Belay Pricing: What a Belay Virtual Assistant Costs per Month

BELAY does not publish pricing. There is no plans page, no hourly rate and no package table on belaysolutions.com, and the only way to a number is a form, a call with a Solutions Consultant and a custom quote. What BELAY does publish is the market it sits in: its own FAQ says most US-based virtual assistants cost $1,200 to $3,000 a month and charge $30 to $75 an hour, and its executive assistant cost article puts a dedicated assistant at $2,000 to $5,500 a month and the average US Executive Assistant at $64,200 a year. BELAY places itself at the premium end of those ranges because its assistants are US-based and vetted.

That leaves you trying to budget for something with no list price. This page works through what BELAY actually publishes, why the specific numbers on other sites should be treated carefully, what moves your quote up and down, and how the total compares with the other ways of covering the same work.

How much does a BELAY virtual assistant cost per month?

The honest answer is that nobody outside BELAY and its clients knows, and any page that gives you a precise BELAY rate is guessing or repeating a guess. Here is the difference between what is documented and what is not.

Figure	Source	Is it BELAY's own rate?
$1,200 to $3,000 a month for a US virtual assistant	BELAY's FAQ on the cost of hiring a VA in the US	No. BELAY's figure for the market
$30 to $75 an hour for a US virtual assistant	BELAY's FAQ	No. Market average, BELAY's own wording
$2,000 to $5,500 a month for a dedicated assistant	BELAY's executive assistant cost article	No. BELAY's range for the category
$64,200 a year, average US Executive Assistant	BELAY's executive assistant cost article	No. Salary benchmark for an employee
Any specific hourly rate or monthly package	Rival agency blog posts	No. Not published by BELAY

Read that table one more time before you accept a number from anywhere. Every documented figure BELAY has put in writing describes the US virtual assistant market in general. None of them is a BELAY price list. BELAY's premium positioning is stated openly on its own pages, where it explains that it costs more than freelance alternatives because you get a vetted US-based assistant, a fast match and a Client Success Consultant who stays with the account, so budgeting at the upper half of the published ranges is more realistic than the lower half.

Why doesn't BELAY publish pricing?

Because the product is a person, and the cost of a person depends on how many hours you need, what skills those hours require and how specialized the role is. An operations assistant at ten hours a week and a fractional controller are both on BELAY's menu, and no single table covers both. Staffing companies also price against what the engagement is worth to each client, which is harder to do with a public rate card.

There is a practical consequence for you. The consultation is a sales call as well as a scoping call, which means the number you are quoted reflects the picture you paint of your needs. Go in with your requirements measured rather than described, and the quote tends to be tighter.

Are the BELAY prices you see online accurate?

Treat them as unverified. Search for BELAY pricing and nearly every result is a blog post written by a competing virtual assistant agency, each one ending with a recommendation to hire that agency instead. Their figures disagree with each other, sometimes by a factor of two on the same question, and none of them cite BELAY. The pages that rank are optimized to capture your search, not to report a price accurately.

You will also see numbers presented with false precision, quoted to the dollar per hour as though read off an invoice. Unless a source shows you the contract it came from, assume it was estimated. We have deliberately not repeated any of those figures here, because adding a sixth contradictory number to the pile would not help you budget.

What decides your BELAY quote

Five things move the number, roughly in order of impact.

• Monthly hours. This is the biggest lever by a distance. Count a real week of work rather than estimating, because most people overstate the hours they need by including tasks they do once a quarter.
• Role and skill level. An executive assistant supporting a CEO, a marketing assistant and a bookkeeper are quoted differently. Asking one person to cover three roles rarely saves money and usually produces a worse match.
• Whether you need finance work. BELAY's bookkeeping, payroll, tax, accounting clerk and fractional controller or CFO services are separate service lines. If you need an assistant and a bookkeeper, expect two lines on the quote.
• Commitment length and notice. Ask what minimum applies, what notice cancellation requires and whether unused hours roll over in a quiet month. Get the answers in writing before you sign.
• Specialist tools or industry. Work in a regulated field, or in software your assistant has to learn, narrows the candidate pool and can move the rate.

Is BELAY cheaper than hiring an employee?

Usually, and BELAY's own figures show why. An employed US Executive Assistant averages $64,200 a year in salary alone, and once you add payroll taxes, benefits, equipment, software seats and the cost of recruiting, the loaded figure lands well above that. A contracted arrangement in the $1,200 to $3,000 a month range is $14,400 to $36,000 a year with none of that overhead, and you buy only the hours you use.

The saving narrows as your hours grow. Contract something close to full time at a premium US hourly rate and you can end up paying more than an employee would cost you, without getting an employee's full-time availability or commitment. The crossover point is worth calculating before you scale the hours up, and our executive assistant cost comparison works through the loaded employee numbers in detail.

How BELAY pricing compares with the alternatives

Three routes cover broadly the same office work at very different prices, and they are genuinely different purchases rather than interchangeable ones.

Route	Typical monthly cost	What you get	Best when
BELAY or a similar US staffing service	$1,200 to $3,000 per assistant, quoted	A vetted US person, judgment, phone calls, finance services	The work changes weekly and needs a human
Offshore VA agency	Well below the US range	A person at a lower rate, with time zone and language trade-offs	Budget is the binding constraint
Office assistant software	$149 to $399 flat per office	Drafting, scheduling, filing and follow-ups, with approval on every send	Most hours go on repeatable written work

The comparison that matters is not price per month but price per unit of the work you actually have. If three quarters of the hours in a $2,400 engagement go on routine email, moving meetings, filing attachments and chasing people who have not replied, you are paying a US professional rate for work that does not need professional judgment.

How to cut the quote before you sign

Do the unglamorous exercise first: log a week of the work you intend to delegate, in fifteen minute blocks, and sort it into two columns. In one column put anything that needs judgment, a phone call, a relationship or a decision. In the other put anything that follows the same pattern every time it happens.

Most small offices find the second column is larger than they expected, and it is the column software handles. Covering it separately lets you hire a human for fewer hours against the first column, which is usually cheaper than a single larger engagement and produces a better assistant experience, because the person is not spending Tuesday morning on inbox triage.

The same logic applies to the finance side of the quote. If what you need is not really bookkeeping judgment but getting statements into a usable form, it is worth checking whether the underlying task is just data movement. Turning a stack of PDFs into rows a ledger can read is a job you can convert a bank statement into a spreadsheet for directly, rather than buying professional hours to retype them.

When a BELAY quote is worth paying

There are jobs where a staffing company is simply the correct purchase, and it is worth being clear about them. If you need someone to call a supplier who is ignoring email, sit on hold with an insurer, handle travel and personal errands alongside business tasks, take on work nobody has documented, or close your books and run payroll with professional responsibility attached, hire a person. No office assistant tool does those things, and one that claims to is overselling.

Equally, if vetting is your main worry and you do not want to run a hiring process, that is what the premium buys. BELAY says it accepts only the top 3 percent of US applicants, reports a 93 percent first-match success rate, can match in as little as one week and backs the match with a guarantee. Those are real services with real cost behind them.

The flat-price alternative for the repeatable half

OfficeAgent covers the second column at a published price rather than a quoted one: $149 a month for one person and $399 a month for an office of up to ten teammates, or $119 and $319 a month billed yearly. It drafts replies in your voice, books and reschedules meetings on your Google or Outlook calendar, files documents that arrive by email, keeps spreadsheets current and writes the follow-ups when a thread goes quiet. Every outgoing action waits for your one-click approval, so nothing reaches a client unread, and there is a 14-day money-back guarantee.

Set against BELAY's own published market range for a single US assistant, an office plan covering ten people costs roughly a fifth to a third as much. That is not a like-for-like swap, and the honest framing is the hybrid: a smaller human commitment for the work that needs a person, with software underneath carrying the volume. Our full BELAY comparison puts the two side by side feature by feature, the virtual assistant software comparison covers the wider category, and our pricing page has the plan detail.