The real cost of a lettings administrator

Every salary aggregator publishes a page for this role, and at the time of writing they broadly agree: the big job boards put the average advertised salary for a lettings administrator in the low twenty-thousands outside London and around twenty-five thousand pounds in it, with the usual spread either side. Those pages answer the question a candidate asks. They do not answer the question an employer should ask, which is what the seat costs.

The arithmetic nobody publishes for this role

• Employer National Insurance, charged since April 2025 at fifteen per cent of nearly the whole salary — the secondary threshold now sits at five thousand pounds a year. On a twenty-four-thousand-pound salary that is roughly two thousand eight hundred and fifty pounds.
• Auto-enrolment pension at the employer minimum of three per cent of qualifying earnings — several hundred pounds more.
• Recruitment: an agency fee commonly priced as a percentage of first-year salary, or the weeks of a manager’s time that advertising and sifting consume instead.
• Cover: the holiday, the sickness and the notice period, worked by colleagues whose own work waits.
• The desk itself: the licence for every system they touch, the equipment, and the square metres they sit on.

Payroll firms publish rules of thumb for the total, and they cluster around one and a quarter to one and four-tenths times salary before the desk costs. Run that on a twenty-four-thousand-pound administrator and the seat is costing somewhere north of thirty thousand pounds a year — around two and a half thousand pounds a month — before anything goes wrong, and before you have paid for the time it takes to find them. Advertised salaries are also not what they were: the boards show hundreds of live vacancies for this role at any moment, and a market with that many open seats is a market where the next hire costs more than the last one.

Our number, for comparison

A dedicated administrator here is from one thousand two hundred and ninety-five pounds a month. That figure is the whole of it: the person, employed by us and working only for you, the desk they sit at, the equipment, the management, the cover arrangements and the recruitment already done. It is on the website because we think a market where nobody publishes a price is a market that suspects its own arithmetic.

The comparison is not perfectly like for like, and we would rather say so than have you discover it. A person in your office can greet a landlord who walks in. Ours cannot, and the work we take is chosen accordingly — the recurring, procedural load that does not care which building it is done in.

If you are running this calculation for your own agency, do it with your own numbers rather than ours: your salaries, your fee, your churn. The shape of the answer survives the substitution. The salary line is the smallest honest way to state the cost of a seat, and every line under it is real money that never appears in the advert.

Figures above are indicative, drawn from the public salary boards and government rates current at the time of writing, and they move. Check them against the sources before they go in anybody’s budget.

Ejas Deane is a partner of the firm. He answers enquiries himself.