Hiring an office manager: what it costs, and what the week is spent on

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.

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 (5 of 12)

• Prepare payroll inputs and hand them to the bookkeeper or accountant monthly

  Hours, changes and absences into a fixed format.

• Keep holiday, sickness and HR records up to date weekly

  Data entry against a policy with clear thresholds.

• Keep health and safety records, fire checks and risk assessments current monthly

  A checklist on a schedule.

• Reconcile expenses and the company card statement monthly

  Match receipt to line, flag the ones that do not match.

• Produce the weekly numbers pack for the directors weekly

  Same sources, same layout, every week.

Needs a person (7 of 12)

• Run the office budget and approve routine spend monthly

  Deciding what is worth buying is a judgement about priorities.

• Manage supplier contracts for phones, broadband, cleaning and insurance monthly

  Negotiating and deciding when to switch is not rules-based.

• Line manage the admin and reception team weekly

  People management cannot be handed to a system.

• Run recruitment and induction for new staff monthly

  Shortlisting and choosing people is judgement.

• Own GDPR, insurance renewals and compliance deadlines monthly

  Knowing which obligations actually apply to this business.

• Solve whatever nobody else owns, from a dead printer to a difficult landlord weekly

  Undefined problems are the definition of judgement work.

• Plan the office move, refit or desk layout monthly

  Occasional, high stakes, and full of trade-offs.

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:

1. 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.

2. 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 accountancy , legal , lettings and property , recruitment , private clinics and cleaning and facilities , and the admin around it looks different in each.

A note on the pay figure #

£38,630 is the median for full time employees in SOC 4141, Office managers, from the ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, 2025 (provisional). ONS publishes a coefficient of variation with every figure, and this one is 3.4 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.