There are certain important factors to consider when determining how much to pay your VA.
As an employer, you need to think about these three major things that can help you in creating an enticing job offer that isn’t over the top for your budget as well. Keeping the balance on both is the first step to finding a good VA and keeping your VA for long-term.
Here we’ve given you a quick-start view into the salary side of things for GVA’s, however, we strongly suggest you download our salary guide (by using the form to the right of this paragraph!), as it’s way more in-depth and is kept constantly up-to-date. It’s free, too!
1. Skills
Most VAs who have multiple skill sets charge higher because they can do a lot more than the average GVA.
An example of these extra skills would be Graphic Designing. This can come in handy when you delegate tasks like newsletter layout designing, creating social media posts, or even simple logo work or picture manipulation. But please do not expect your GVA to do a full-scale graphic design work for your website.
Another extra skill would be content writing. Since content writing is normally considered as a separate VA role, most GVAs do not want to focus on this even if they can write good content. VAs would be willing to write the occasional newsletter or blog post that come once a week, or even twice. But a daily writing task is not for a GVA.
These two skills are the most common extra skills for GVAs, but there are still a lot of other skill sets that can be considered outside of a GVA’s scope that you can hone or even take advantage of those skills as long as you know their capacity in that area.
However we highly discourage mixing and matching VA roles. There is no “super VA” who can do it all.
2. Experience
Highly experienced VAs usually claim higher salary rates because they have—well, more experience!
Just like in the real world setting, a good track record is important. Working for a year with one employer is a feat for an online worker, since online jobs tend to end relatively quickly compared to the normal job. It is a huge advantage if a VA candidate has had years of experience with a single employer.
Always check references to verify a VA’s track record on their resume. It can be a very good basis for you to know if the VA has had a good working track record.
3. Your Job Description
In our post 25 Tasks You Can Outsource to a GVA, we list the most common GVA tasks. However, we understand that different employers have different needs, and the salary rate you offer your VA would also depend on the amount of work load you want to outsource.
If you require a more high-end, executive-level VA, this would mean that the rate you would be offering would also be high-end. For this type of GVA, an offer of $600 and up (full-time, per month in USD) is a good starting rate. The part-time rate is usually $300 USD and up for this role.
For the common GVA role, the average rate is $450 – $600 per month, full time. Part-time is usually around half of this rate, which is $200 – $300 per month.
We recommend you pay your VA on a per month basis rather than an hourly basis. Not only is this easier for you to track, but it also gives your VA a feeling of having a more stable and long-term working opportunity.
For a more comprehensive and updated version of the salary guide, as mentioned above, please download our Free eBook, by using the form to the top of this page. In this eBook, we have included more tips and details on VA salaries, payment and how to compute for 13th month pay.
