The Real Maths Behind Employing Someone to Answer Your Phones

Hiring someone to answer the phones looks like the obvious fix. You find a decent candidate, agree a salary, and the calls get covered. Problem solved. Except the salary is only the start of it, and once you do the full arithmetic, the decision looks considerably different.

This is not a pitch for outsourcing. It is an attempt to run both options through the same numbers, because most small business owners make this call without doing that properly, and it tends to be an expensive mistake in whichever direction.

What an in-house hire actually costs in 2026

Start with the National Living Wage, which rose to £12.71 per hour in April 2026. A full-time receptionist working standard hours comes to roughly £26,400 per year at that floor rate. That is the number people tend to use when they say "a receptionist costs about £26k". It is also the wrong number.

Add employer National Insurance at 15%, and note that the secondary threshold dropped to £5,000 this year, meaning contributions kick in much earlier than most small business owners are expecting. On a £26,400 salary, you are looking at approximately £3,210 in employer NI on top. Then add pension contributions at the statutory minimum. Then think about holiday cover, which on a standard 28-day entitlement means roughly five and a half weeks where someone else is either handling calls, calls are being missed, or you are paying for agency cover.

The figure you actually need to plan around is closer to £31,000 to £33,000, before you have spent a penny on recruitment, training, equipment, or the hours you personally spend managing someone.

The legal picture has also shifted materially this year. Statutory sick pay now applies from day one of illness, with no waiting period. That one change alone alters the calculation for any employer used to budgeting sick days as unpaid. More significant still: the unfair dismissal qualifying period is set to drop from two years to six months, expected to take effect on 1 January 2027. Which means anyone you hire this autumn is likely to carry that protection within months of starting. For a business without an HR function, that is not a small thing. It means performance conversations, probation reviews and early-stage dismissals all carry legal exposure they did not carry two years ago.

A sole trader hiring their first receptionist probably has not spoken to an employment lawyer. Most do not, until it is too late.

What outsourced call handling actually costs

Need More Time does not publish rates here, but the pricing structure is a retained monthly arrangement rather than a per-call or hourly fee. It is positioned against the cost of employment, not as a low-cost alternative to the cheap end of the market.

What you are paying for: calls answered by a real person, trained on your business specifically, presenting as part of your team. Not a script. Not an automated menu. Not someone reading a screen for the first time because your usual contact is off.

What you are not paying for: employer National Insurance, pension contributions, statutory sick pay, holiday cover, recruitment costs, equipment, or the management overhead that comes with having a direct report. You are also not carrying any of the new employment law exposure, because there is no employment relationship to manage.

The service operates Monday to Friday, 8 am to 6 pm. If your business needs someone answering calls at 9 pm on a Sunday, this is not the right option, and it is worth being direct about that.

Weighing the same criteria

Total annual cost

An in-house hire at National Living Wage plus NI, pension and holiday costs sits realistically at £31,000 to £33,000 before recruitment or training. An outsourced arrangement will typically cost considerably less than that. The gap widens further when you include the time you spend managing a direct report.

Cover during sickness and holidays

With an in-house hire, you absorb this yourself, either through gap cover, agency staff, or calls simply not being answered. With an outsourced arrangement, cover is built in. The team handling your calls does not go on holiday at the same time.

Flexibility when call volumes change

A receptionist is a fixed cost. If you have a quiet week, you still pay. If you have a spike, one person has a limit on what they can handle. An outsourced arrangement scales with your actual volume rather than against a headcount that was set when you signed a contract.

Management overhead

This is the one most people underestimate. A direct report requires your time: supervising, reviewing, handling disputes, managing performance, conducting reviews. That is time taken from the work that earns you money. The outsourced model removes that overhead entirely.

Legal exposure

An in-house hire brings employment law obligations that are, in 2026, more demanding than they have been for some time. The day-one sick pay entitlement, the forthcoming six-month unfair dismissal threshold, the enhanced duty to prevent workplace harassment that lands in October: these are not theoretical risks. They are administrative and legal commitments attached to every single hire, however small your business is. The outsourced model carries none of them.

What the outsourced model does not do

It is not a presence in your physical office. It will not make you a coffee or sign for a delivery. If your requirement includes on-site reception, an outsourced telephone and administration service is a partial solution at best. That distinction matters, and pretending otherwise would be pointless.

Which option suits whom

If you are an established business with consistent call volumes, existing HR knowledge, and a genuine need for on-site presence during your working day, hiring a receptionist is defensible. The costs are real but manageable, particularly if you are already set up to handle the employment obligations.

If you are a smaller business, particularly at the point of your first hire, the numbers almost always point the other way. The total cost of employment is routinely underestimated by owners who have not done it before. The legal exposure attached to a hire in late 2026 is genuinely higher than it was. And the flexibility of an outsourced arrangement, being able to scale it or change it without a redundancy process, is worth more than it looks on a spreadsheet.

The businesses that tend to get most value from an outsourced call handling and Business Assistant arrangement are those where the owner is the bottleneck: on site, in meetings, driving between jobs, unable to answer the phone and unwilling to let it ring out. A property maintenance firm with two crews on the road and nobody left in the office. A small consultancy where every missed call is a missed instruction. A start-up that needs professional call handling from day one but cannot yet justify a salary commitment.

For those businesses, the honest comparison does not really need a tiebreaker. The maths does it.

To find out what a Business Assistant or Telephone Answering arrangement would look like for your business, call us on 020 3303 3303, or take a look at the Business Assistant page on needmoretime.co.uk.