Count the work first, then pick the hours.
Most owners size a virtual assistant plan backwards: they pick the number of hours that feels affordable, then go looking for work to fill it. Run it the other way. List every recurring task you'd hand off, put an honest weekly hour count next to each, and add roughly 20 percent for handoffs and revisions while the assistant is new. For most solo operators that list totals 12 to 20 hours a week, which is squarely part-time territory. When the delegation spans several functions at once, admin plus content plus the website, the same math usually lands at or near 40.
The audit takes one normal week. Every time you do something you'd rather not be doing, write it down with a time estimate, and be honest about frequency: a task that eats four hours once a quarter is not the same as one that eats one hour every Tuesday. What you're building is a picture of your recurring, repeatable workload, because that's the only work a plan should be sized against. One-off projects can ride on top of it; they shouldn't set the baseline.
If the list itself is the hard part, start with what to delegate first to a virtual assistant and build the audit from there. Once you have the list, these are the volume signals that move the number, with the weekly hours they typically represent.
- The inbox and calendar are a daily job. If triage, replies you could template, and scheduling back-and-forth eat an hour or more of your day, that's 6 to 8 hours a week on its own.
- Billing runs late. Invoicing, payment reminders, and expense filing for a roster of 15 to 20 clients typically takes 2 to 4 hours a week, and it's the first thing that slips when you're busy, which is expensive slippage.
- Marketing happens in bursts, then stops. A weekly blog post plus a maintained social calendar is 5 to 8 hours of steady work every week. That steadiness is exactly what's hard to supply when you're also the product.
- The website has a to-do list nobody owns. Copy updates, a landing page for the next offer, small fixes and plugin updates: 2 to 5 hours in the weeks it comes up, zero in the weeks it doesn't.
- Data work queues up. CRM updates, lead imports, list cleanup, report pulls: usually 2 to 3 hours a week, endlessly deferrable and never actually optional.
Now add yours up. A founder handing off the inbox, billing, and the data queue lands around 10 to 15 hours a week, and a 20-hour plan covers it with room for the occasional project. Add steady content production or real website work to that same list and you're past 25 hours before anything goes wrong, which is the point where 40 stops being ambitious and starts being arithmetic.
Two published plans, and a custom lane past them.
Lil Assistance publishes two plans, billed weekly, with a custom tier for anything the standard shapes don't fit. Here's how they compare.
| Plan | Weekly cost | Effective hourly | Roughly per month | Built for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20 hours/week | $340 | $17/hour | About $1,360 | A solo operator's recurring admin plus one growth task; active projects with priority handling |
| 40 hours/week (Most Popular) | $600 | $15/hour | About $2,400 | Work spanning several functions in the same week; full team access and the fastest turnaround |
| Custom | Quoted | Negotiable | Depends on scope | Mixed hours across teams, weekend or night coverage, dedicated pods for launches |
Two things sit outside the table. Every plan carries a one-time $250 setup fee per remote worker, so your first month runs higher than the steady state. And there's no long-term contract on either plan: the commitment is weekly, which matters more than it sounds when you're sizing by guesswork, because a wrong guess costs you a week of adjustment rather than a quarter. For how these figures stack up against solo freelancers, US-based assistants, and a full-time hire's loaded salary, the breakdown of how much a virtual assistant costs covers the whole market.
Flexible hours change what a plan actually buys.
The hours question looks like a volume question, but half of it is a shape question: does your work look the same every week, or does it move?
Here's the problem with sizing a fixed role, and it shows up whether that role is a part-time employee or a single freelancer on retainer. Say you buy 20 hours a week of an admin assistant. Some weeks the admin genuinely takes 20 hours. Other weeks it takes 12, and the remaining 8 either sit idle on your invoice or get filled with invented work, because an admin specialist can't build your landing page or cut your webinar into clips. You paid for a job description, and the job description doesn't flex.
Lil Assistance prices hours, not roles. Your 20 or 40 hours sit with a coordinated team of specialists across admin, web, design, content, and video, and a project manager assigns each week's tasks to whoever fits them. The week admin runs light, the spare hours go to the landing page. The week before a launch, they swing to design and email. You submit the tasks; the project manager handles who does what and checks the output, so reallocating hours doesn't mean re-briefing three different contractors yourself. Over a quarter, that's the difference between buying a fixed slice of one person's time and buying a fixed amount of output aimed wherever it's needed.
Twenty flexible hours cover more ground than thirty locked to one job description.
Part-time or full-time: match the plan to the pattern.
Part-time: 20 hours a week
The right first plan for most solo operators and very small teams.
- ✓ Covers a typical founder's full recurring admin load plus one growth task
- ✓ Lowest weekly commitment at $340, so the sizing mistake is cheap to correct
- ✓ Forces real prioritization, which is healthy in the first months of delegating
- × Sustained overflow means work starts queuing, and queued admin quietly becomes your admin again
- × Effective rate is $17/hour against $15 on the larger plan
Full-time: 40 hours a week
For workloads that span functions, or volume that has outgrown 20.
- ✓ $15/hour effective, the best published rate
- ✓ Room for admin, content, and web work in the same week without triaging one away
- ✓ Full team access and the fastest turnaround of the published plans
- × Overkill if your audit came in under about 15 hours; you'd be paying for headroom you won't use yet
- × A bigger weekly line item to justify before delegation has proven itself in your business
And sometimes neither is right. If your audit came back with less than about 5 hours a week of genuinely recurring work, a weekly plan is premature: a one-off gig freelancer for that single narrow task is the cheaper call, and there's no shame in waiting until the list grows. The sign-up flow does list a 10-hour option below the two published plans, but it isn't publicly priced, so treat it as a conversation rather than a tier. At the other end, if you're consistently blowing past 40 hours or need coverage outside business hours, that's the custom lane: mixed hours across teams, weekend and night coverage, and dedicated pods for launches. One more honest note for any size: the first few weeks run slower than the steady state, because handing over context and building working procedures is real work. The guide to hiring a virtual assistant covers that onboarding side step by step.
How many hours does a part-time virtual assistant usually work?
Across the industry, part-time virtual assistant arrangements typically run 10 to 20 hours a week, with 20 the most common standard. Lil Assistance's part-time plan is 20 hours a week at $340, which works out to $17 an hour, plus a one-time $250 setup fee per remote worker.
Is 10 hours a week enough?
It can be, for exactly one contained recurring task: just the inbox, or just invoicing and payment follow-up. It's rarely enough once you're delegating across two or more areas, because context-switching eats a bigger share of a small block. If your audit honestly says 8 to 10 hours, ask about the 10-hour option, but expect to outgrow it if delegation goes well.
Can I move between 20 and 40 hours later?
Yes. There's no long-term contract on either plan, so moving up or down is a plan change, not a renegotiation. That's also the practical answer to sizing anxiety: pick the plan closest to your audit, run it for a month, and adjust once real volume replaces the estimate.
What happens to hours I don't use in a week?
Rollover terms aren't published on the site, so ask before you sign. In practice the flexible allocation is the better protection: hours the admin work didn't need can go to a different specialist the same week, a backlogged design task or a batch of video clips, so a light admin week doesn't have to mean unused hours at all.
Do I have to manage the specialists myself?
No. Every plan includes a project manager who takes your task list, assigns each item to the right specialist, and coordinates handoffs and quality. You have one point of contact, and the delegation overhead that usually makes outsourcing feel like a second job sits with them rather than with you.
Size it once, then let the hours move.
Run the one-week audit, pick the closest plan, and reallocate as your priorities shift. Most owners start at 20 hours a week.