UK. Telephone answering and virtual receptionists

Which is the best answering service for your business?

No two UK answering services charge the same way: per call, bundles with an excess rate, included allowances, per minute (85p), by the second, or by quote only. Headline prices say little. The table records each provider's stated terms, dated.

Charged

Cover

Option		provider's own page, checked 23 Oct 2026
ReceptionHQ Short calls, and anyone who wants the choice of per-call or per-minute pricing	States it is one of the few UK providers offering both per-call and per-minute pricing, on its pricing page, read 23 October 2026. Four service levels are priced separately	MessageExpress from £15 a month plus VAT for message taking, MyReceptionist from £16 with call transfers, MyAssistant from £30 for lead capture and CRM updates, MyDiary from £30 for appointment scheduling. Call diversion, voicemail to email and IVR are £10 a month each, extra numbers £5. Call centre services are pricing on application. Its message taking page adds £1.10 a call to the £15 pay as you go plan, and sells MessageExpress bundles from £25 a month for 25 calls to £410 for 500, with excess calls at £1.10, plus VAT. Both pages read 23 October 2026	24/7 stated as included as standard on any live answering plan, with the page stating there is no after-hours surcharge for evenings, weekends or bank holidays	By plan: message taking, call transfers, FAQ answering, lead submission into your CRM, order taking, payment processing and appointment scheduling	States UK receptionists answer the majority of calls for UK clients during standard office hours of 9:00am to 5:30pm Monday to Friday, with overflow to its teams in Australia and the US after hours and during unforeseen peaks. That is the most candid statement about overflow on this page and it is worth reading before you compare it with the in-house providers	7 day free trial with no card and instant activation. States no lock-in contract, month to month, no cancellation fees. Prices are plus VAT
Message Direct Out of hours and emergency call-out cover	Monthly plans, described as fair pricing based on service levels delivered. The page does not publish a per-call or per-minute rate	Plans from £19.20 a month, also expressed as from £0.64 a day, with no per-call rate published alongside it	24/7, 365 days a year. Sold for full-time use, out of hours only, or overflow when needed	Message taking described as the core service, plus a 24/7 virtual receptionist with call transfers and order taking, appointment booking into online diaries, overflow handling, and emergency response and call-outs	States 100 per cent in-house from its own offices in Bournemouth	14 day free trial. States you can upgrade, downgrade or pause your plan at any time, and that there are no long contracts
Answer4u Low call volumes where you only want to pay per call	Pay as you go: a monthly subscription plus a fee for every call, with email and SMS message alerts charged on top. Call bundles are the alternative, priced by the number of calls a month	£19.99 monthly subscription plus pricing from £1.75 per call. Email messages £0.11 each, SMS messages £0.17 each. Bundles run from Receptionist 25 at £43.75 a month for 25 calls to Receptionist 200 at £350 for 200, and the page states no rate for a call beyond a bundle. Read 23 October 2026	24/7, 365 days a year, with a dedicated 24 hour call-out service sold separately	Message taking with caller details and reason for call, stored in an online client portal and sent by email or text. Also sells diary management, email handling, help desk support and a full outsourced call centre	States a UK-based team at its Nottingham call centre, and its pay as you go page, read 23 October 2026, states agents go through a six-month training programme. Those are the provider's own claims about its own operation	30 day free trial offered, and the page states no contractual obligation on pay as you go. The virtual receptionist page names no integration; its diary management page, read 23 October 2026, states that service can be integrated with any diary or CRM platform
Office Answers Short, occasional weekday calls, priced by the minute	A monthly subscription plus receptionist time charged per minute, the only per-minute rate published in this table	Subscription £25 a month, receptionist time 85p a minute and a £25 set-up fee. Messages by email are free and by text 10p each, all prices subject to VAT. Its standard 01 number is supplied, and any UK 01, 02 or 03 number is £5 a month. Read 23 October 2026	Its FAQs state receptionist hours of 08:30 to 18:00 Monday to Friday. Callers out of hours hear a message that the office is closed, and voicemail to email is sold separately. Not 24/7	Message taking: the receptionist answers in your company name from a screen of information about your business and takes a message rather than answering detailed questions, sent immediately by email and by text if you wish. Call routing and an automated phone menu are priced separately	States its team of operators is based in the UK, and describes the team as the right size to handle busy times without sounding like a call centre	A one month rolling agreement with no long term commitment, ended by telling it by the 25th of the month, no deposit and no months paid up front. Set-up within 24 hours. No free trial is stated on the pages we read
JAM Bespoke packages built around a specific call mix	Quoted per business against the services you pick, with a published starting price rather than a rate card	Prices starting at £35 a month, read 23 October 2026. The page states no separate price for a phone number or system	24/7 support stated, including order taking 24 hours a day, 7 days a week	Message taking described as the core, plus call transfers, lead qualification, order taking, FAQ answering, diary management and overflow handling during peak hours or staff shortages	States UK based receptionists, and 46 years of virtual reception	Sold as a bespoke package by quote. States it does not charge connection fees when a transferred call is accepted, which is an unusual and checkable commitment
AnswerConnect Buyers who want live chat and calls from one provider	Plans, but the detail is gated: the plans page asks for your name, email and phone number before it shows the range, and also offers the plans as a PDF	A site-wide banner states 2026, get started for only £45 a month. No further figure is visible without submitting the form, so that is the only price we can source	24/7, with out of hours answering sold as a distinct service covering weekends and holidays	Live call answering by a virtual receptionist, appointment scheduling, out of hours cover and live chat support for website visitors	Sold as a UK service with a UK freephone number and a UK contact address. The pages we read do not state where the agents themselves are based	A customer portal and mobile app are described, along with integrations. No contract term is published on the pages we read
Face For Business Short calls billed by the second, with evening and weekend cover	Three plans. Taster and Inclusive Minutes are charged by the second, with the page stating it does not round up to the nearest minute, and Message Only is a set price per call. No per-second or per-call rate is published	Taster from £49 a month, Inclusive Minutes from £115 and Message Only from £99, read 23 October 2026. The page states no setup or onboarding fees, and no charge for sales or nuisance calls on the Message Only and Inclusive Minutes plans	Its telephone answering page, read 23 October 2026, states calls are answered 8am to 8pm Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm on Saturday and 10am to 4pm on Sunday. Taster covers core business hours and evening and weekend support is listed on Inclusive Minutes. Not 24/7	Message taking with messages sent on immediately, call transfers, appointment booking on the Inclusive Minutes plan, and call recordings in an online portal and app. An outsourced switchboard is sold as a separate service	States every PA is based in the UK and trained in-house, and that no bots or AI answer its calls	7 day free trial. A 90-day minimum term, then a 30-day rolling plan you can amend or cancel on 30 days' notice. Its telephone answering page names integrations for Microsoft, Stripe and CRM systems
Pocket Receptionist Predictable monthly cost at a known call volume	Per call, inside a plan: each tier includes a number of calls and anything beyond the allowance is £2.99 a call. The page states there are no per-minute meters and no plan-locked minutes	Starter £75 a month for 30 calls, Growth £145 for 60, Pro £230 for 100, Enterprise £635 for 300, all with excess calls at £2.99	Extended hours coverage stated as 08:00 to 20:00 on every plan, which is the clearest published hours statement here and is not 24/7	Answering and qualifying forwarded calls, call transfers to mobile and landline, and booking directly into calendars	States UK-based receptionists answering during and after business hours, GDPR compliant with UK-only storage and role-based access	7 day free trial, month to month terms with the ability to step up or down between tiers. Integrations named as Google, Outlook and Calendly for calendars and Zoho, HubSpot and Salesforce for CRM bookings
Moneypenny Larger businesses wanting a named team on the account	Quoted, with no rate card on the site: every route ends at a form described as get pricing and an overview of our free trial. Its plans are sized in inclusive minutes, and its message taking page, read 23 October 2026, states calls beyond the allowance can be charged on a per minute basis	Not published for its receptionist plans. Its message taking page, read 23 October 2026, states from £55 per month for calls answered 9am to 5pm on weekdays, with 24/7 answering from an additional £35 a month	A 24/7 answering service is sold as a distinct offer alongside the main service	Telephone answering, outsourced switchboard, appointment booking, lead management, managed live chat, multichannel customer service and social media management. An AI receptionist is sold as a separate product	States UK-based people, with its own AI technology described as supporting rather than replacing them, and bespoke customer teams for larger accounts	A free trial is referenced on the quote form. Read 23 October 2026, the page states a minimum term of three months on its smaller schemes (150 inclusive minutes and below), then one month's notice, and six or twelve months with three months' notice on larger schemes. No integration list is published on the pages we read
CallCare Higher volumes, overflow and 24/7 emergency lines	Quoted, and the site is explicit about the variables: call volume, how many active users you need, service type and hours of call coverage, described as usage prices so you only pay for what you need	Not published	24/7, 365 days, including overnight, weekends and holidays	Inbound and outbound calls, customer service enquiries, appointment scheduling, lead capture, complaint resolution, emergency response and overflow support. You can use a shared operator pool or a smaller dedicated team	States it operates 100 per cent in-house from UK-based offices	No contract term published. States ISO 27001 certification scoped for its Manchester flagship operation, the only certification claim on this page

How UK telephone answering services charge, and what the published entry price actually buys

Last updated 2026-10-23

Answering services are quoted in at least five incompatible units, which is why comparing them on headline price alone produces the wrong answer. This table reduces ten UK providers to the charging basis and the entry price, so you can work out which model fits your own call pattern before anyone quotes you.

Every price is copied from the provider's own page, read again on 23 October 2026, and reproduced, not estimated or averaged; the service descriptions were read on 15 August 2026, and for Face For Business and Office Answers on 23 October 2026. Where a provider publishes no price we record that rather than guessing, because quote-only is a real answer and two of the ten give it. Where a price sits behind a form, as with AnswerConnect, we record only the figure visible without submitting one. Charging basis and VAT treatment are taken from the provider's own wording, and most of these pages do not state VAT at all. AllDayPA is absent because its site would not serve us a readable page; Best Reception is absent because none of its pages we read on 23 October 2026 states a price. No provider pays us and no placement on this site is paid.

How UK telephone answering services charge, and what the published entry price actually buys
Provider	Charging basis	Published entry price	Hours stated	Source
ReceptionHQ	Per call or per minute; four service levels priced separately	MessageExpress from £15 a month plus VAT, and £1.10 a call on pay as you go or beyond a bundle; MyReceptionist from £16; MyAssistant and MyDiary from £30	24/7 included as standard, no after-hours surcharge	receptionhq.co.uk message taking, read 23 October 2026
Message Direct	Monthly plan, priced on service levels; no per-call rate published	From £19.20 a month, also given as from £0.64 a day	24/7, 365 days
Answer4u	Subscription plus a fee per call, or monthly call bundles	£19.99 a month plus £1.75 per call; email messages £0.11, SMS £0.17	24/7, 365 days
Office Answers	Subscription plus receptionist time per minute	£25 a month plus 85p a minute, with a £25 set-up fee; texts 10p, email messages free; plus VAT, read 23 October 2026	08:30 to 18:00 Monday to Friday	office-answers.co.uk prices, read 23 October 2026
JAM	Bespoke package by quote, with a published starting price	From £35 a month; no phone system price stated, read 23 October 2026	24/7
AnswerConnect	Plans, with the detail released only after you submit a form	Banner states from £45 a month; nothing further visible without the form	24/7, with out of hours sold separately
Face For Business	Plans charged by the second, or a set price per call	Taster from £49 a month, Inclusive Minutes from £115, Message Only from £99; no setup fees, read 23 October 2026	8am to 8pm weekdays, shorter hours at weekends	ffb.co.uk answering service pricing, read 23 October 2026
Pocket Receptionist	Plan with an included number of calls, then £2.99 per extra call	£75 a month for 30 calls, up to £635 for 300	08:00 to 20:00 on every plan
Moneypenny	Quoted, in plans of inclusive minutes; no rate card published	Receptionist plans quoted; message taking from £55 a month for weekday cover, read 23 October 2026	24/7 answering sold as a distinct service	moneypenny.com message taking service, read 23 October 2026
CallCare	Quoted on call volume, users, service type and hours	Not published	24/7, 365 days

Four of the ten UK telephone answering providers compared state that they price by time used rather than only per call: Office Answers charges 85p a minute of receptionist time, Face For Business charges by the second on its Taster and Inclusive Minutes plans without rounding up to the minute, Moneypenny sells plans of inclusive minutes and, if you choose, charges per minute beyond them, and ReceptionHQ offers per-minute pricing beside per-call. Office Answers is the only one of the four that publishes the per-minute rate itself. The rest price per call, per included allowance or per bespoke quote (read 23 October 2026).
Published entry prices run from £15 a month plus VAT and £1.10 a call (ReceptionHQ MessageExpress pay as you go) to £75 a month for 30 included calls (Pocket Receptionist). CallCare publishes no price at all, and Moneypenny none for its receptionist plans, though its message taking page states from £55 a month for weekday cover. All read 23 October 2026.
Three providers publish a rate for each call beyond a subscription or an allowance: £1.10 on ReceptionHQ's MessageExpress plans, £1.75 on Answer4u's pay as you go and £2.99 beyond a Pocket Receptionist plan allowance (read 23 October 2026).
Two providers here publish a separate charge for the message itself: Answer4u at £0.11 per email message and £0.17 per SMS message on top of the per-call fee, and Office Answers at 10p per text message, with messages by email free (read 23 October 2026).
Seven of the ten providers state 24/7 or 365 day cover in some form. Pocket Receptionist publishes extended hours of 08:00 to 20:00 on every plan instead, Face For Business answers 8am to 8pm on weekdays, 9am to 5:30pm on Saturday and 10am to 4pm on Sunday, and Office Answers 08:30 to 18:00 Monday to Friday; ReceptionHQ states 24/7 is included with no after-hours surcharge (read 23 October 2026).

Cite this page

“How UK telephone answering services charge, and what the published entry price actually buys”, Answering Service Compare, https://answeringservicecompare.com/ (updated 2026-10-23). Every price is copied from the provider's own page, read again on 23 October 2026, and reproduced, not estimated or averaged; the service descriptions were read on 15 August 2026, and for Face For Business and Office Answers on 23 October 2026. Where a provider publishes no price we record that rather than guessing, because quote-only is a real answer and two of the ten give it. Where a price sits behind a form, as with AnswerConnect, we record only the figure visible without submitting one. Charging basis and VAT treatment are taken from the provider's own wording, and most of these pages do not state VAT at all. AllDayPA is absent because its site would not serve us a readable page; Best Reception is absent because none of its pages we read on 23 October 2026 states a price. No provider pays us and no placement on this site is paid.

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The detail

Sourced, dated, kept current.

Answering service pricing in the UK

UK answering service pricing from £15 a month: five charging models, every published per call and per minute rate, and which is cheapest at your volume.

Pay per call answering service: UK prices

What UK answering services charge per call on pay as you go, the monthly fee that still sits on top, and the call count where an allowance plan becomes cheaper.

Virtual receptionist or answering service: the difference

Message taking, call handling, virtual reception and outsourced contact centre are four different products sold under overlapping names. What each actually does.

Ten questions to ask a UK answering service

What counts as a call, where the agents actually sit, who owns the number, how the script gets updated, and the other questions that decide whether this works out.

How we chose these, and how they are ordered

Every provider here answers business calls with human agents in the UK and sells to small and medium businesses, not only enterprises. Each had a page we could read: on 15 August 2026 for the first eight we compared, and on 23 October 2026 for Face For Business and Office Answers.

Answering services that are purely automated or AI-first are out of scope. Several of these providers now sell an AI receptionist alongside the human one, and where they do we say so. The comparison is about services staffed by people.

The order is by published entry price, cheapest first, with the two providers that publish no receptionist price at the end. That order was chosen because price transparency is what a buyer can check before making contact, not because cheapest is best.

Read the charging basis column before the price column. A £19.99 subscription charging £1.75 a call comes to £72.49 at thirty calls before message fees, against £75 for a plan with thirty calls included. The same two models land in wildly different places at ten calls or at a hundred.

Two providers are missing and both are worth naming. AllDayPA, one of the largest UK providers, serves its site as a splash page that our checks cannot get past. On 23 October 2026 its pricing page refused our read outright, so we could not read a price or a service description at source.

Best Reception is missing for a different reason. Its pages read normally on 23 October 2026 and offer a free 14-day trial, but none of the pages we read states a price. Its free trial page says it suggests a call handling package near the end of the trial, matched to the number of messages taken.

Neither absence is a judgement on the provider. Face For Business, which sat behind a bot challenge when this table was first built, served its pricing page in full on 23 October 2026 and is compared here. So is Office Answers, whose site is office-answers.co.uk.

What this table does not tell you: what the service sounds like. There are no ratings, scores or review counts here. The quality of an answering service is almost entirely about the individual people on your account and the script you write with them, and no comparison table can measure that.

Most providers here offer a free trial precisely because that is the only real test. Use the table to work out which charging model fits your call pattern, then spend the trial listening. We take no commission from any provider on this page and carry no paid placements.

ReceptionHQ receptionhq.co.uk pricing
Message Direct message-direct.co.uk telephone answering
Answer4u answer-4u.com virtual receptionist
Office Answers office-answers.co.uk prices
JAM jam.co.uk virtual receptionist service
AnswerConnect answerconnect.co.uk plans
Face For Business ffb.co.uk answering service pricing
Pocket Receptionist pocketreceptionist.co.uk pricing
Moneypenny moneypenny.com UK virtual receptionist
CallCare callcare247.com

Answering Service Compare is an information site. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to any answering service or provider named here, and nothing on it is legal or contractual advice. We take no commission from any provider in this comparison and carry no paid placements. Prices, hours and terms change without notice: every figure carries the date we read it on the provider's own page, and the details that decide your bill, notably what counts as a chargeable call, are set by the contract rather than the website.

The questions we get

How much does a telephone answering service cost in the UK?

On 23 October 2026, published entry prices ran from £15 a month plus VAT (ReceptionHQ MessageExpress, plus £1.10 a call) to £75 for 30 calls (Pocket Receptionist). The other six start from £19.20 to £49 a month; the table above lists each. CallCare and Moneypenny quote; Moneypenny's message taking starts from £55 for weekday cover.

What is the most affordable answering service in the UK?

Cheapest entry, read 23 October 2026: ReceptionHQ MessageExpress, £15 a month plus VAT and £1.10 a call, or £26 at ten calls. Answer4u is £19.99 plus £1.75 a call, £37.49 at ten; both before message fees and VAT. Above about thirty calls, Pocket Receptionist's £75 for 30 or £145 for 60 can be cheaper (pay per call prices).

Are UK answering services charged per call or per minute?

Mostly per call or per plan; four of the ten state they price by time. Office Answers: £25 a month plus 85p a minute, the only per-minute rate published. Face For Business bills two plans by the second. Moneypenny can, if you choose, charge per minute once inclusive minutes run out; ReceptionHQ offers per-minute beside per-call. The table shows each.

Which UK answering services use UK-based agents?

Nine of the ten state it, differently. Message Direct and CallCare state 100 per cent in-house teams; Answer4u, Face For Business, JAM, Pocket Receptionist, Moneypenny and Office Answers state UK-based staff. ReceptionHQ states UK receptionists take most UK calls in office hours, overflowing to Australia and the US after hours and at peaks. AnswerConnect's UK site does not say.

Do answering services cover nights and weekends?

Most do. Message Direct, Answer4u, JAM, AnswerConnect, Moneypenny and CallCare state 24/7 or 365 day cover; several sell out of hours alone, often the cheapest way to buy. ReceptionHQ states 24/7 is included on any live plan, with no after-hours surcharge. Pocket Receptionist, Face For Business and Office Answers publish set hours instead; the table lists them.

Which answering services offer appointment scheduling?

Several do, usually on a higher tier. Pocket Receptionist names Google, Outlook, Calendly, Zoho, HubSpot and Salesforce. ReceptionHQ sells MyDiary scheduling, from £30 plus VAT. Message Direct states it works with almost any online diary, Answer4u with any diary or CRM. Face For Business books appointments on its Inclusive Minutes plan. Test it with your own diary in the trial.

How long am I tied in?

Generally short for small businesses, but only seven of the ten publish terms. Five state rolling or no lock-in terms: ReceptionHQ, Message Direct, Pocket Receptionist, Answer4u (pay as you go) and Office Answers. Moneypenny states three months minimum on smaller schemes, Face For Business 90 days. JAM, AnswerConnect and CallCare publish none: get notice periods in writing.

Why is AllDayPA not compared here?

AllDayPA, a well known UK provider, would not serve us a readable page. On 15 August 2026 it showed a splash page our checks cannot pass; on 23 October 2026 its pricing page refused our read. An unsourced row is not published; its absence is no judgement on the company. Face For Business, blocked in August, is now compared.

Are there answering service reviews or ratings here?

No. This site has no ratings, scores or review counts: quality depends almost entirely on the people on your account and your script, which no table can measure. We compare what each publishes: charging, entry price, hours, agent location, contract terms. Most offer a free trial, 7 to 30 days, and the trial is the real review.

Sources

This site's own datasets, every figure quoted from its source and dated:

The median published figure in the UK Answering Service Capability Board is 42.50 GBP across 6 sources' own pages (range 14.99 to 129 GBP), read 11 November 2026.
For monthly bundle, the median published figure in the UK Answering Service Price Index is 29.50 GBP across 26 figures from the sources' own pages (range 10 to 399 GBP), read 11 November 2026.
The UK Call Handling Compliance Rules carries 2 published figures read from 2 sources' own pages, from 28 to 28 day, read 7 November 2026.

Compare the charging model, not the headline

Ten UK answering services, how each one actually charges, what the published entry price buys, and which two will not quote until you call.

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