What does it cost to hire a sales administrator in the UK?

An employer pays about £32,982 a year for a full-time sales administrator on the median salary, once £3,562 in employer National Insurance and £675 in pension contributions are added, and before recruitment, holiday cover, a desk in the sales office and a licence for the order system. ONS figures for 2025 put the full-time median at £28,745 (Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, Table 14.7a, occupation group 4151, sales administrators). Half of full-time sales administrators earn between £25,000 and £33,970.

How much is a sales administrator paid?

ASHE is a 1% sample of HMRC's PAYE records, so it reports what was paid, for the tax year to 5 April 2025 and for people who had been in the job for more than a year. The 2025 edition is provisional; the revised figures and the 2026 edition are expected in October 2026. Sales administrators are their own occupation group, but it spans every industry, and in a wholesaler or a manufacturer the job often carries more than the title says: credit checks on new accounts, back orders, returns, the odd request for quotation. Adverts for the job as you would write it, in your area, 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 is 15% of earnings above £5,000 a year: £3,562 on the median. The Employment Allowance takes up to £10,500 off an eligible employer's annual bill.

• Pension at the automatic enrolment minimum of 3% of qualifying earnings, the band from £6,240 to £50,270 a year: £675 on the median.

• Holiday of at least 5.6 weeks, 28 days for a five-day week, bank holidays included at your choice. Orders keep arriving in those weeks, so somebody else keys them or the cut-off is missed.

• Recruitment. The CIPD's Resourcing and talent planning report 2026 gives a median cost per hire of £2,000 for employees below senior management, and the same for the private sector alone. It is a survey median from a small sample of 223 employers, so read it as a marker.

The sum leaves out sick pay, a seat and a licence in the order system, and the weeks before a new person knows which customers always order short and which carrier to use for the Highlands. The rules behind each item are set out in what it costs to employ anyone in the UK.

What a sales administrator does in a wholesaler or a manufacturer

The National Careers Service describes the job as answering customer enquiries by phone, email and face to face, taking and processing orders and payments, running credit checks, raising invoices, updating customer records, checking stock, organising deliveries and giving after-sales support. In a wholesaler the morning is purchase orders arriving as PDFs and emails that have to be in the system before the cut-off, then the calls asking what is in stock and where the delivery is, then the quotes that went out last week and were never followed up. In a manufacturer it is the request for quotation nobody has costed, the order that has to become a works order, the acknowledgement the customer is waiting for, and the lapsed account that used to order every month.

Most of that is keying, matching, answering from the record and following up on the day promised, and it is the part of the job that grows with every new account until the next hire feels inevitable.

Can AI do part of a sales administrator's job?

An AI worker can take the keying and the chasing. It has a written role, is given access to the order system and the inbox you already run, and has a person who reviews what it does. For the sales office it can take on order processing, reading the emailed and PDF orders, keying them for release and raising the queries where a code or a quantity does not match; first-line client support, answering the emailed questions about stock, delivery and copy invoices from the record; sales follow-up, chasing every quote on the day it was promised and noticing the accounts that have gone quiet; the first draft of a quote from the enquiry and your price list; and the statements and reminders that keep the ledger moving. Each is a defined task with a record of what was done.

What stays with the person

The phone stays with a person, and so does anyone standing at the trade counter. A person releases the order, decides what to do about a customer over its credit limit, prices anything that is not on the list, and handles the complaint that needs an apology rather than a reference number. An AI worker never changes a customer's bank details, never agrees a price it has not been given, and never sends an order to the warehouse that a person has not released.

Should you hire a sales administrator, or split the job?

Count the orders, enquiries and quotes in a week and mark how many needed a person's judgement rather than a person's hands. If the keying and the chasing are what is forcing the hire, the hire may be an AI worker and the sales office you have. If the customers want a voice they know, hire the person and give them an AI worker for the queue. Our comparison of AI staff with hiring an administrator sets the two side by side. The same arithmetic for a general role is in our article on what it costs to hire an administrator, and how an AI worker is specified and managed is in our explainer on what AI staff are. Our starting price is on the homepage.

In a sales office an AI worker would start with the order book, keying each order for a person to release, and your team would keep anything off the price list, credit and complaints. For a sales office that types in orders faster than it can sell, the next step is to talk to our agent.