Personal Assistants: Buying Back Time

The Million Dollar Question: A top personal assistant to an ultra-high-net-worth principal in a major U.S. city can earn a base salary of roughly:
A) $45,000 B) $80,000 C) $150,000–$250,000 D) $1 million+

Read on for the answer.

Of all the things money can buy, the one the wealthy talk about wanting most is time — and a personal assistant is the most direct way to buy it. Not a thing, not an experience, but hours: the calls you don’t have to make, the errands you don’t have to run, the small decisions that no longer reach your desk. This piece is about that trade — what a personal assistant actually does, who hires one and at what point, what it costs, and why, strangely, even people who can plainly afford to buy their time back so often don’t.

What it is

A personal assistant is one trusted person whose job is to absorb the logistics of someone else’s life so that person can spend their attention elsewhere. At its simplest, the role is leverage: it takes the hundred small tasks that fill a week — scheduling, travel, bills, errands, correspondence, the dentist, the dry cleaning, the car service — and moves them off one person’s plate and onto another’s.

It helps to separate the personal assistant from the roles it gets confused with. An executive assistant supports someone in a work context — managing a calendar, screening email, coordinating meetings and travel for a busy professional. A personal assistant does the same kind of work but for the principal’s whole life, the personal side as much as the professional, and often both at once. A household manager or estate manager runs a property and the staff inside it; a chief of staff sits above everything, running the principal’s entire personal enterprise and the people who run its pieces. The lines blur constantly, and at smaller scale one person wears several of these hats. But the defining feature of a personal assistant is intimacy of scope: this is the person who knows your schedule, your preferences, your family, and your passwords, and who is trusted to act on your behalf without being asked twice.

That trust is the whole product. A personal assistant who has to be supervised closely is not saving anyone time. The good ones operate with judgment — anticipating, deciding, and only escalating what genuinely needs the principal’s input. What you are buying is not a pair of hands. It is a second brain pointed at your daily life.

Who uses it

Whether someone hires a personal assistant tracks wealth, but it tracks the shape of a life even more closely. The real trigger is the combination of money and time pressure: enough money to pay for help, and a life busy or complex enough that the help pays for itself.

$1M–$5M households rarely have a dedicated personal assistant. At this level the math is hard to justify — a full-time salaried assistant can cost as much as a second mortgage, and most people here are still doing their own logistics or leaning on a spouse, a part-time bookkeeper, or app-based services. The exception is the time-poor professional — a founder, a surgeon, a partner at a firm — who may share an assistant or use one a few hours a week.

$5M–$30M households are where a personal assistant starts to make real sense, often part-time or shared at first, then full-time as the demands grow. By this point there is frequently a business to run alongside a household, travel that needs managing, and a calendar that has become a job in itself. The assistant absorbs it.

$30M–$100M households typically have a dedicated, full-time personal assistant, and often more than one role: a personal assistant for the principal’s life, plus a household manager or estate staff for the homes. The assistant here is a genuine professional with years of experience, frequently sourced through a private staffing agency.

$100M+ and $1B+ households run support as a team. There may be several assistants covering different principals or shifts, a chief of staff coordinating them, and a clear line into the family office. At this level the principal’s time is treated as the scarcest resource in the operation, and an entire small staff exists to protect it.

The pattern is the one that runs through life at every wealth level: the dollar figure sets what’s possible, but it’s the texture of the life — how many obligations, how much travel, how little margin — that decides what actually gets hired. Plenty of people worth $20 million have no assistant, and plenty of time-starved executives worth far less wish they did.

Why they use it

The honest reason is not status. It is that, past a certain level of demand, managing your own life becomes a part-time job, and for a high earner that is the worst possible use of their hours.

Time is the first and most obvious reason, and it is more than a convenience. A 2017 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that people who spend money on time-saving services report greater life satisfaction — and that the happiness boost from buying time rivaled the effect of having substantially more income. A personal assistant is the most concentrated form of that purchase: instead of buying back an hour here and there, you hire someone whose entire job is to give you hours back, every day.

Attention is the subtler reason. The cost of a busy life is not only the time the small tasks consume but the mental space they occupy — the low hum of open loops, the things you keep meaning to handle. A good assistant closes those loops, and what the principal gets back is not just hours but focus: the ability to think about one important thing without forty trivial ones nagging underneath.

Continuity matters as the operation grows. The assistant becomes the institutional memory of a life — which airline the principal prefers, which hotel room, which restaurant table, which relationships need tending and when. That accumulated knowledge is precisely why turnover in the role is so costly, and why principals will pay to keep a good assistant for years.

Access and gatekeeping round it out. The assistant is the filter — the person who decides what reaches the principal and what gets handled before it ever does. For someone whose time is in constant demand, the value of a trusted gatekeeper is hard to overstate.

How it works

In practice the job is wide and a little undefinable, which is exactly the point — the assistant handles whatever needs handling. But the work clusters into a few recognizable areas.

Calendar and communications. The core of the role is the schedule and the inbox: booking and rearranging appointments, managing email, fielding calls, and protecting blocks of the principal’s time. This is the gatekeeping function, and it is where a sharp assistant earns their salary daily by deciding what is worth the boss’s attention.

Travel and logistics. For anyone who moves frequently, travel is a constant project — flights, cars, hotels, restaurant bookings, itineraries that change at the last minute. The assistant owns it end to end, including the contingency plans when a connection falls through at 11 p.m.

Errands, bills, and household admin. The unglamorous backbone of the job: paying personal bills, coordinating deliveries, returning purchases, managing subscriptions and renewals, liaising with the people who fix the things that break. At higher wealth levels this overlaps with household and estate staff, and the assistant becomes the coordination point among them.

Trust and discretion. Because the role touches everything — finances, family, schedule, private life — it runs on confidentiality. Placements at higher wealth levels are made under signed non-disclosure agreements, and the staffing process is slower precisely because vetting and discretion matter so much. Principals are not just hiring for competence; they are hiring for someone they can trust inside the walls of their life.

Boundaries. The flip side of an undefinable job is that it has no natural stopping point. The work bleeds into evenings, weekends, and vacations, especially when the principal travels, and the line between “personal assistant” and “always on call” has to be drawn deliberately or it disappears. The arrangements that last are the ones where expectations, hours, and reachability are set explicitly at the start — because a role defined as “handle whatever comes up” will otherwise expand to fill every hour there is. Burnout and turnover in the job usually trace back to boundaries that were never agreed, not to the tasks themselves.

Sourcing. Generalists are found through ordinary job boards. Experienced private assistants are typically placed through specialist staffing agencies — firms such as Career Group, Tiger Recruitment, Morgan & Mallet, and Mahler Private Staffing — that maintain vetted candidate pools and handle the matching, reference-checking, and confidentiality that private households require. The agency takes a placement fee, usually a percentage of the first-year salary.

What it costs

The price of a personal assistant spans a wide range, because “personal assistant” covers everything from an entry-level generalist to a seasoned operator running a principal’s entire life. The ladder looks roughly like this.

At the base, the broad occupational floor is set by ordinary administrative work. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics put the median wage for secretaries and administrative assistants at $47,460 in May 2024, with the top 10 percent earning more than $76,550. A general personal assistant for a busy household or small business tends to land in roughly the $50,000–$75,000 range, depending on city and experience.

In the middle, an experienced personal or executive assistant supporting a high-net-worth principal earns more. Listings and salary trackers for high-net-worth executive assistant roles cluster around the mid-$60,000s on average, with experienced professionals in major markets reaching into six figures once the role carries real responsibility and long hours.

At the top, the numbers become genuine executive salaries. Personal assistants to ultra-high-net-worth principals and to public figures in expensive cities can command base salaries from roughly $150,000 up toward $250,000, and the staffing firm Morgan & Mallet reports packages for the most demanding UHNW personal assistant roles reaching about $300,000. In Los Angeles, a celebrity or billionaire principal will often start a serious personal assistant near $150,000.

On top of base pay, the full package at higher wealth levels frequently includes a year-end bonus, full benefits, and sometimes a housing or vehicle allowance, plus paid travel when the assistant is on the road with the principal. Use the bracket shorthand for where each tier sits: a $1M–$5M household that hires at all is buying near the floor; a $30M–$100M household is paying solidly into six figures; and only at $100M+ does the $250,000–$300,000 top of the market become routine.

Hidden costs and tradeoffs

The salary is the visible cost. The rest of the bill is easy to miss.

You become an employer. Hiring a personal assistant onto your household payroll makes you a household employer, with all the obligations that implies. In the U.S., once you pay a household worker more than $2,800 in 2025, you owe the “nanny tax” — Social Security and Medicare contributions reported on IRS Schedule H, where the combined FICA rate is 15.3 percent of wages, split between employer and employee. Most states also require workers’ compensation coverage. None of this is optional, and getting it wrong is how a simple hire turns into a tax problem.

Management is a real job. An assistant has to be hired, trained, directed, reviewed, and occasionally let go. The principal who hires someone to save time then spends time managing them — and the better the delegation, the more deliberately that relationship has to be built. People who treat the role as set-and-forget tend to get poor results and then conclude, wrongly, that assistants don’t help.

Turnover is expensive. Because so much of the value is accumulated knowledge and trust, losing a good assistant resets the clock. Replacing one means another search, another vetting process, another six months before the new person knows where everything is. The cost of churn is rarely counted but always paid.

Dependence and exposure. A personal assistant ends up knowing nearly everything — finances, family, schedule, weaknesses. That intimacy is the source of the value and also the source of the risk, which is why discretion, references, and NDAs matter so much. And there is a quieter dependence: principals who delegate their entire daily life can lose touch with how it actually runs, which becomes its own vulnerability if the assistant leaves.

What people get wrong

The biggest misconception is that having a personal assistant is mainly a status symbol — a marker of having arrived. For the people who use them well, it is the opposite of a flex; it is a practical tool, often kept quiet, whose entire purpose is leverage rather than display.

The second misconception is “I can do it faster myself.” This is the trap that keeps even wealthy people from buying their time back. The same research that found buying time makes people happier also found a striking reluctance to do it: in one survey, about half of 850 millionaires reported spending nothing at all to outsource tasks they dislike, and only a tiny fraction of working adults said they would use a small windfall in a way that saved them time. The constraint, in other words, is usually not money. People who can plainly afford help still resist handing off their own lives — out of habit, guilt, a sense that delegating personal tasks is indulgent, or simple discomfort with letting go.

The third thing people get wrong is underrating trust as the real bottleneck. Competence is relatively easy to find; a person you are comfortable giving the keys, the calendar, and the credit card is not. That is why placements take time, why principals keep good assistants for years, and why the relationship, when it works, looks less like employment and more like a long partnership. The skill that makes the trade pay off is not finding someone who can do the tasks — it is being willing to actually let them.

Bottom line

So, the Million Dollar Question: a top personal assistant to an ultra-high-net-worth principal in a major U.S. city earns a base salary of roughly C) $150,000–$250,000 — with the most demanding roles reaching around $300,000, even as the broad median for administrative assistants sits near $47,000. The range is enormous because the job runs from entry-level errand-running to managing a principal’s entire life.

A personal assistant is the cleanest example on this whole site of converting money into time, and the evidence says the trade genuinely makes people happier. Yet the most interesting fact about it is that even people who can easily afford the swap so often refuse to make it. The binding constraint is rarely the price. It’s the willingness to trust someone else with the small machinery of your own life