If you are taking more than a handful of calls a day, can commit to steady hours, and there is other admin work to justify the role — quoting, invoicing, ordering materials, scheduling the crew — hiring is a genuine option. But it costs more than the wage suggests once KiwiSaver, ACC, leave and recruitment are counted. If your call volume is lower, seasonal, or you mainly need after-hours and overflow cover, outsourcing gets the phone answered without the fixed cost of a role. There is no universally right answer. It comes down to volume, budget, and how much of the job is genuinely more than answering the phone.
What does hiring a receptionist actually cost, beyond the wage?
The wage is the smallest part of the number.
A receptionist in New Zealand earns an average of roughly $50,000 a year; a broader office administrator role sits nearer $59,000 to $69,000, depending which source you use. On top of gross salary you must pay at least 3.5% into KiwiSaver from 1 April 2026, and an ACC Work Levy set by your business’s industry classification.
That classification point is worth checking with your accountant rather than guessing. Levies vary considerably by industry, and a trade business’s classification does not necessarily produce the same rate for an office role as a pure office business would pay. Broadly, mandatory on-costs add somewhere between 6% and 12% on top of gross salary, and toward the lower end for straightforwardly office-based work — but those are published estimates from payroll providers, not an official statistical release.
Then there is leave. Four weeks annual leave plus ten days sick leave is close to seven weeks of paid absence a year, during which someone still has to answer your phone. That is the cost most people leave out of the calculation, and it often lands hardest over summer, when half the country is also trying to get a job done before Christmas. When your one office person is away, the phone does not answer itself. It either comes back to you between jobs, gets picked up badly by whoever is nearest, or goes to voicemail — the exact outcome hiring was meant to fix.
And if you recruit through an agency rather than hiring direct, budget 15% to 20% of the first year’s salary in fees.
Before any of that, there is the time hiring itself takes. Writing the ad, screening CVs, interviewing, checking references — easily a week or two of hours pulled from a business owner already stretched. Notice periods at a previous job commonly run four weeks, so the gap between deciding to hire and having someone answering calls is rarely short. And once they start, there is a genuine ramp-up: learning your pricing, your regular customers, which supplier to call for what, before they can be trusted to promise a customer a callback time without checking with you first. Weeks of training, not a day of induction, and none of it shows up in an hourly rate.
A worked example. A part-time hire at 25 hours a week on $28 an hour is roughly $36,400 in wages, plus $2,000 to $4,000 in on-costs, before any recruitment fee. Call it around $40,000 minimum for a role that still leaves your phones uncovered on sick days and annual leave, and takes weeks to get up to speed on your pricing and your customers.
None of that makes hiring wrong. It makes it a bigger decision than the hourly rate suggests — and one worth checking against your accountant before you commit, since the actual employment obligations (leave entitlements, minimum wage, tax and KiwiSaver settings) are their territory, not ours.
Why does a receptionist feel idle one week and swamped the next?
Enquiries do not arrive on a roster. A part-time receptionist working, say, nine to two on weekdays is paid for those hours whether the phone rings twice or twenty times. Some weeks it will look like the easiest wage in the business — a quiet stretch, a few calls, plenty of time for filing. Other weeks the phone will not stop between nine and eleven, calls will overlap, and the caller who rang last will hear it ring out because there is only one of her and only one line she can hold at a time.
That is the utilisation problem, and it is nobody’s fault. It is what happens when you staff a job to an average and demand comes in bursts — after a storm, after a marketing push, on the Monday after a long weekend when everyone who put off calling a tradie finally picks up the phone. A single employee cannot flex to meet a spike without sitting idle the rest of the time. And once she is off the clock, or on leave, the gap is every enquiry outside her rostered hours, landing exactly where it did before you hired anyone.
None of this argues against hiring. It argues for being honest about what a fixed set of hours actually buys, weighed against options built to absorb the peaks without carrying the cost of the troughs.
The cost of outsourcing
An answering service runs from roughly $43 to $400 a month depending on the model — our cost breakdown has the real published New Zealand figures, including options cheaper than ours.
A managed front desk that captures, qualifies, books and follows up — rather than taking a message — starts from $497 a month plus setup, in New Zealand dollars excluding GST, with our Starter plan, in New Zealand dollars, scaling to $1,200 and $2,000 a month at the higher tiers. What’s included at each tier sets out exactly what is being run for you at that price, so you are not comparing a headline number against a role with an open-ended job description.
None of these carry KiwiSaver, ACC, recruitment fees, or a coverage gap when someone is on leave. The trade-off is real though: you are not building an in-house relationship with a dedicated person who learns your business, your regulars, and the way you like things done. If you are also weighing a straight AI receptionist app against a person-staffed answering service, the honest comparison covers that ground on its own — it is a different question to hiring versus outsourcing, but it usually comes up at the same time.
The middle paths, and where each one breaks down
Hiring and a fully managed front desk are the two ends of the range. Most trade businesses try something in between first, and each has a genuine strength and a predictable failure mode.
A partner or family member answering the phone. Free, personal, and customers often like it — they are speaking to someone who clearly knows the business, not a stranger reading a script. It works well for a long time in plenty of trade businesses. Where it breaks down is quiet and gradual: the phone starts ringing at the dinner table, a holiday gets interrupted for a quote, and the goodwill that made it work in year one is not the same by year three. There is no backup when they are busy or unwell, and no real way to hold anyone accountable for a missed call — it is family, not staff.
A virtual assistant based overseas. Genuinely cost-effective, and a step up from nothing. The catch is fit: time zones do not always line up with a New Zealand working day, and trade terminology takes real time to learn — a caller can tell within thirty seconds whether the person on the other end understands what they are describing. Good for admin that is not time-critical, harder for the moment a customer needs someone who sounds like they know the trade.
A call-centre answering service. Covered above on cost, but worth separating from a dedicated person for one reason: you are usually reaching whoever is rostered on, working from a general script rather than deep knowledge of your business. Fine for capturing a message. A limitation the moment a caller wants a real answer rather than a callback promise.
A managed front desk. Built to close the gap between “message taken” and “job booked” without asking you to hire anyone — capture, qualify against your own rules, book, and follow up, run as one process. Costs more than voicemail and less than a hire once on-costs are counted, and what’s included sets out exactly what that buys at each tier.
Who answers the phone at 9pm?
A burst pipe or an electrical fault does not wait for business hours, and whoever answers first usually gets the job.
An employee does not answer after knock-off. Unless you are paying someone an on-call rate to carry a phone at night — rare for a part-time office hire, and a question for your accountant if you are weighing it — a hire covers the hours they are rostered and nothing outside them. A family member might pick up out of habit for a while, but that is exactly the arrangement that wears thin fastest, since evenings and weekends are when the resentment builds. An overseas VA can sometimes land in a timezone that covers a New Zealand evening, but that is a coincidence to check for, not assume. A call-centre answering service is usually where after-hours cover is genuinely built in, though frequently priced as an add-on, so confirm it explicitly. A managed front desk is designed to run through the evening without anyone being asked to be on call: the 9pm enquiry gets the same qualifying questions and the same fast reply as the one at 9am.
If after-hours enquiries are a meaningful share of your work — burst pipes, lockouts, storm damage — this single question often decides the whole comparison, because it is the one gap hiring alone cannot close.
The cost of doing nothing
There is a fourth option plenty of trade businesses default into without deciding to: nothing changes, and calls arriving while you are on the tools go to voicemail or ring out.
It never appears as a monthly bill, so it feels free. It is not. Every unanswered call either waits for you to ring back or goes to whoever answered first. We are not going to attach a dollar figure to that, because no reliable New Zealand figure exists and the ones circulating online do not trace to anything. But you can work out your own: how many did you miss last week, and what is an average job worth to you?
Comparing the options
| Option | Typical annual cost | Best fit | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Do nothing | No direct cost | Low volume, no growth plans | Work going to whoever picks up |
| Family answering | No direct cost | Very early stage, low volume | Wears thin over evenings, no backup |
| Hire part-time | ~$40,000+ | Steady volume plus other admin work | Recruitment, no leave cover, ramp-up time |
| Overseas VA | Varies widely | Non-urgent admin, inbox and scheduling | Timezone gaps, trade knowledge takes time |
| Answering service | ~$500–$4,800 | Overflow, after-hours, message-taking | May only take a message, not book |
| Managed front desk | From ~$6,000 plus setup | Want capture through to follow-up run for you | Not worth it at very low volume |
When hiring is genuinely the right call
Be honest about this one. If you already need someone in the office handling quotes, invoices, supplier orders and scheduling — and answering the phone is one part of a bigger role — a hire earns their keep doing all of it, not just the calls. The same holds once you are big enough that a dedicated person builds real relationships with your regulars, or when you simply want someone physically in the office. At that scale a hire does more than any outsourced service can, and it is the right answer.
There are also things a person does that no phone-answering option, however good, was ever built to do. Someone in the office greets a customer who walks in to drop off a deposit or pick up a part. Someone signs for a delivery, chases a supplier who is running late, and notices — without being told — that a regular customer has not rung in a while and might be worth a call. If a chunk of your enquiries genuinely arrive in person rather than by phone, that is a strong point in favour of hiring, because it is not a gap any answering service or managed front desk is designed to fill.
When outsourcing is genuinely the right call
If your call volume is variable or seasonal, if you want fewer interruptions while you are on the tools, or if you need consistent after-hours cover without hiring shift workers to replicate it, outsourcing wins on flexibility. You are not carrying a wage bill through a quiet month, and you are not exposed when someone is away — and unlike a fixed set of rostered hours, it is built to answer a busy week fully rather than leave the fourth caller on hold.
A quick decision check
Four questions:
- Is there enough non-phone admin work to justify a role on its own?
- Can you commit to steady hours and a consistent wage bill even in a quiet month?
- Do you need someone physically present, or just the phone answered properly?
- Does a meaningful share of your work come in after hours, when an employee’s rostered shift has already ended?
Two or three yeses toward the first three point toward hiring. Mostly noes, or a yes to the fourth, point toward outsourcing. If you are still unsure, whether you need an answering service at all is the question worth answering first, and the guide to handling trade enquiries covers what the job actually involves either way. If you want an outside look at your actual call volume before spending anything, a free front desk audit reviews your calls, forms and quote follow-up and shows you where jobs may already be slipping through — no obligation either way.