AI receptionist vs. hiring a receptionist: cost, coverage and fit

What does a full-time receptionist really cost?

About $55,000 a year at the national median, once you add benefits to wages. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a median wage for receptionists of $18.27 an hour, or $38,010 a year, in May 2025. The lowest-paid 10% earned under $13.83 an hour and the highest-paid 10% over $24.01.

Wages aren't the whole cost. In the BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation survey for June 2026, wages were 68.7% of total compensation for private-industry office and administrative support workers, and benefits were 31.3%. Dividing wages by 0.687 gives total compensation:

That still leaves out recruiting, training time, a desk, a computer, a phone line and the cost of covering vacations and sick days.

What does a part-time receptionist cost?

Roughly $30,000 a year for 25 hours a week at the median wage. Part-time workers usually get fewer benefits: in the same June 2026 BLS survey, benefits were 20.0% of total compensation for part-time private-industry workers, versus 31.5% for full-time.

The math: 25 hours × 52 weeks × $18.27 = $23,751 in wages. Divide by 0.80 and you get about $29,690 a year, or about $2,470 a month, for 25 hours of coverage a week. That's 15% of the hours in a week.

For comparison, self-serve AI receptionist plans listed in October 2026 run from $49 a month (Rosie, 250 minutes) to $500 a month (Smith.ai's AI Enterprise plan, 300 calls). More detail is in how much an AI receptionist costs.

How many hours does each option actually cover?

A full-time receptionist covers about 40 of the 168 hours in a week, roughly 24%. An AI receptionist covers all 168.

The gap matters because customers don't call on your schedule. Evenings, weekends, lunch breaks and the minutes when your receptionist is already on another line are when calls go unanswered. CallRail's January 2025 benchmark of 1.1 million conversations found 14% of calls to home services businesses were missed, and in its September 2025 survey 21% of consumers said they immediately call another business when one doesn't pick up.

So the real comparison isn't "human or AI" for business hours. It's what happens to the other 128 hours, and to the second call that comes in while the first is still talking. Our guide to after-hours calls covers that window in detail.

How do they compare side by side?

What hidden costs come with each option?

Both options cost more than the headline number. Plan for these before you compare.

Hiring a person:

• Recruiting time: writing the ad, screening, interviewing and checking references.
• Training: a new hire has to learn your services, pricing approach, scheduling rules and software before they're fully useful.
• Coverage gaps: someone still has to answer during vacations, sick days and lunch.
• Turnover: when a receptionist leaves, you pay the hiring and training cost again.

Using an AI receptionist:

• Setup: someone has to teach it your services, tone and booking rules. Self-serve tools leave that to you; Arifwork does it with you.
• Texting registration: business texting needs A2P 10DLC registration, which Twilio lists at $4.50 to $46 one time, a $15 campaign vetting fee and $1.50 to $10 a month as of October 2026.
• Oversight: plan to read transcripts closely for the first few weeks and tune the rules.
• Overage: per-minute and per-call plans cost more in a busy season.

When is hiring a human receptionist the better choice?

Hire a person when the job is mostly in the room, not on the phone, or when calls need real judgment.

• Walk-in traffic. Check-ins, payments, paperwork and a friendly face at the counter.
• Emotional or high-stakes calls. Complaints, bad news and delicate conversations.
• Consultative sales. Big-ticket work where the person answering is part of the sale.
• Healthcare. Medical, dental, med spa and therapy practices need HIPAA-compliant tools. Arifwork is not HIPAA-compliant and isn't built for them.
• Very low call volume. If the phone rings twice a day and the owner always picks up, you may not need either.

When does an AI receptionist make more sense?

Choose AI when most calls are routine, many arrive outside business hours, or the people who answer phones are also doing the work.

• Owner-operators and field teams. Plumbers, roofers and HVAC techs can't answer from a crawl space. See plumbing and roofing.
• Nights, weekends and holidays. Arifwork's Ava works all three, calling missed callers back within seconds.
• Repetitive intake. Hours, service area, pricing approach, booking. The same answers, every time.
• Texts and chat too. Arifwork's Max answers texts, web chat, Instagram and Facebook messages and books in the conversation.

What about using both?

If you have a front desk, consider using both: people handle the room and the hard calls, and AI handles overflow, after-hours and the routine.

In practice, your receptionist answers during the day. When the line is busy or rings out, Arifwork's AI calls the customer back, books the job and texts a confirmation. When a conversation needs a person, it goes to your team with the full transcript. Your staff stops playing phone tag and spends time on the customers in front of them. See how it works and meet the AI employees.

How do you decide? A five-question worksheet

1. How many calls do you get, and when? Pull 30 days of call logs and group them by hour.
2. How many are missed? Count calls that went unanswered or to voicemail, especially outside business hours.
3. What is a booked call worth? Use the missed-call revenue calculator or the worked examples in how much missed calls cost.
4. How much of the job is in person? If it's most of it, you need a human.
5. What's your budget per month? Compare $4,610 for a median full-time hire with benefits to AI options.

If the answers point to AI, or to a mix, book a demo and we'll quote the AI employee that fits.

Frequently asked questions