How Much Does a Virtual Telephone Triage Assistant Cost?

The rate is $10.00 to $12.65 per hour, and where a candidate sits in that band depends on experience, education, location, role, specialty, language, schedule, and whether the placement is full or part time. Rates generally begin around $10 an hour and may range up to approximately $12.65.

In the numbers a practice budgets with, full time at 40 hours a week is roughly $1,600 to $2,024 a month, and part time at 20 hours is about half that. Billing follows hours worked, so the monthly figure tracks the schedule rather than sitting fixed like a salary. Call volume is spiky in triage, so hourly coverage aligned to your busiest windows usually beats a fixed seat.

How Does That Compare With an In-House Seat?

Registered nurses earn a median $97,550 a year, or $46.90 an hour (Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025). That is the offer-letter number, and it is the smaller part of what the seat costs.

The rest is the employer load. For professional and related occupations in private industry, BLS puts total benefits at about 47.0% on top of wages, split across legally required benefits such as Social Security, Medicare, unemployment and workers' compensation, then insurance and retirement, then paid leave and supplemental pay (Source: BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, March 2026).

Wage for Registered nurses from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025. Load percentages from BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, March 2026, professional and related occupations, private industry. Cost per hire from the SHRM 2025 Benchmarking Report. The virtual column uses 2,080 hours, a full 52 weeks at 40 hours, so it is not flattered by assuming unworked weeks. Honest Taskers does not publish a savings percentage; run the comparison on your own salary and hours.

What Is Included in the Hourly Rate?

The rate covers recruiting and screening, HIPAA training with quarterly data privacy refreshers, background checks, remote-work screening, and dedicated Customer Success support. It also covers unlimited replacement support if a placement turns out to be the wrong fit.

What it does not cover is your software. Your phone platform, EHR, and triage protocol tooling stay on the subscriptions you already pay for, and the assistant works inside them on access your practice grants and can revoke at any time. A virtual telephone triage assistant can work within a HIPAA-compliant arrangement when a BAA is signed. Compliance itself stays with the practice, because it lives in the practice's own policies and daily conduct, and no staffing company can promise it on the practice's behalf.

What Does the Assistant Own, and Why Is This Not a Nurse Replacement?

The assistant handles the volume around the clinical decision, not the decision itself. Read the exclusion list first, because it defines the role.

What the assistant never does: deciding how urgent a caller's symptom is, telling a patient what care to seek or what to do medically, diagnosing a condition or interpreting symptoms clinically, overriding or rewriting the practice's triage protocol, or any task requiring a clinical licence or a physical presence in the office.

What it does own is everything the licensed clinician should not be spending time on: answering and logging inbound calls, capturing the caller's details and the reason for the call accurately, following the practice's own protocol to route the call to the right person, sending messages into the EHR, handling the callbacks and confirmations that follow a triage decision, and chasing the administrative loose ends. See telephone triage assistant duties and responsibilities, the tasks worth delegating, and the telephone triage virtual assistant guide.

How Should You Read the Cost Comparison, Then?

Not as a swap. Registered nurses earn a $97,550 median salary, or $46.90 an hour, which is about $143,400 a year once employer loads for professional occupations are added (Source: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, and BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, March 2026).

The relevant question is what share of your triage line's minutes actually require that licence. If a nurse spends a large part of the day taking down names, confirming callbacks, and logging messages, those minutes are being bought at nurse rates for work that does not need a nurse. Moving them is where the saving comes from.

Honest Taskers' talent pool does include licensed nurses and physicians, but that is a recruiting fact rather than a scope claim: placements perform administrative and clinically adjacent work, and never practise under their licence for the client. Keep the triage decision with your own clinician. If you are comparing vendors, see the best virtual telephone triage medical assistant companies.

How Do You Test the Cost Before Committing?

New clients may receive a two-week working trial with their first selected candidate, subject to Honest Taskers' current service terms. The trial runs on live work rather than a scripted demo, so the comparison is against real volume.

Two weeks shows how many calls were fully handled without clinician involvement, and how much of your nurse's day came back as a result. Time it before and after. Measure your own before-and-after rather than a national average, because the baseline that matters is your practice's.

Talk to Honest Taskers about triage line coverage for your practice.