What does it cost to outsource customer service in 2026?

Answering service or outsourced call center: two different products

If you want to outsource customer service in the UK, the prices online look reassuringly exact: £1.35 a call at ReceptionHQ, £2.20 a call at Answer (answer.co.uk). Neither is the price of an outsourced call center. Both are telephone answering services, which pick up the phone in your name and take a message.

In short: UK telephone answering services charge from 99p to £2.99 per call, or £1.15 to £1.75 per extra minute on the per-minute plans below, and mostly take a message. Outsourced agents who resolve the question are quoted per hour or per agent, and none of the more than 25 UK providers we checked publishes that rate. An in-house employee at the ONS median costs about £2,580 a month by our calculation, before holiday cover and recruitment.

Published prices fall into two products, and mixing them up is the quickest way to get a budget wrong.

The first is the telephone answering service, also sold as a call answering service or virtual receptionist. A receptionist answers, notes who called and why, and passes it on. Sometimes they transfer the call or book an appointment. You pay per call or per minute, usually with a monthly bundle, and nearly every provider publishes its prices.

The second is outsourced customer service: a contact center team that learns your products and policies and answers your customers' questions itself. You pay per hour, per handled contact or per full-time agent (FTE), and the rate comes in a quote rather than on a price list.

An organisation with real contact volume is usually shopping for the second product, while the first page of Google is full of prices for the first. A message taken is not a question answered. All provider prices were checked on their own pages on 1 October 2026.

How much does a telephone answering service cost in the UK?

These are the prices of six UK providers as shown on their own pages on 1 October 2026. Where a provider states it, prices exclude VAT. Pocket Receptionist, AnswerConnect and The Answer Centre don't say either way on the pages we read.

Answer, pay as you go: £2.20 plus VAT per call, with 'no fair usage policy or duration limits'. You buy credit in advance, at least £25.

The Answer Centre: pay as you go at 99p a call, with no setup fee.

ReceptionHQ: pay as you go at £16 a month plus £1.35 per call. The largest bundle, MyReceptionist 1000, is £1,015 a month for 1,000 calls, with extra calls at £1.25. All plus VAT, with no setup fee and a rolling monthly subscription.

Pocket Receptionist: the Starter plan is £75 a month with 30 calls included, then £2.99 per call. The largest plan, Enterprise, is £635 a month for 300 calls. Calls are answered from 8am to 8pm.

Posh: per-minute bundles from £50 a month, with additional minutes at £1.50. On the largest plan, £1,168 a month for 1,000 minutes, an additional minute costs £1.15. All prices exclude VAT, and plans run month to month.

AnswerConnect: the entry plan is £205 a month for 150 minutes, plus a £49.99 setup fee, with additional minutes at £1.75. Every interaction is 'rounded up to the nearest minute'.

Per call, the plans above run from 99p at The Answer Centre (pay as you go) to £2.99 for a call over Pocket Receptionist's Starter allowance. Inside ReceptionHQ's largest bundle a call works out at about £1.02 (our calculation: £1,015 for 1,000 calls). Extra minutes cost £1.15 to £1.75.

The catch is in how a call is counted. Answer charges the same for every call, however long it lasts. Per-minute providers round: AnswerConnect up to the next whole minute, and Moneypenny 'in 30 second increments', according to its terms. A call of 2 minutes 5 seconds is billed as 3 minutes at the first and 2.5 minutes at the second. Over a month of short calls that difference adds up, so ask how a call is counted before you compare per-minute prices.

And keep in mind what the price buys. With most of these plans a receptionist takes a message, and someone in your team still calls the customer back with the answer.

What does an outsourced call center cost per hour?

If you want agents who resolve your customers' questions themselves, the pricing model changes. Contact centers bill per hour of agent time, per handled contact or per full-time agent per month, often with a minimum volume.

None of the more than 25 UK providers we checked publishes that rate. Moneypenny doesn't publish a price list either. The hourly figures that circulate online come from blogs and offshore vendors rather than UK price lists, so we have left them out. We would rather give you no number than a wrong one.

That leaves a quote. To make it comparable with the figures in this article, ask for these in writing:

The price per handled contact, not only per hour, so it sits next to a per-call price.

What counts as billable time: talk time only, or also after-call work and waiting time between calls.

The minimum volume or minimum hours a month, and what you pay in a quiet month.

Setup and training, and who pays when agents need updating after a change to your prices or policies.

The hours covered, and the surcharge for evenings, weekends and bank holidays.

The minimum term and the notice period.

What an in-house employee costs in the UK

The other benchmark is your own team. According to the ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (April 2025, provisional, the latest release as of 1 October 2026), median full-time pay for call center and contact center staff (occupation code 7211) is £27,035 a year, or £14.36 an hour excluding overtime. For other customer service occupations (code 7219, 'customer service occupations not elsewhere classified') it is £27,848, or £14.48 an hour. The median for all full-time employees is £39,039.

On top of pay come the employer costs set by law. According to gov.uk, for 2026 to 2027 employer National Insurance is 15% on earnings above £5,000 a year, the minimum employer pension contribution is 3% of qualifying earnings between £6,240 and £50,270, and the National Living Wage for workers aged 21 and over has been £12.71 an hour since April 2026.

We calculated what that means at the ONS median for call center staff: £27,035 in pay, plus £3,305 employer National Insurance, plus £624 pension, comes to about £30,964 a year, or about £2,580 a month. That is our arithmetic on the sourced figures, not a published number.

Treat it as a floor. It leaves out holiday cover (gov.uk sets the entitlement at 5.6 weeks' paid holiday a year), recruitment, training, a manager's time, the phone system and the desk. Eligible employers can offset part of their National Insurance with the Employment Allowance, which gov.uk puts at £10,500 for 2026 to 2027.

Hidden costs in the contract

The price page is where the cost starts. The terms decide what you actually pay. Moneypenny's general terms and conditions (updated May 2026) spell this out more clearly than most:

Minimum term: 3 months on plans up to 150 minutes a month, 6 months on plans from 250 to 1,000 minutes, and 12 months from 1,500 minutes.

Notice: on plans from 250 minutes a month, '3 months from the date of the next invoice'.

Onboarding: the start date may include onboarding and setup, and charges apply 'regardless of whether the Customer has completed any required configuration or is actively using the Services'.

Hours: standard cover is 8:30am to 6pm, Monday to Friday. Evenings, weekends and 24/7 are separate subscriptions.

Unused minutes 'cannot be rolled over into subsequent months', and Moneypenny may raise its charges once a year.

Other providers have their own versions. AnswerConnect charges the £49.99 setup fee mentioned above. At ReceptionHQ unused monthly allowances expire too, although it includes 24/7 cover with no after-hours surcharge.

With outsourced agents, the costs no price list shows are mostly about knowledge. Agents need training before they start, and every change to your prices, opening hours or policies has to reach them. Ask who pays for that time, how quality is monitored and reported to you, and what leaving costs, including getting your knowledge and data back.

A worked example: 1,000 calls a month, compared per call

To put this side by side, take a fictional organisation and price the same workload each way. Our assumptions:

It receives 1,000 inbound calls a month, mostly during office hours.

Every call lasts 2 minutes 30 seconds. Real calls vary, which is exactly why rounding matters.

Prices are as published on 1 October 2026, excluding VAT (The Answer Centre's page doesn't say either way). Heyloha bills in euros. We have not converted its prices to pounds, because any exchange rate would be out of date by the time you read this.

Answer, pay as you go: 1,000 calls at £2.20 is £2,200 a month, so £2.20 per call. Call length makes no difference.

The Answer Centre, pay as you go: 1,000 calls at 99p is £990 a month, so 99p per call.

ReceptionHQ, MyReceptionist 1000: £1,015 a month for exactly 1,000 calls, about £1.02 per call. Every call over the bundle costs £1.25.

A per-minute service: here rounding decides the bill. Rounded up to the next whole minute, as AnswerConnect does, each call counts as 3 minutes, so you pay for 3,000 minutes against 2,500 minutes of actual talk. In 30-second steps, as in Moneypenny's terms, this example stays at 2,500 minutes, but a call of 2 minutes 31 seconds would already count as 3.

In-house: one full-time employee at the ONS median costs about £2,580 a month by our calculation, so about £2.58 per call at this volume. The phone is covered only while that person is at work, and holiday cover, recruitment and training come on top.

Outsourced agents: no UK provider publishes a rate, so this line stays empty until you have a quote. Ask for it per handled call and add it here.

Heyloha: call minutes count in whole minutes, rounded down, with a minimum of 1 credit per call. A call of 2 minutes 30 seconds is 2 credits, so 1,000 calls use 2,000 credits. Heyloha 2,500 at €599 a month, excl. VAT, covers that with room to spare, which is about €0.60 per call. Heyloha 1,000 at €339 plus 1,000 automatic extra credits at €0.45 would come to €789, so the bigger plan is the cheaper one here.

None of this counts your own team's time: calling customers back after an answering service has taken a message, and picking up the calls an AI agent hands over. Per call is still the fairest unit to compare. It just isn't the whole bill.

Where AI fits, and where it doesn't

Besides an answering service and outsourced agents there is a third option: software that answers the repeat questions itself, on the phone, in your website chat and on WhatsApp, day and night.

It handles the questions that come back every day with a fixed answer: opening hours, prices, delivery times, appointments, returns and orders (for order status it needs a link to your shop system). It is also there in the evenings and at weekends, when many answering plans cost extra or don't answer at all, and at peaks, when several people call at once.

Keep it away from complaints from upset customers, exceptions to your policy, negotiations about price, and medical, legal or financial advice. And anyone who asks for a person should get one. Those conversations belong with your team, or with an outsourcing partner if you keep one.

That makes the handover the part to check first. In Heyloha, on website chat and WhatsApp, a colleague takes over with the whole conversation in view. On the phone, a warm transfer means your colleague hears the reason for the call before the caller is put through. If nobody answers, a callback request goes to your team by email, so the caller doesn't hit a dead end.

Heyloha is one example with published prices: €149 a month for 250 credits, €239 for 500, €339 for 1,000 and €599 for 2,500, all excl. VAT. One credit is one complete chat or WhatsApp conversation, or one call minute. Inside a plan, that works out at €0.24 to €0.60 per chat, or €0.72 to €1.79 for a three-minute call. Every channel and an unlimited number of users are included, nights and weekends cost no extra, and plans run month to month, with no minimum term or setup fee.

The limits, plainly. The AI answers from your website and documents, so gaps there become gaps in its answers, and you should review the conversations in the first few weeks. It takes incoming calls only. When the credits run out it pauses and callers hear a short message that the service isn't available, unless you switch on automatic extra credits, which cost €0.32 to €0.75 each depending on the plan. And it bills in euros, which matters if your budget is in pounds.

You don't have to pick one route. AI can handle the first line for the predictable questions, with your team or a call center behind it. Our page on how to outsource customer service compares the routes side by side: your own team, a call center, AI, or a combination. If it's mainly the phone, the AI receptionist page shows how that works, and our telephone answering service page is the one to read if you are replacing a call answering plan. How to automate customer service takes you through it step by step, and every plan is on the pricing page.

Compare like with like before you outsource customer service

Write down what you are buying first: a message taken, or a question answered. Then put every option in the same unit, per handled call or conversation, and add the minimum term, the rounding and the hours covered. Do that, and a quote for outsourced agents, a bundle from an answering service and the cost of your own employee become comparable.

If most of your calls are the same handful of questions, the quickest way to find out what software would cost you is to measure it on your own calls. Try Heyloha free for 14 days. You pay nothing now: you do enter a payment method, and if you cancel within 14 days nothing is charged. The phone can be live within an hour.

Frequently asked questions about outsourcing customer service costs