The all-in cost of a part-qualified, built up line by line from salary to cost per productive hour, and set against a dedicated seat.
When a practice owner thinks about hiring a part-qualified, the number in their head is the salary. £35,000, say. That is what goes on the advert and what the candidate negotiates. It is not what the practice pays.
The practice also pays employer National Insurance, the pension contribution, the software licence, the desk, the laptop, the training, the recruitment fee, and the weeks of lower output while the new person learns your clients. Then it pays for holidays, sickness and the time spent in meetings, on the phone and on the practice's own admin, none of which is billable.
This guide builds the real number step by step. We use our working rule of thumb, which is that the all-in cost of a UK employee is about salary × 1.35. That multiplier covers employer NI, pension, software and desk, and recruitment amortised over a sensible period. If your practice has better data from your own payroll, use it. The structure of the sum is the same.
A part-qualified in a UK practice in 2026 is advertised at £32,000 to £38,000 outside London, with London and the South East above that (Indeed, PayScale and recruiter adverts, 2026). We will use £35,000 as the worked example and show the top and bottom of the range in the table.
The multiplier breaks into three parts. The split is our estimate from running a practice; the exact proportions in your firm will differ, particularly on recruitment.
Employer NI and the employer pension contribution. We are not going to quote the rates here because they change; check current rates on gov.uk. In our experience the two together come to somewhere around 18% of salary for someone at this level. On £35,000 that is about £6,300.
A seat in your practice software, Office, the practice management system, a laptop on a three-year cycle, a share of rent and utilities, CPD and study support for a part-qualified who is still sitting exams. Call it 7% of salary, around £2,450 a year. Practices that pay for the full study package will be above this.
A recruiter fee for a part-qualified is commonly a percentage of first-year salary, and at this level £5,000 or so is an ordinary bill. The person then stays, on average, somewhere between eighteen months and three years. Amortise a £5,250 fee over 18 months and it costs you about £3,500 a year, or 10% of salary. If you hire direct and skip the fee, you still pay in partner time spent sifting CVs and interviewing, which is not free either.
| Line | £32,000 salary | £35,000 salary | £38,000 salary |
|---|---|---|---|
| Salary | £32,000 | £35,000 | £38,000 |
| Employer NI and pension (about 18%) | £5,760 | £6,300 | £6,840 |
| Software, desk, training (about 7%) | £2,240 | £2,450 | £2,660 |
| Recruitment fee over 18 months (about 10%) | £3,200 | £3,500 | £3,800 |
| Total per year (× 1.35) | £43,200 | £47,250 | £51,300 |
| Per month | £3,600 | £3,938 | £4,275 |
| Per productive hour (1,500 hours) | £28.80 | £31.50 | £34.20 |
So the £32–38k advert is a £44–52k cost, rounded. That is the range we use across this site when we talk about a UK part-qualified.
A full-time contract is around 1,824 attendance hours a year after holidays and bank holidays. You do not get 1,824 hours of work on client files. Take off sickness, training, team meetings, the Monday morning catch-up, internal admin, the time spent waiting for a client to send the bank statements, and the afternoons lost to a slow practice system. In a well-run practice you get roughly 1,500 productive hours out of a full-timer. Some practices measure lower. Very few measure higher.
That figure matters because it is the denominator. The same £47,250 spread over 1,824 hours would be £25.90 an hour. Spread over the 1,500 you actually get, it is £31.50. The second number is the real one.
A Muckin Accounts seat is £2,650 a month for 160 hours, or £31,800 a year. The person in that seat is a qualified South African accountant in our own Pretoria office, doing year-end accounts, CT600s, self assessment and management accounts, with every job reviewed and signed off in the UK before it reaches you. Full detail on the accounts production page.
The 160 hours are productive hours on your work. We do not deduct planning calls, status updates or our own internal training from the seat. Holidays and sickness are covered by us, not billed to you. So the denominator is 1,920 hours a year, not 1,500.
| UK part-qualified | Accounts seat | Production seat | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost per year | £44,000–52,000 | £31,800 | £23,400 |
| Cost per month | £3,600–4,275 | £2,650 | £1,950 |
| Productive hours per year | About 1,500 | 1,920 | 1,920 |
| Cost per productive hour | £28.80–34.20 | £16.56 | £12.19 |
| Review included | No, your manager does it | Yes, UK sign-off | Yes, UK sign-off |
| Cover for absence | No | Yes | Yes |
| Notice | Contractual, usually one to three months | One month, rolling | One month, rolling |
The Production seat at £1,950 is the bookkeeping, VAT, payroll and admin equivalent. Against a UK bookkeeper on £27–32k, which is £36–44k all-in on the same rule of thumb, it is £12.19 an hour against roughly £24–29. The pricing page has the half and part-time versions if you do not need a full 160 hours.
This is where we have to be straight, because the table above flatters us.
A person in the room. Your part-qualified can walk over to the partner's desk with a question and have it answered in thirty seconds. A seat asks by message and gets an answer when the reviewer sees it, which on a busy day might be that evening. We run on UK hours and Pretoria is only one to two hours ahead, so the gap is small, but it is not zero.
Client relationships. A part-qualified who has been with you three years knows which client always sends the wrong bank account and which one needs a phone call rather than an email. They can sit in a meeting. A seat can hold that knowledge about the files but should not be the client's contact. Your fee-earners stay the face.
A future manager. The part-qualified you hire today may be the manager who runs your practice in six years. That is a return no outsourced seat will ever produce for you.
Flexibility on the day. If a client walks in with a shoebox and needs accounts by Friday, a person in the office can drop everything. A seat can too, but it takes a message and a reshuffle of the week's plan.
None of that is a reason not to use a seat. It is a reason to use a seat for production and keep your UK people for the parts that need to be in the room.
Keep the UK part-qualified. Stop giving them 1,500 hours of production. Put the year-end grind, the bookkeeping and the self assessment returns into seats at £12–17 an hour of reviewed work, and use the UK person for review, client contact, advisory and the awkward jobs. You end up with the same headcount, more finished work, and a part-qualified who is doing the work that will get them qualified rather than the work that makes them leave. The mechanics of the handover are on how it works.
Run your own numbers through the capacity calculator. It takes your client counts, estimates the hours, and shows the cost as seats against a UK hire at the all-in figures above. Then talk to us about which work should move first.
Published 22 August 2026. Tax rules and rates change — check current figures on gov.uk before relying on anything here. This is general information for practice owners, not advice.
On a £32,000 to £38,000 salary, roughly £44,000 to £52,000 a year once employer NI, pension, software, desk and recruitment are counted. Our rule of thumb is salary multiplied by 1.35.
About 1,500 a year in a well-run practice, out of roughly 1,824 attendance hours. Holidays, sickness, training, meetings and internal admin take the rest.
For production work, yes. For client relationships, in-person flexibility and growing your future managers, no. Most practices use seats for production and keep UK staff for review and client contact.
A fair comparison of the three main offshore markets for UK practices: time zones, qualifications, price ranges, typical models and what to check anywhere.
Read itWorked numbers for a 120 year-end, 180 self assessment practice under per-job and seat models, and an honest view of when per-job is right.
Read itTwo routes to white-labelling outsourced production: silent and open. Working papers, sign-off, engagement letters, logins, email and insurance.
Read itTell us what's piling up. We'll come back within one working day with who we'd put on it and what it costs.