Receptionist vs outsourced vs AI: what each costs

What each one costs a year

A receptionist on your payroll costs about £29,600 a year, an outsourced reception service £1,499 to £2,760 at 100 calls a month, and an AI receptionist £828 to £1,188 on plans priced by the call. Each of those is paid for by the person or by the call.

Ours works another way. Agent Place charges one flat monthly fee for unlimited agents, month to month: nothing extra per call, minute or message, so a busy month costs the same as a quiet one, and any agent you add later sits under the same fee. Fully functioning and delivering value in 30 days guaranteed, or you pay nothing more until your agents are. We give you the price on the call.

Every figure is worked out below. The three are not like for like, and the section after the numbers says exactly where the comparison breaks down, because a receptionist does a job an answering service and an agent do not.

What a receptionist on your payroll costs

About £29,600 a year for one full-time person on the median wage, and the wage is roughly seven eighths of it.

• Wages: £25,865. The median full-time receptionist in the UK, or £13.50 an hour, according to the Office for National Statistics' 2026 pay survey (provisional figures). You cannot pay less than the National Living Wage, which is £12.71 an hour from April 2026.
• Employer National Insurance: £3,129.15. Employers pay 15% on everything an employee earns above £417 a month, on the rates for 6 April 2026 to 5 April 2027.
• Pension: £588.75. The minimum an employer pays under automatic enrolment is 3% of earnings between £6,240 and £50,270 a year.
• Holiday: 5.6 weeks, paid. Almost every worker is legally entitled to 5.6 weeks' paid holiday a year, which an employer may count bank holidays towards. The wage above already includes it, so the cost is not more money but fewer weeks: about 46 of the 52 are worked, and someone else answers the phone for the rest.
• Sick pay: £123.25 a week on top. Statutory Sick Pay is £123.25 a week, or 80% of average weekly earnings if that is lower, for up to 28 weeks, and it is paid on days when nobody is answering the phone.

Add the three figures to the wage and one receptionist costs £29,582.90 a year. Spread over 37.5 hours a week for the 46.4 weeks that are worked, that is about £17 for every hour actually covered, before a desk, a phone system, recruitment or training. It also covers about a fifth of the week: 1,740 hours of the 8,760 in a year.

What an outsourced reception service costs

£124.95 to £230 a month for 100 calls on the published prices we checked, which is £1,499.40 to £2,760 a year. Most services charge £1.10 to £2.99 a call or a minute, usually as a monthly bundle with a price per call above it.

Every figure in the table is quoted from that service's own pricing page, read on 21 October 2026. We do not link to them, and prices change, so check the current figure on the service's own site before you compare. We set out more of them, and what sits outside the headline price, in AI receptionists against answering services and in what a call answering service costs in the UK, and the best-known name's own prices in Moneypenny alternatives.

Two things decide which end of that range you land on. The first is whether the plan counts calls or minutes, because a minute plan bills a four-minute booking at four times the rate. The second is the hours: the cheapest plan in the table stops at 6pm on a weekday, so an evening caller still reaches voicemail.

What an AI receptionist costs

£828 to £1,188 a year at 100 calls a month, or £69 to £99 a month, on the plans we checked that are priced by the call. Per-minute plans are left out here, because what they cost depends on how long your calls run. The way in starts lower: from £10 a month with a charge of £0.85 a call, £39 a month for 30 calls, or £99 a month for unlimited calls, and extra minutes run from £0.10 to £0.54.

Ours is priced differently, because we build the agent rather than sell you a tool to set up yourself. Agent Place charges one flat monthly fee for unlimited agents, month to month, so the receptionist and any other agent you add later sit under the same fee, and a busy month costs the same as a quiet one. Nothing extra per call, minute or message. Stop any month. Fully functioning and delivering value in 30 days guaranteed, or you pay nothing more until your agents are. We set your fee on the consultation, once we know what your AI receptionist has to do and what it has to connect to. How that compares with the other ways of buying an agent is set out in what an AI agent costs.

Why the three numbers are not like for like

Because they buy different things, and anyone who lines them up as one number against another is selling you something. Three differences matter more than the price.

• A receptionist does a job, not a task. Answering the phone is part of it. Greeting people, chasing paperwork, knowing which patient or customer is which, and judging what is urgent are the rest, and neither a service nor an agent does those. The honest sum is not £29,600 against an agent's fee, it is the hours an agent takes off that person's week.
• A service takes a message; an agent finishes the job. An answering service picks up in your name and sends you the details, and you ring back. An agent answers the question from what you told it, offers real free slots and books one while the caller is still on the line. Some services book too, so ask yours.
• Judgement still goes to a person. A person is better on the calls that need judgement, which is why the mix that often works is an agent taking every call and passing the handful that need a human to you or to a service, so the human time goes only on the calls that need it.

What sits outside each headline price

None of it is hidden, and all of it is easy to miss on a pricing page.

• VAT. The standard rate is 20%. Some pages quote with it and some without, so check which before you compare.
• What counts as a call or a minute. Rounding decides the bill on short calls. A plan that rounds up to the minute turns a 20-second message into a minute.
• What a call over the bundle costs. On the services above it is £1.50 to £2.99 a call, which is where a busy month gets expensive.
• Setup fees and the term. One of the services we checked charges £49.99 to set up and one AI plan charges £25. Ours is one flat monthly fee for unlimited agents, month to month, so there is no term to sit out: you can stop any month.
• Employer costs, on the payroll option. National Insurance and pension are the two above. Recruitment, a desk, a phone system, training and cover for holiday and sickness are real and are not in our £29,600.

Which one fits your calls

Match it to the calls you actually get rather than to the headline price.

• A receptionist on your payroll if the person is needed in the building anyway, or if most calls need someone who knows your callers by name and can judge what is urgent.
• An outsourced reception service if a human voice on every call is worth £1.10 to £2.99 a call to you, and your calls arrive inside the hours the plan covers.
• An AI receptionist if most of your calls are routine, arrive out of hours, or end in a booking, because it answers all of them at any hour, and on the published prices the AI plans charge less per call than the human services.

If you are not sure which of your calls are routine, the quickest test is the number on this page. Ring it, ask it what your callers ask, and judge the answers.

How we build it

We build it around your own callers, and you see it working on them before it does the job on its own.

1. A 30-minute consultation. What comes in today, what usually goes unanswered or takes too long, and what you want done with each kind.
2. Scope. We watch how your calls are handled today and agree what the agent will do: what it knows about your business, the questions it asks, and the rules for anything it should hand to a person.
3. Build. We build it inside the tools you already use, connected to your calendar and the systems it needs.
4. Test. It runs on your real calls, checked by us, until it gets them right and sounds like you.
5. Live. It does the job on its own, and we keep it working.

A receptionist that answers calls and takes messages is the simpler build; one that writes into your own software has more to connect. Fully functioning and delivering value in 30 days guaranteed, or you pay nothing more until your agents are.

Worth a 30-minute conversation

Tell us which of your calls you would like answered, and we will tell you on the call what we would build and what it would cost. If an off-the-shelf tool or a human service is the better buy for your calls, we will say that instead.

One flat monthly fee for unlimited agents, month to month. Fully functioning and delivering value in 30 days guaranteed, or you pay nothing more until your agents are.