What the job costs #
Salary is the part everyone quotes and the smallest part of the decision. Here is the employment cost at the national median, using the rates in force for the 2026 to 2027 tax year.
£24,678
Median salary
ONS ASHE 2025 (provisional), SOC 4216
£28,183
Employment cost a year
Salary, employer NI and minimum pension
£16
Per hour worked
37.5 hour week, 46.4 working weeks
| Item | A year | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Median salary | £24,678 | ONS ASHE 2025 (provisional), SOC 4216 |
| Employer National Insurance | £2,952 | 15 per cent above £5,000 |
| Minimum workplace pension | £553 | 3 per cent of qualifying earnings |
| Employment cost | £28,183 | About £16 an hour on a 37.5 hour week |
Recruitment, equipment, software seats, training and cover for holiday and sickness all sit on top, and they vary too much between businesses to put a number on here.
If you want to run your own figures, the true cost of an employee tool does this with your salary, hours and on costs.
What the week is actually made of #
Here is the job as it usually runs in a business, split by whether the work follows a fixed pattern or needs a person to decide something. This split is our analysis, not a survey, and your version of the role will differ.
Runs to a pattern (7 of 12)
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Book, move and cancel patient appointments daily
Rules about slot type, clinician and duration.
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Register new patients and update their details daily
Structured data capture.
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Process repeat prescription requests daily
A defined workflow with clinical sign off.
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Take payments for private work and insurance forms weekly
A fixed price list and a payment flow.
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Run recall lists for reviews and vaccinations weekly
A query over the patient list.
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Liaise with hospitals, pharmacies and community teams daily
Known contacts, known formats.
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Prepare clinic lists and chase did not attends daily
A report and a follow up sequence.
Needs a person (5 of 12)
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Absorb the phone rush when the lines open daily
Volume, distress and triage at the same time.
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Care navigate patients to the right clinician or service daily
A clinical safety decision made by a non clinician.
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Scan and code incoming clinical correspondence daily
Coding a letter wrongly puts wrong data in a record.
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Deal with patients who are upset, unwell or aggressive at the desk daily
Purely human, and often the hardest part of the day.
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Hold the line on confidentiality and information governance daily
Judging what can be said to whom.
What to do before you advertise #
The question is not whether to hire. It is what the person will be doing on a Tuesday afternoon in March. Two things are worth doing first, and both take less effort than writing the advert:
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Count the week you are about to buy
Write down the jobs this role would pick up, how long each takes and how often it happens. The cost of admin time calculator adds it up and puts a cost on it.
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Separate the pattern from the judgement
If most of the hours sit in the first list above, a hire will absorb the pressure rather than remove it, and the same pressure returns when the business grows again.
Plenty of businesses do both: automate the repeated half, then hire someone to do the half that needs a person, often part time or at a level that keeps them interested. That is a better job than the one the advert usually describes.
Where this role usually sits #
This job turns up most often in private clinics and care , and the admin around it looks different in each.
A note on the pay figure #
£24,678 is the median for full time employees in SOC 4216, Receptionists, from the ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, 2025 (provisional). ONS publishes a coefficient of variation with every figure, and this one is 1.7 per cent, which ONS treats as reliable.
It is a national figure covering every employer size and region. What a specific business pays depends on where it is, how specialised the job is, and what else is on offer nearby.