Ask anyone who has hired an executive assistant what it costs, and most will quote a salary. That number is rarely the real one.
The full cost of an EA in 2026 is a layered thing. Salary is one slice. Benefits, recruiting, training, equipment, turnover, and the hours you spend managing them are the rest. By the time you add it all up, the true number is often two to three times what people first quote.
This is a breakdown of what an EA actually costs in 2026, where the hidden costs live, and how to think about it against the alternatives.
The salary, by tier
EA salaries in the US sit in three rough bands, with national averages around $80,000 to $95,000 for the role.
- Junior EA: $50,000 to $75,000 per year. Calendar coordination, inbox triage, travel logistics. Usually 0 to 2 years of experience. Best for principals whose admin needs are mostly volume, not judgment.
- Mid-level EA: $75,000 to $130,000 per year. The default hire for most operators. Strong calendar judgment, can draft client communication in your voice with light supervision, runs travel and gifting end to end.
- Senior EA: $120,000 to $160,000 per year. Operates as a force multiplier. Top of the band overlaps with the lower end of chief of staff comp. Can attend meetings on your behalf, hold institutional memory across hundreds of relationships, and run cross-functional projects.
Chief of staff is a related but distinct role, with US average base around $218,000 and a typical range of $164,000 to $304,000 according to recent Glassdoor data. Startups tend to pay lower base, in the $125,000 to $170,000 range, with equity making up the difference. If your principal really needs a chief of staff, that is a separate hire and a separate budget conversation.
In high-cost cities like New York, San Francisco, and London, add 15 to 25 percent to any of these bands. In specialized fields like law, finance, or executive search, add another 10 to 20 percent on top.
The hidden costs
The sticker price is the part everyone quotes. The hidden costs are where the real number gets built.
- Benefits and payroll taxes: roughly 30 to 40 percent on top of base salary. Health insurance, retirement match, payroll tax, paid time off, sick leave. According to BLS data, benefits make up about 30 percent of total compensation for private industry workers in late 2025. A $100,000 base becomes $130,000 to $140,000 fully loaded.
- Recruiting: $15,000 to $40,000 if you use a placement firm. Contingency firms typically charge 20 to 30 percent of first-year base salary, with retained search firms going higher. Even in-house, expect 30 to 60 hours of your team's time over the search.
- Onboarding and ramp: a great EA takes three to six months to reach full output. During that window you are paying the salary while spending your own hours teaching them your preferences, voice, and judgment. Conservatively, that is another 80 to 120 hours of your time. Multiply by your hourly rate to see the real figure.
- Equipment and software: laptop, phone, subscriptions, expense card. Usually $3,000 to $5,000 in year one and $1,500 to $2,500 each year after.
- Turnover: EA tenure tends to run three to five years on average, longer than many admin roles because of the close relationship with the principal. But when they do leave, you pay for the search again, the ramp again, and the institutional memory walks out the door. Industry research puts the true cost of replacing a professional employee at 50 to 150 percent of their annual salary, with the higher end common for roles where context loss is significant.
Add it all up. A mid-level EA on a $100,000 base actually costs closer to $145,000 to $170,000 per year fully loaded once you account for benefits, equipment, and amortized recruiting and ramp costs. A senior EA on a $150,000 base lands between $215,000 and $245,000 once everything is counted.
The time tax most executives forget
The cost most operators miss entirely is the one they pay in their own time after the EA is hired.
A good EA needs direction. They need feedback, course corrections, weekly priorities, context on relationships, and access to your judgment when something does not fit the playbook. Most operators spend three to five hours a week managing their EA. At a $400 hourly rate, that is another $60,000 to $100,000 a year of your own time, layered on top of the EA's compensation.
That is not a complaint. It is the deal. A great EA earns those hours back many times over. But it belongs in the math.
What you actually get
Not all EAs are created equal, and the gap between an average EA and a great one is enormous.
A great EA reads your inbox faster than you can, writes in your voice indistinguishably, knows which meetings you would hate before you do, and holds institutional memory of every relationship in your network. They protect your time aggressively, fix problems quietly, and make you look more organized than you are. Twelve months in, they know your preferences better than you can articulate them.
An average EA executes the tasks you assign. They schedule what you ask them to schedule. They reply to what you forward. They are useful, but they do not compound.
The price of a great EA is higher, the search is longer, and the retention is harder. Most operators try and fail to hire one two or three times before they get the right person.
The alternatives, and what they actually cost
The full-time US-based EA is the gold standard and the most expensive option. There are three real alternatives, each with a different shape.
- Offshore EA: $1,200 to $4,000 per month, usually based in the Philippines or Latin America. Lower cost, but time zone friction, language nuance, and limited institutional context typically mean you get a fraction of what a US-based EA delivers. Premium offshore services with heavy training and management overhead, like Athena, Persona, and Pearl Talent, can run $2,500 to $5,000 per month.
- EA agency or fractional service: $2,500 to $5,000 per month for US-based agency support. A trained EA who works across multiple clients. Faster to onboard, no benefits or recruiting overhead, but you share their attention with other principals.
- Executive assistant service that runs on software: $50 to $400 per month, depending on the depth of the service. The newest category. The good ones handle inbox drafting, calendar coordination, meeting prep, and routine follow-ups, and they run on your approval so you stay in control while the work moves in the background.
The math by role
The same EA cost lands very differently depending on what your hour is worth.
- Founder of a $5M revenue company: roughly $300 to $600 per effective hour. A fully loaded EA at $170,000 pays for itself in 340 recovered hours per year. That is about seven hours a week. Most founders recover more than that in the first month.
- Solo law firm partner: the average US lawyer hourly rate is $349 per Clio's 2025 Legal Trends Report, with solo practitioners typically billing $150 to $350 per hour and specialists charging $500 to $800 or more. Three to four recovered billable hours per week, at a $300 rate, covers a $150,000 EA.
- Real estate agent doing $200,000 in GCI: one additional closed deal per quarter from faster follow-up covers most of an entire year of EA support. The 80 percent first-responder advantage in speed-to-lead means most agents are leaving more than that on the table.
- VC or investment partner: dealflow is a relationship business. The deals you lose to slow follow-up are usually invisible until they show up in someone else's portfolio.
In every case, the math works for the right person. The reason most people who could afford an EA do not have one is not cost. It is the search, the management, the ramp, and the risk of getting it wrong.
Where Orchid fits
We built Orchid for the people who looked at this math and got stuck on the hiring part. The salary made sense. The fully loaded cost made sense. They just did not want to run another search, another onboarding, another three-month ramp, another performance review.
Orchid handles inbox triage, drafts replies in your voice, runs calendar coordination, preps you before every meeting, sends the follow-ups you forgot, and lives in Messages so there is no new app to babysit. It works on approval, in your voice, quietly in the background.
For most operators, Orchid sits at a fraction of the cost of even an offshore EA, with none of the recruiting or onboarding overhead. It is not for everyone. If your needs are complex, fully delegated, or deeply relationship-heavy, you will still want a great human EA. If your needs look like the eighty percent that an EA actually does day to day, Orchid covers it.
A question worth sitting with
If you priced out your last twelve months of admin work at your real hourly rate, what would the number be?
And what would change in your week if that number went somewhere else?
