What does it cost to hire an office manager in the UK?

A full-time office manager costs a UK employer £44,647 a year on the median salary, once £5,045 of employer National Insurance and £972 of pension contributions are added, and that is before recruitment, equipment, holiday cover and your own time managing the person. The Office for National Statistics puts the median at £38,630 a year in its Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings for 2025 (Table 14.7a, occupation group 4141, office managers), and half of full-time office managers earn between £31,205 and £50,494.

How much is an office manager paid?

ASHE is a 1% sample of HMRC's PAYE records, so it describes what employers pay rather than what adverts promise. The annual figures cover the tax year to 5 April 2025 and only people who had been in the job for more than a year, so they run a little behind this month's adverts. The 2025 edition is provisional, published on 23 October 2025. Pay varies with the region and with what the title means in your firm: in a twelve-person practice the office manager may run the whole back office, finance included. Two or three adverts in your area, for the job as you would write it, are the check on the national figure.

What does an employer pay on top of the salary?

• Employer National Insurance. For the 2026 to 2027 tax year it is 15% of everything the employee earns above £5,000 a year, which on £38,630 comes to £5,045. The Employment Allowance lets an eligible employer take up to £10,500 off its annual employer NI bill, so a firm with one or two staff may pay little of this; on this salary, a third employee takes it past the allowance.

• Pension. Automatic enrolment sets a minimum employer contribution of 3% of qualifying earnings, the band between £6,240 and £50,270 a year. On the median salary that is £972.

• Holiday. The statutory minimum is 5.6 weeks a year, 28 days for someone on a five-day week, and the employer may count bank holidays within it. A full-time salary pays for 260 working days, of which 232 are worked.

• Recruitment. The CIPD's Resourcing and talent planning report 2026 puts the median cost per hire at £2,000 for employees below senior management. The CIPD drew it from a small sample, the 223 employers who could estimate their cost to within a fifth. An office manager falls in that group, and an agency fee takes your own figure above the median.

• The rest. Sick pay, a desk, a laptop and licences have no national figure, and neither do the months before a new person knows how your firm works.

The same on-costs for any other post are set out in what it costs to employ someone in the UK.

What does an office manager do all week?

The National Careers Service describes the job as organising day-to-day office operations, managing the office budget and expenses, preparing reports for the senior team, carrying out appraisals and helping to recruit and train staff. In an architecture practice or an engineering consultancy the office manager chases timesheets before the stage invoices can go out, keeps the expenses matched to job numbers and writes up the Monday meeting. In a marketing agency the same person chases the hours against each retainer and rebuilds the monthly client report from whatever the platforms exported. In a construction contractor the job is the subcontractor file, with insurances that lapse, cards that expire and the paperwork behind each application for payment.

Most of that list is chasing, collating and keying, which is the part of the salary an owner least wants to pay for and the part a good office manager least wants to do.

Can AI do part of an office manager's job?

An AI worker can take the repeatable part. It has a written role, works inside the systems you already run, and a person reviews what it produces. For the office manager's week it can take on the timesheet chasing before the invoice run, the invoice and payment chasing after it, the expense and receipt chasing at month end, the first draft of the monthly report from the figures in your systems, and the meeting notes and the actions that follow. For a contractor it can gather each subcontractor's pack and keep every expiry date in view. Each is a defined job with a record of what was done.

What stays with a person?

Appraisals, disciplinary matters, recruiting and training, the quiet word with the engineer whose timesheets are always late, and everything else in the National Careers Service list that is about people stay with a person. So does any decision that commits money, any call that has to be made by phone, and the judgement about which client to ring first when three things go wrong. That judgement is what an office manager who runs the place is paid for. The chasing around it is not judgement, and it is what fills the week.

Should you hire, or split the job?

Write down the week you are hiring for, task by task, and mark each one as judgement or as repeatable admin. If most of the list is admin, you may not need the hire, or you may need a part-time or more senior person for the judgement and an AI worker for the rest. If most of it is judgement, hire the person and give them an AI worker so the chasing does not swallow them. How AI staff compare with hiring an administrator sets the two side by side, what it costs to hire an administrator runs the sum for a general post, and what an AI worker is explains how one is managed. Our starting price is on the homepage.

With an office manager on your list, the chasing and the keying could be specified for an AI worker first, leaving the people, the money and the judgement calls to the person you hire. Would the office manager you are about to advertise for spend most of the week chasing other people? Talk to our agent first.