When a small business finally admits the phone needs answering, the first instinct is to price up a receptionist. It seems like the obvious fix. Then the numbers arrive.

Here's the real arithmetic, at April 2026 rates, including the bits that count in favour of hiring — because most articles on this subject are written by software companies and quietly skip those.

What a part-time receptionist actually costs

Say 20 hours a week, at the National Living Wage. From April 2026 that's £12.71 an hour for anyone 21 or over.

  • Wages: 20 hours × £12.71 × 52 weeks = £13,218 a year, about £1,102 a month.
  • Pension: auto-enrolment means 3% employer contribution on qualifying earnings — roughly £209 a year.
  • Employer's National Insurance: 15% on earnings above the £5,000 secondary threshold, which would be about £1,233 a year — but probably £0 for you, and this is the bit nobody mentions.

The Employment Allowance is £10,500, and it offsets employer's NI. If this receptionist is your only employee, or you have a small team, that allowance almost certainly swallows the NI bill entirely. So the honest number is around £13,400 a year — roughly £1,120 a month, not the inflated figure you'll see quoted elsewhere.

Holiday pay is another one people double-count. If you're paying 20 hours a week across all 52 weeks, their statutory holiday is already inside that number. It's not an extra line.

We could pad this section. The real cost is bad enough without it.

The number that actually matters isn't the salary

£1,120 a month is a lot. But it's not the problem.

The problem is that 20 hours is 12% of a week. There are 168 hours in seven days. Your receptionist covers twenty of them.

So for £13,400 a year, your phone is answered by a person for one hour in eight, and rings out for the other seven. Evenings — when a domestic customer finally sits down and rings about the extension — nobody. Saturday, when the enquiries actually come — nobody. Sunday — nobody. Their lunch hour, their two weeks in Spain, the Tuesday they're off with a sick child — nobody, unless you cover it yourself, which is what you were trying to stop doing.

Work it per covered hour and it's about £12.91 for every hour your phone is genuinely staffed. That's not bad value for what it is. It's just that "what it is" is 12% of the problem.

To get real coverage — evenings, weekends, holidays, sickness — you don't need a receptionist. You need three or four, or a rota. Now you're into five figures a quarter, and you're managing a team.

The costs that aren't on the payslip

Recruitment takes your time. Training takes your time — and again in eight months when they leave, because reception roles turn over. Someone has to manage them, and that someone is you. There's a desk, a phone, a computer. There's the awkward month where they're not working out.

None of that appears in the £13,400 and all of it is real.

What an AI receptionist costs

RingSorted is £39 a month for 30 answered calls, then 49p per extra call. Plus is £69 for 100 calls, then 39p. Unlimited is £99 with no per-call charge. All plus VAT.

£39 a month is £468 a year. Against £13,400, that's about a twenty-ninth of the cost — and it answers 100% of the hours rather than 12%. There's no recruitment, no notice period, no pension, no NI, no rota, and no Tuesday when it's off sick.

One more thing worth understanding, because it's where traditional answering services catch people out: RingSorted bills per answered call, not per minute. Per-minute billing — common across the human answering market at roughly 30p to £1.20 a minute — means the meter runs while your customer explains their problem. The call where someone describes the job properly, the one you can actually quote from, is the most expensive of your month. Per call, a call is a call.

Where a receptionist genuinely wins

Now the honest half, because "software is 29× cheaper" isn't the whole story and you'd be right to be suspicious of an article that stopped there.

A receptionist does a job. Software answers a phone. Those aren't the same thing.

Your receptionist also greets people at the door, chases invoices, books your engineers, handles the post, calms down the customer who's turned up angry, and knows that Mrs Patterson always rings on Fridays and just wants reassurance. They make judgement calls. They notice things. Over a year they learn your business in a way no configuration screen captures.

If you need that — a person doing a role, not a phone being answered — then £13,400 is the price of it, and an AI receptionist is not a substitute. Buy the person.

The comparison is only fair when the job genuinely is "answer the phone, find out what they want, tell me". For a huge number of small businesses that's exactly the job, which is why the maths lands where it does.

What RingSorted isn't

Plainly, since we're doing honest numbers.

RingSorted is software. There's no team of ours behind it. On Plus and Unlimited, when a caller needs a person, it transfers them straight through to a number you choose — your mobile, whoever's on call. That's a transfer to you, not to our staff. On Lite there's no transfer at all: every call becomes a message. And it won't pretend to be human if a caller asks.

If you want a genuinely staffed team answering as your business — the thing that is a receptionist, without the recruitment — that's TNS365, the company that built RingSorted. Different service, different price. We'd rather tell you it exists than sell you software as a substitute for a person.

The decision

Ask what you're actually buying.

If you're buying a colleague — someone who does a dozen jobs, one of which is the phone — hire one, and pay properly for it.

If you're buying "my phone gets answered", you're about to spend £13,400 a year to solve 12% of that, and there's a £468 option that solves all of it.

Hear it before you decide: ring 0330 9123 365, our own line, answered by RingSorted. Then start a free trial and see what a month of your calls actually looks like.