A part-time receptionist versus outsourcing your clinic admin

A part-time receptionist costs less per hour than any outsourced admin service, including mine. The decision is not really about the rate. It comes down to how many hours of admin your clinic reliably has each month, and whether the work needs someone standing in the building. Here is the arithmetic, honestly.

The short version

• A part-time receptionist works out cheaper per hour than outsourcing.
• Employer National Insurance and pension add several hundred pounds a year.
• Outsourcing usually wins when there are not enough hours to fill a role.
• Only someone in the building can cover a front desk in person.
• Clinics of three or more clinicians often end up doing both.

What a part-time receptionist actually costs

Start with the wage. From April 2026 the National Living Wage for anyone aged 21 or over is £12.71 an hour. Someone doing fifteen hours a week at that rate is about £9,914 a year in gross pay, and that is the legal floor rather than the going rate. A person who has worked a clinic desk before will ask for more, and will be worth more.

Two costs sit on top of the wage and they catch people out. Employer National Insurance is charged at 15 per cent on earnings above a secondary threshold of £5,000 a year, which on that salary comes to roughly £737 (the current rates and thresholds are published on gov.uk). A lot of small employers can cover that with the Employment Allowance, which is £10,500 for 2026 to 2027, though eligibility has conditions attached and is worth checking with your accountant. The workplace pension adds a minimum employer contribution of 3 per cent of qualifying earnings, about £110 a year at this salary.

So the all-in figure lands somewhere between roughly £10,020 and £10,760 a year for fifteen hours a week. Spread across 780 paid hours, that is about £12.85 to £13.80 an hour. Nothing outsourced comes close to that hourly number, and any service that tells you otherwise is quietly comparing something else.

Then there is cover. Almost all workers are entitled to 5.6 weeks of paid holiday a year, and part-time staff get the same proportionally. That pay already sits inside the salary above, but the weeks do not cover themselves. Five and a half weeks a year, plus sick days, is time when the desk is either empty or being covered by you.

What outsourcing actually costs

My rate is £35 an hour with a minimum of eight hours a month, billed monthly on seven day terms. The retainers work out lower: five hours is £165 a month, ten hours is £310 and twenty hours is £580, which is between £33 and £29 an hour. It is all set out on the pricing page.

That number is higher per hour and it is meant to be. It carries no recruitment, no payroll, no contract of employment, no holiday to cover and no notice period beyond a rolling month. You are buying hours of work rather than a person's availability, and you only buy the hours you actually use.

The question that actually decides it

How many hours of admin does your clinic produce in a month, reliably, every month? That is the whole decision, and almost nobody knows the answer without counting.

Fifteen hours a week is sixty five hours a month. If your clinic genuinely produces sixty five hours of admin, an employee is the cheaper answer by a wide margin and you should hire one. If it produces ten or twelve hours, you have a harder problem, because nobody recruits for two and a half hours a week and gets someone reliable who stays.

In the clinics I have seen, owners in that position do one of two things. They hire for more hours than the work justifies and then fill the rest of the shift with jobs that were never worth paying for. Or they hire for a few hours, the person leaves inside the year, and the recruiting starts again on a Sunday evening.

What an employee can do that a remote service cannot

A receptionist is in the building. They open the door, take a card payment at the counter, hand someone a form, change the couch roll, sign for a delivery and read the room when a patient arrives upset. None of that can be done from anywhere else, and no amount of software changes it.

If the job you are trying to fill is mostly presence, hire. A remote arrangement is the wrong tool for it and I would tell you that on the call rather than take the work.

Where outsourcing wins

The work that travels well is the work that does not need a body in the room. Insurer billing and shortfall chasing, invoicing and remittances, dictation and clinical letters, inbox management, recalls and cancellation lists, expenses and bookkeeping. All of it happens inside your own practice software, and it does not care where the person doing it is sitting.

It also wins on the awkward part of employing someone. Holiday, sickness, a resignation in your busiest month: an outsourced arrangement keeps all of that off your desk. And the specialist end matters more than people expect. A receptionist learns your insurer mix over a year or two of doing it alongside everything else. Someone who does insurer billing every week usually recognises what a shortfall is before they have finished reading the remittance. I went through that difference in more detail in the piece on a clinic virtual assistant versus a specialist admin service.

How I would decide

Count the hours first, for one honest month. Write down every admin job and how long it took, including the ones you do at nine at night. Most owners are surprised, and not always in the direction they expect.

If the answer is more than about half a working week, every week, and a good part of it needs someone physically there, hire a part-time receptionist. If the answer is a handful of hours and nearly all of it is billing, letters and inbox, outsourcing is usually the cheaper option in practice, even though it is dearer per hour.

And if you run a clinic with three or more clinicians, the answer is often both. Someone on the desk for the patients in front of you, and the billing handled by someone who does nothing else all week. At that size, that split is the first arrangement I would look at.