Telephone Answering Service Costs UK (2026)

Most answering services would rather you asked for a quote than read a price. Moneypenny and alldayPA, the two biggest names in the UK market, publish no rates at all. That makes “how much does it cost” a harder question than it should be, so we went through every UK provider we could find that does publish a price, and did the employment arithmetic for the alternative most small businesses are actually weighing: a person on the desk.

Everything below is a published figure with a source at the bottom of the page. Where a provider doesn’t say whether VAT is included, assume it isn’t.

What do UK call answering services charge per call?

There are three pricing models in the market and most providers use a mix.

ReceptionHQ’s own survey of the market, updated in February 2026, puts the typical range at £0.99 to £2.50 per call or £0.80 to £1.85 per minute, with base subscriptions of £15 to £55 a month. That matches what the published pages above show. It also lists the extras that don’t appear on the headline: £25 to £40 a month for evening and weekend cover, £35 to £75 for full 24/7, and £20 to £100 for setup or custom scripting. Treat those as a provider’s view of its competitors rather than an independent study, but nothing on the published price lists contradicts it.

Two things the table doesn’t show. First, most of these prices buy a message taken, not a call resolved: the operator writes down a name and number and you ring back. Booking an appointment or answering a question about your prices is usually a higher tier or not offered. Second, a per-call rate looks cheap until you multiply it. Three hundred calls a month at £2.20 is £660, before VAT.

What does an in-house receptionist cost?

More than the salary, and the salary has a legal floor that most published “average receptionist salary” figures now sit below.

From 1 April 2026 the National Living Wage is £12.71 an hour for anyone 21 or over. A full-time receptionist at 37.5 hours a week therefore costs at least:

£12.71 × 37.5 × 52           = £24,785  salary
15% × (£24,785 − £5,000)     =  £2,968  employer National Insurance
3% × (£24,785 − £6,240)      =    £556  minimum employer pension
                               £28,309  a year, or £2,359 a month

That is the floor, not a typical figure. Anyone with experience, or anywhere near London, costs more. Small employers can offset up to £10,500 of the NI bill through the Employment Allowance, which brings the minimum down to about £25,340 if you have no other staff absorbing it.

What it buys is 37.5 hours a week of cover during office hours, one call at a time, minus 28 days’ statutory holiday and whatever sickness there is. Nobody answers at 6pm, on a Saturday, or while the receptionist is already on the phone. Divided by the roughly 1,740 hours actually worked in a year, the floor cost is about £16 an hour of desk cover.

For most businesses under ten people the honest comparison isn’t receptionist versus service. It’s “nobody” versus service, because a full-time desk was never affordable. The receptionist figure is still worth knowing: it’s what the answering-service industry is priced against, and why £200 a month for a shared operator looks reasonable in a sales call.

How much does an AI answering service cost?

AI answering is priced differently because the cost of an extra call is close to zero. Providers either sell a block of minutes or charge a flat rate.

Prices exclude VAT. Ours are on the pricing page; we’ve stated them here so the comparison is complete, and so you can put them straight into the arithmetic below.

The structural difference is that AI services don’t charge for time of day. There is no out-of-hours rate because there is no out-of-hours shift, and there is no queue because the service takes several calls at once. What you’re checking when you compare AI providers is what happens on the call: whether it can book into your diary and answer from your own material, or whether it’s a message-taker with a synthetic voice.

What would a typical small business actually pay?

Take a business receiving 100 calls a month, averaging three minutes each, with 40 of those calls arriving outside 9 to 5. Here is the published price of each option.

At 300 calls a month the spread widens: £297 at The Answer Centre, £635 at Pocket Receptionist, £660 at answer.co.uk, about £850 at Paperclip, against £89 on Maeby’s Pro plan or still £99 at Hey Jodie.

The cheapest human option and the AI options end up in the same £40 to £100 band at low volume. The difference is what the money buys. A 99p message is a slower voicemail with a polite voice: the caller still hasn’t got what they rang for, and you still have the callback to make. That’s the comparison to run before the price one. We set out what a missed call costs in a separate post; the short version is that for most businesses the cost of the service is small next to the value of the calls it saves, whichever service it is.

What to check before you sign

1. What is a “call”? Some providers count every ring, including sales calls and wrong numbers. Face for Business explicitly doesn’t charge for nuisance calls; most don’t say.
2. What are the hours? If the plan covers 8am to 8pm, the calls that arrive at 8.15pm are still going to voicemail, and those are the ones you were paying to catch.
3. What happens on the call? Message only, or bookings and questions? The price gap between the two is often larger than the gap between providers.
4. Is there a minimum term or a setup fee? Most of the providers above say no contract; Paperclip charges £99 setup and answer.co.uk asks for £25 of credit up front.
5. Is the quote ex VAT? Almost always. Add 20%.

If you’d like to see what an AI answering service does with a real call before comparing prices, you can test one free in your browser without a phone number or a card.