If you have ever priced up hiring someone for your front desk, you have probably done the sum the same way everyone does: find a salary figure, compare it with what you are spending now, decide.
That sum is almost always wrong, and it is wrong in a predictable direction. In the UK the advertised salary is the floor of what employing someone costs, not the total. Employer's National Insurance, the pension minimum, 5.6 weeks of statutory holiday and the cost of finding the person all sit on top of it, and none of them appear in the job advert.
Every figure below is sourced and dated, because salary content is full of numbers with no provenance.
The short answer. A UK receptionist is currently advertised at about £25,578 a year. Add employer's National Insurance and the auto-enrolment pension minimum and the true cost of employment is nearer £29,200 a year — roughly £2,440 a month — before recruitment, holiday cover, sick pay and turnover. And that buys about 40 of the 168 hours in a week. The sourced arithmetic is below.
What the reported data says
The two most-quoted UK sources disagree with each other, which is itself worth knowing before you budget off either of them.
| Source | Figure | Sample | Updated |
|---|---|---|---|
| Indeed UK | £25,578 per year | 11.7k salaries from job postings (past 36 months) | 10 August 2026 |
| National Careers Service | £18,000 starter to £22,000 experienced | not stated | 2026 |
| National Living Wage (statutory floor) | £12.71 per hour, aged 21 and over | statutory | from 1 April 2026 |
The gap has an explanation, and it matters. Indeed's figure is what employers are advertising right now; the National Careers Service profile is a standing occupational guide that has not kept pace with the wage floor. Since 1 April 2026 the National Living Wage has been £12.71 an hour for anyone aged 21 or over — which on the 38 to 40 hours a week that same profile lists is roughly £25,100 to £26,400 a year. In other words, a full-time receptionist advertised at £22,000 would now be paid below the legal minimum.
So take the Indeed figure as the live market rate, treat the lower guide range as historic, and note that in practice the statutory floor and the market rate have converged: there is very little room left underneath.
One thing worth being careful about. That figure is for a full-time receptionist. It is common to see it quoted as though it were the cost of part-time help, which roughly doubles the apparent cost of a part-timer and makes any comparison against it meaningless. If you are pricing half-day cover, halve it — do not start from the full-time average.
The role and the postcode change the number
This is the part most salary articles skip, and it is the part that matters if you are running a practice rather than a shopfront.
| Role (Indeed UK) | Reported pay | Sample | Updated |
|---|---|---|---|
| Receptionist (UK average) | £25,578 per year | 11.7k salaries | 10 August 2026 |
| Medical receptionist (UK) | £13.35 per hour | 1.7k salaries | 10 August 2026 |
| Receptionist, London | £29,798 per year | 2,000 salaries | 9 August 2026 |
Two things stand out.
Location moves the number more than the role does. Indeed puts London at 16% above the national average — about £4,200 a year of difference for the same job title.
Medical receptionists are barely paid a premium, and that is a problem. The general average of £25,578 works out at roughly £13.12 an hour on a 37.5-hour week; Indeed's medical receptionist figure is £13.35. That is a premium of under 2% for a role that involves NHS referrals, repeat prescriptions, insurers, patient confidentiality obligations under UK GDPR, and a diary where a double-booking has real consequences. If you are recruiting for a practice front desk, budgeting at the market rate is how you end up re-recruiting in six months — the job is harder than the pay band suggests.
Note the sample sizes. The general figure rests on 11,700 advertised salaries; the medical one on 1,700. Treat the first as solid and the second as directional.
What the salary does not include
Here is where the sum goes wrong. Employing someone in the UK costs the salary plus:
- Employer's National Insurance. For 2026/27 employers pay 15% on earnings above the secondary threshold of £96 a week (£5,000 a year) — see the gov.uk rates and categories. This is the single largest line on this list.
- …minus the Employment Allowance. Eligible employers can knock up to £10,500 off their annual employer NI bill (gov.uk). For a small practice with one or two people on payroll this can wipe the NI line out entirely, so check your eligibility before you budget — it changes the arithmetic more than anything else here.
- Pension auto-enrolment. The employer minimum is 3%, with a total minimum of 8%, calculated on qualifying earnings between £6,240 and £50,270 a year (gov.uk).
- Holiday. Almost all workers are entitled to 5.6 weeks of paid leave — 28 days on a five-day week (gov.uk). The pay for those days is already inside the salary. What is extra is cover — or accepting that the desk is unstaffed for five and a half weeks a year.
- Sick pay. Statutory Sick Pay is up to £123.25 a week for up to 28 weeks (gov.uk), and it comes with the same cover problem.
- Recruitment. The CIPD's Resourcing and Talent Planning Report 2024 puts the median UK cost per hire at £1,500 for employees (£2,000 for senior managers and directors), covering advertising, agency fees and in-house resourcing time.
- Onboarding. Weeks before someone is useful on your systems, your referral routes, your regulars.
- Equipment. A desk, a computer, a phone, a chair.
- Turnover. Front-desk roles turn over often. Every departure means paying the recruitment and onboarding cost again, and running short in between.
The real number, added up
Take the Indeed average of £25,578 and add only the two statutory on-costs that apply to essentially every employer. This is straightforward arithmetic on the sourced figures above, shown so you can redo it with your own salary.
| Line | Per year |
|---|---|
| Advertised salary (Indeed UK, 10 Aug 2026) | £25,578 |
| Employer's NI — 15% of (£25,578 − £5,000) | £3,087 |
| Pension — 3% of (£25,578 − £6,240) | £580 |
| Cost of employment | £29,245 (≈ £2,437 a month) |
That is £3,667 a year — about 14% — that never appears in the advert, and it is before recruitment, holiday cover, sick pay, a desk and a computer.
Two honest caveats, both of which cut the other way. If you qualify for the Employment Allowance, the NI line can fall to zero and the total comes back to about £26,158 — so a small single-site business may well be nearer that. And if you already offer more than the statutory pension minimum, more than 28 days' holiday, or any benefits at all, the real figure is higher than £29,245, not lower. The point is not the exact number; it is that the advert is never it.
The number nobody costs: hours
A full-time receptionist covers about 40 of the 168 hours in a week. Under a quarter. Take out the 28 days of statutory holiday and it is less again.
For some businesses that is completely fine — if your customers only ever contact you between nine and five, the other 128 hours are not costing you anything. But if you run a practice where patients ring in the evening because that is when the child's temperature went up, or a salon where people book on a Sunday, or a trade where the job goes to whoever answers first, the uncovered time is not a rounding error. It is most of the week.
This is worth pricing separately from the salary, because no salary fixes it. Two part-timers do not fix it either. It is a structural feature of employing a human being, and the honest options are: accept it, pay for out-of-hours cover, use an answering service, or automate the phone.
So what should you actually do?
Genuinely depends, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
Hire someone if your front desk work is mostly in person — walk-ins, a waiting room, physical admin, relationships with regulars. Software does not do any of that well, and a good receptionist is worth considerably more than they cost.
Hire part-time if your call volume is real but concentrated, and you can live with the phone being unattended the rest of the time.
Use an answering service or an AI receptionist if the problem is specifically the phone — calls going unanswered, out-of-hours enquiries dying in voicemail, no capacity to hold a caller while you are with someone else. This is the narrow case where the automated option genuinely wins, because it is priced against the hours a person cannot work rather than against the person.
For scale: Remi starts at £89 a month, and Standard is £149 — about £1,788 a year, or roughly 6% of the £29,245 above — and it answers at ten at night and on a bank holiday. It also cannot greet anyone in your waiting room, which is exactly why this is a comparison and not a replacement.
If you are pricing that option, here is what an AI receptionist actually costs in the UK.
Do a combination, which in practice is what most businesses land on: keep the human for the front of house, and put something on the phone so the human is not interrupted every four minutes.
The point of this post is not that hiring is a mistake. It is that "£25,000 a year" is not what a receptionist costs, and comparing anything against that number will lead you to the wrong answer.
Salary figures in this post are the reported market averages published by Indeed UK and the National Careers Service on the dates shown, and they will move. Statutory rates and thresholds are those published on GOV.UK for the 2026/27 tax year — check them directly rather than relying on any summary, including this one, and take advice on your own payroll position.