Athena lists a dedicated executive assistant at roughly $3,000 a month after an onboarding commitment. The vendor handles recruiting, backup coverage, and management — you get a person, not a hiring project.
Fractional chief of staff. A step up the judgment ladder from an assistant: a US fractional chief of staff typically charges $7,000–14,000 a month for part of their week, covering not just task execution but prioritization and stakeholder coordination. Go Fractional benchmarks the role at $177 an hour, so that range is a 10–20 hour week; their own typical scope, 12 hours a week, lands at about $8,500 a month.
Part-time or hourly EA. Priced per hour, usually without benefits or a long-term commitment — the cheapest way to get human help, and the least predictable in terms of continuity and institutional memory.
Each of these trades something for the lower price: continuity, context, or availability. None of them removes the coordination work itself — it still has to be done by someone, human or software.
PILOT reads your mail, calendar, and meetings into one model of your commitments and briefs you every morning on what actually needs you — the information half of the executive assistant job, without a hire. A limited number of private clients, onboarded personally.
Request accessThe cost ladder, compared
Figures below are public market rates as of mid-2026, not PILOT pricing; salaries and vendor prices change, so verify before budgeting a hire.
| Option | Approx. cost | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Part-time / hourly EA | varies, no fixed rate | occasional, low-continuity tasks |
| Full-time US EA (salary only) | $36,000–43,000/yr | dedicated, in-house, full context |
| Germany EA (fully loaded) | €5,100–6,100/mo | in-house hire, EU payroll included |
| Managed virtual EA (Athena) | ~$3,000/mo | a person, without the hiring project |
| US fractional chief of staff | $7,000–14,000/mo | judgment and prioritization, part-time |
| Full-time chief of staff | $150K+/yr | full-time judgment and political work |
| PILOT | request access | the information layer, at software cost |
Read top to bottom, the ladder is really answering one question at each rung: how much continuity and judgment do you need, and how much are you willing to pay for it. The jump from a virtual EA to a fractional chief of staff is a jump in scope — from executing tasks to owning prioritization — not just a jump in price.
Get the Chief of Staff Kit — the brief, review and delegation system PILOT runs, as a free PDF. Runnable by hand.
Is an executive assistant worth it for a founder?
The honest test isn’t the price tag on any rung of the ladder above — it’s what’s actually consuming the hours. Two different jobs get bundled under “executive assistant,” and they have different answers:
Real-world coordination that needs judgment. Negotiating with a vendor, handling a sensitive call, making a travel decision on the fly, representing you in a room. This genuinely needs a person, and once the volume of this work is high enough, paying for it — at any rung on the ladder above — is a reasonable trade against a founder’s own time.
Information management. Reading everything so you don’t have to. Tracking who owes you what and chasing it. Preparing you before a meeting with the right context. Producing a briefing every morning instead of you reconstructing your day from five inboxes. This is mechanical, high-volume, and exactly the kind of work that drains a founder without requiring a human to be present for it.
Most founders who feel they “need an EA” are drowning in the second category more than the first — not decisions, just coordination, the thing in their head that never got written down anywhere reliable. That distinction is worth making before signing a lease on a $40,000 salary.
What changes if the assistant is software
An AI chief of staff like PILOT doesn’t compete with a human EA on the axis of judgment, presence, or a phone call — it isn’t trying to. What it does is take the information-management half of the job off a founder’s plate without a salary: it ingests mail, calendar, meetings, and voice notes into a private knowledge graph, delivers one morning briefing with the day’s actual priority and no more than about seven items, tracks every commitment in both directions and flags one that’s stalled for ten days or more, and produces a weekly review of what got done and what slipped. The proactive side of that — noticing a stalled promise before you have to ask about it — is covered in more depth in proactive AI assistants, done honestly. A human confirms every outbound write PILOT initiates — the system proposes, it never sends anything in your name unprompted; only replies inside an outreach conversation you have already approved go out on their own.
That’s a meaningfully different cost basis than anything on the ladder above: no recruiting cycle, no onboarding period during which a new hire is still learning your business, no benefits line. It is not a like-for-like replacement for a human EA doing real-world tasks — the honest comparison, including where the human still wins, is in PILOT vs. a human chief of staff. It is, for the founders whose actual bottleneck is information rather than errands, the part of the executive-assistant cost equation that no longer needs to be a line item at all.
How to decide
A short way to place yourself on the ladder, rather than defaulting to whichever hire is most visible:
- You need real-world tasks handled by a person, at meaningful volume → a full-time hire or a managed service like Athena is the right shape of answer, and the numbers above are the real cost of it.
- You need judgment and prioritization, but not full-time → a fractional chief of staff, priced accordingly.
- You’re drowning in email, meeting prep, and follow-ups, and the real problem is that nothing tracks it → that’s information management, and it’s worth pricing a standing system before pricing a salary. The AI chief of staff category exists precisely for this gap, and what an AI-powered executive assistant can do covers the software side of the ladder in more depth.
- You’re not sure which category your load falls into → the shortlist in best AI executive assistant tools and the trigger checklist in when founders can’t afford a chief of staff both help place the decision before you commit to a number on this page.
Whichever rung you choose, the goal is the same one that makes the hire worth considering in the first place: starting the day already knowing exactly what matters, instead of reconstructing it yourself from memory.