The Datum Report

Occupation 4215 · Administrative and secretarial occupations

Personal assistants and other secretaries

Half of full-time personal assistants and other secretaries in the UK earn more than £34,954 a year, and half earn less.

Personal assistants and other secretaries provide administrative and secretarial support to individuals, departmental or management teams within organisations.

How people enter it

There are no minimum academic requirements, although entry to professional secretarial courses typically requires GCSEs/S grades. NVQs/SVQs are available in Administration at levels 2, 3 and 4.

What the work involves

• acts as a first point of contact for a manager or team with colleagues and people from outside organisations, fields telephone enquiries, takes and passes on messages
• arranges appointments, keeps business diary, organises travel arrangements, makes reservations and organises a variety of functions
• opens, sorts, distributes and files correspondence (in hard copy and electronic) and deals directly with routine correspondence
• uses appropriate software to produce correspondence, memoranda, reports, presentations and other documents from drafts, handwritten copy or by transcribing dictation
• arranges and attends meetings, takes minutes and prepares records of proceedings
• translates documents and liaises with overseas clients and suppliers

Also called

Executive assistant · PA-secretary · Personal assistant · Personal secretary · Secretary

What it pays

How pay has changed

Median gross annual pay for personal assistants and other secretaries, full-time employees, 2023 to 2025. Each point is that year's ASHE April snapshot as published — revisions are not backfilled into earlier years, and a year ONS withheld is a gap rather than a joined line.

ONS, ASHE Table 14 - occupation by four-digit SOC (national). Table

Year-on-year change

The change from each year to the next, in per cent, computed from the figures in the chart above — so the two cannot disagree.

ONS, ASHE Table 14 - occupation by four-digit SOC (national). Table

Pay by region

Median gross annual pay for full-time employees, ranked, against the UK figure. 11 of 11 regions are published: ONS withholds a cell where the survey sample cannot support it, and those are shown as gaps rather than dropped — an absent region is not a region without the work in it.

ONS, ASHE Table 14 - occupation by four-digit SOC (national). Period 2025. Table

Every regional figure

ONS does not publish occupational pay below region. Cells the survey could not support are shown as withheld, with its reason — adding a region split to a specific occupation leaves roughly a tenth of cells publishable.

Common questions

Classified alongside this

Company secretaries and administrators · Legal secretaries · Medical secretaries · Receptionists · School secretaries · Typists and related keyboard occupations