Hourly vs hour banks: structures clients stay on

Pure hourly billing has three problems for a VA. Clients watch the meter and hesitate over every delegation — is this email worth $35? Your income stops the week you do. And every month starts at zero, which means you're always selling instead of working. An hour bank fixes all three at once.

Here's how a bank works: the client prepays a block of hours each month — 10, 20, or 40 hours covers nearly every part-time engagement — and you draw the balance down as tasks land, reporting what's left in your regular update. Small businesses commonly spend $500–2,500 a month on part-time support, so banks aren't an exotic structure to them; they're the normal one. With the money question already settled, clients delegate freely instead of rationing you.

The bank rate sits 5–15% under your walk-in hourly rate, and that's a trade, not a discount given away. Committed hours let you plan your week, cut your marketing time to near zero, and stop re-selling yourself monthly. Say so when you quote it: "The bank rate is lower because the hours are guaranteed." Clients respect a price that has a reason.

What keeps banks healthy is writing the rules before the first dollar moves: what counts against the bank (task work and calls — not your invoicing), when the balance resets, and what happens to unused hours. Pick one rollover policy — hours expire monthly, or they roll one month — and apply it to everyone. A client who knows unused hours expire delegates more, not less. Ambiguity is what produces the end-of-month argument.

Keep a one-off hourly rate on your sheet too, priced 10–15% above the bank rate, for genuine one-offs and overflow. It makes the bank the obvious choice without you ever making a pitch.

Your rate floor: the billable-hours math

Here's the mistake that keeps VAs busy and poor: taking a monthly income goal and dividing it by all the hours in a work month. You will not bill all of them. Real freelance VAs bill about 70–80% of their working hours — the rest goes to finding clients, communication, invoicing, and the gaps between tasks. Price from the fantasy number and you'll work full-time hours for part-time money, then wonder why the goal never arrives.

The floor formula has two steps. Monthly hours you can work (weekly hours × 4.33) times your billable percentage gives you billable hours. Your goal divided by billable hours is your rate floor — the lowest hourly number at which the month can possibly work. Below it, no amount of hustle fixes the math.

Run the calculator's defaults: a $3,000 goal, 25 workable hours a week, 75% billable. That's 108.3 hours available, 81.2 of them billable, and a floor of $36.95 an hour. Notice where that lands: squarely inside the typical US freelance band of $25–45, and below the $40–70 that marketing specialists command. The math is telling you something useful — at 25 hours a week as a generalist, you target the top of the admin band, take on more hours, or grow a specialty. Those are the only three honest options.

Two levers move an unsellable floor: more hours (a bigger denominator) or a specialty (the Module 1 premiums — CRM and tech setup work bills $40–80 an hour precisely because few VAs do it well). The forbidden lever is assuming you'll bill 100% of your time. You won't. Nobody does.

Building your three packages

Three packages. Not five, not a menu of eleven. More tiers make prospects do arithmetic; three make them pick a size. Each package is just an hour bank with a name, a lane set, and rules — built from your floor rate, plus margin, minus the 5–15% commitment discount from Lesson 1.

Starter bank — 10 hours a month. Inbox triage, scheduling, and one support lane of their choosing, say social scheduling. This is the package for a solo operator testing delegation for the first time. Core bank — 20 hours. Two or three lanes, the weekly async update, and a monthly report pull. Most of your clients will live here — at US bank rates, 20 hours lands roughly between $600 and $900 a month, dead center of what small businesses already spend on part-time support. Full bank — 40 hours. Near-daily coverage across all your lanes, with a faster response window. It exists partly to be bought and partly to anchor: a prospect who flinches at 20 hours often chooses it calmly once 40 is sitting beside it.

Every package states five things: the hours, the lanes included, the update cadence, the response window, and the overage rule — extra hours billed at your one-off rate, or work pauses at 90% used until you say go. Pick one rule and print it. The word that never appears anywhere on the page is "unlimited."

A package isn't real until it's written in your numbers, for your floor, with your lanes. The worksheet below is where that happens — twenty minutes here saves you from improvising prices on calls, which is where underpricing actually occurs.