Phone answering service UK (2026): prices compared

A telephone answering service puts a person on your phone when you cannot be there. Whether you search for an answering call service, a call answering service or virtual receptionist services, you are buying the same thing: someone else's staff, answering in your name.

This chapter shows what UK services charge, checked on their own pricing pages on 3 October 2026, what a month costs at your call volume, and when an AI receptionist does the job for less. It is one chapter of our complete guide to AI receptionists.

Line wrote this guide, and Line sells an AI receptionist. Every competitor price links to its source.

What is a telephone answering service?

A telephone answering service is a company whose receptionists answer your business calls in your company's name, from their own office. They take the caller's details and send you a message by email, text or app. Many also transfer calls, book appointments or cover nights and weekends. You pay per call, per minute or for a monthly bundle.

The three kinds of answering service

The names overlap, and "virtual receptionist" now also describes AI products. Ask any provider whether a person or software will answer. Our chapter on AI vs virtual receptionists compares the two.

How does a phone answering service work?

You forward your calls to a number the service gives you. A receptionist answers in your business name, follows the brief you wrote, and sends you the message. If you asked for it, they put urgent calls through to you.

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

A UK telephone answering service costs 99p to £2.20 a call on pay as you go in October 2026, excluding VAT, and many add a £15 to £20 monthly fee. Call bundles work out at 82p to £2.50 a call. Per-minute plans charge about £1 to £1.85 a minute. Two of the best-known names publish no price at all.

Phone answering service cost depends on how many calls you get, how long they last, and the hours you need covered. Here is what 12 UK providers publish.

UK answering service prices, checked 3 October 2026

Prices exclude VAT. ReceptionHQ, Answer.co.uk and Posh say so on the page; the others do not say, so ask. Answer.co.uk's £2.20 is its rate for new customers.

Two more providers publish only a starting point. Message Direct starts at £19.20 a month, with 24/7 cover and one month's notice, but no per-call rate. Virtually There sells pay as you go by quote, with 24/7 cover and no set-up fee.

What a month costs at 50, 150 and 300 calls

Each cell shows the price excluding VAT, then including 20% VAT.

How we worked it out:

• ReceptionHQ pay as you go: £15 + (calls × £1.10). At 150 calls: £15 + £165 = £180.
• Answer4u: £19.99 + (calls × £1.75). At 150 calls: £19.99 + £262.50 = £282.49.
• Answer.co.uk: calls × £2.20. Bundles can cut this by up to 20%.
• Posh: 2 minutes a call. 100 minutes is the £128 plan. 300 minutes is the £254 plan (200 minutes) + 100 × £1.25 = £379. 600 minutes is the £594 plan (500 minutes) + 100 × £1.20 = £714.
• ReceptionHQ bundles: the 50-call plan at £49; the 100-call plan at £85 + 50 × £1.10 = £140; the 300-call plan at £255.
• Pocket Receptionist: the 30-call plan at £75 + 20 × £2.99 = £134.80; the 100-call plan at £230 + 50 × £2.99 = £379.50; the 300-call plan at £635.
• VAT: price × 1.2. Answer4u and Pocket Receptionist do not say whether prices include VAT; we assume not.
• Call length: no source publishes a UK average, so we used 2 minutes. Check yours on your phone bill.

Three things stand out. A bundle sized to your volume is the cheapest human option: 150 calls cost £140 on ReceptionHQ's bundle, against £180 on its pay as you go. The same 150 calls cost almost three times as much at the dearest provider. And per-minute plans depend on call length: at 3 minutes a call, the Posh bill at 150 calls rises from £379 to £548.

For the AI side of this maths, read how much an AI receptionist costs in the UK.

Hidden costs in telephone answering service pricing

The headline rate is rarely the bill. Ask about each of these before you sign.

1. Set-up fees. AnswerConnect charges £49.99 on some plans and NoMissedCalls £15 or £35. ReceptionHQ, The Answer Centre and Face For Business charge none.
2. Rounding. AnswerConnect rounds every call up to the next minute. Posh also counts time a receptionist spends on tasks for your account.
3. Overage. Pocket Receptionist's 30-call plan works out at £2.50 a call. Call 31 costs £2.99.
4. Night surcharges. NoMissedCalls adds 85p a day for 24/7 cover.
5. Minimum terms. Moneypenny asks for three months on small plans and 6 or 12 months on larger ones. Most others are monthly.
6. What counts as a call. Pocket Receptionist charges for "any call our receptionists answer on your behalf", which includes sales calls, wrong numbers and spam. Face For Business does not charge for sales or nuisance calls on its Message Only plan and above.
7. Message charges. At 150 calls with a text for each, 10p to 17p texts add £15 to £25.50 a month.
8. Your own forwarding costs. On most mobile plans, a forwarded call uses your minutes.
9. VAT. Add 20% if you cannot reclaim it. Answer.co.uk's £2.20 is £2.64 on the invoice.

How much does an after-hours or 24/7 answering service cost?

Some UK services include nights, weekends and bank holidays at no extra cost. Others charge a daily fee, about £26 a month at NoMissedCalls, or sell night cover by quote.

• 24/7 included: ReceptionHQ (its after-hours calls go to staff in Australia or the US), Answer.co.uk, AnswerConnect, Posh (staff in Reading) and Answer4u.
• 24/7 for a fee: NoMissedCalls, 85p a day.
• 24/7 by quote or as a separate service: Moneypenny (standard hours 8:30 to 18:00), Pocket Receptionist (standard hours 08:00 to 20:00) and Verbatim (weekdays 8:00 to 18:30, Saturday mornings).
• Evenings and weekends, no overnight cover stated: Face For Business, on plans from £115 a month.

Outside the hours you pay for, Moneypenny, Verbatim and Face For Business send callers to voicemail. Sources are in the price table.

Who needs an out-of-hours answering service

• Trades with emergency work. Leaks, no heating, lock-outs. The caller needs someone tonight.
• Property and lettings. Tenants report repairs at night. Urgent ones go to a contractor; the rest wait for the morning.
• Care providers. An on-call manager must hear about urgent calls at once.

For emergencies, the brief matters more than the price. Write down what counts as urgent, who is on call each night, and how the receptionist reaches them: ring, then text, then ring a backup. A message in an inbox at 2am is not an emergency procedure.

The AI option for nights

An after-hours call answering service is where AI is strongest. An AI receptionist answers at 2am at the same rate as 2pm, because there is no night shift to pay for. It answers questions, books, checks jobs and takes the details for anything urgent, and it hears a distressed caller the way a person does. Before you trust it with nights, check how it gets a real emergency to your on-call person.

Answering service, AI receptionist or both?

Pay for a person when you want a human voice on every call, or when a regulator requires one. Use AI for the rest: with access to your diary and systems it answers, books, checks and fixes on the call, at any hour and any volume. Most businesses that take more than a few calls a day do best with AI first and a person for the decisions they keep.

When a person is worth paying for

• A human voice is part of your service. If you promise clients a person on every call, a human service keeps that promise.
• High-value first calls you want a person on. If one new client is worth thousands of pounds, £2 for a person on the first conversation is cheap. An AI receptionist can still take the enquiry, check the facts and book that conversation.
• Regulated work. Solicitors stay accountable for work done through others under the SRA Code for Firms (paragraph 2.3). Under the Consumer Duty, the FCA says firms are likely to need "a real-time human interface, such as a phone service" for some customer issues (FCA FG22/5).

When AI is better

• Volume. At 300 calls a month, the human services above cost £255 to £714 before VAT. At typical UK AI rates of 15p to 37p a minute, the same 600 minutes cost about £90 to £222.
• Getting things done. Opening hours, prices, "is my job still on for Thursday?", "can you move my visit?". With your diary and systems connected, an AI receptionist answers and acts on the call. A message-taking service takes a message, and you still call back.
• Upset callers. An AI receptionist hears tone, acknowledges the problem and, with access to the customer's record, can put it right within the limits you set. A message-taker can only promise a call back.
• A full record. An AI keeps a transcript of the whole call. A human service sends what the receptionist wrote down.

The hybrid

Many answering services now sell both. Moneypenny blends its PAs with its AI receptionist. Answer.co.uk sells AI answering at £10 a month plus 85p a call next to its human service, and Answer4u sells an AI receptionist next to its human plans. AnswerConnect and Face For Business stay human only. You can also build your own hybrid: AI answers first, or only at night, and your team takes the decisions you keep for a person.

Callers accept AI more readily when they can reach a person. In a January 2026 survey of 5,001 UK adults commissioned by Moneypenny, which sells both, 54% were comfortable with an AI that said it was an AI at the start, and 68% when it would hand them to a person (Moneypenny / Censuswide). So say it is an assistant, and give callers a route to a person.

Compare the cost for your call volume

Enter your calls a month. The calculator prices a human service across four pay-as-you-go plans from the table above, 99p to £2.20 a call, and compares it with voicemail, a full-time receptionist and AI.

How to choose a call answering service for a small business: 12 checks

Check the people, the hours, the script, the contract and the data before the price. A cheap answering service for a small business that loses messages costs more than a dear one that does not.

1. UK-based staff, day and night. Ask where calls are answered at 3am and at peak times. ReceptionHQ, for example, sends after-hours calls to Australia or the US.
2. Hours. Match the cover to when your calls come, including bank holidays.
3. Script control. Can you change the script yourself, the same day?
4. How messages arrive. Email, text or app, how fast, and at what cost.
5. Transfers. Can they put calls through, and is the transfer charged?
6. Diary access. Can they book into your calendar, or only take a request?
7. Call recording and data protection. Ask whether calls are recorded and how long recordings and messages are kept. The service processes your callers' data for you, so UK GDPR requires a written contract with it. Our chapter on GDPR and UK law covers the notices you need.
8. Contract and notice period. Minimum term, notice, and how prices can rise.
9. Free trial. Most offer one, from 7 days (ReceptionHQ, Posh, Face For Business) to 30 days (Answer4u). Run it on real calls.
10. Reporting. A call log with times, lengths and outcomes, so you can check the bill.
11. Overflow or full cover. Answering only the calls you miss costs less than answering every call.
12. References in your sector. Ask for two clients in your trade. A service that knows lettings or law asks the right questions unprompted.

If you are leaving a quote-only service, our Moneypenny alternatives chapter compares options with public prices, human and AI.

How to start or switch without missing calls

Run the old and new set-ups side by side. Brief the service, test it with your own calls, then switch the divert. Give notice on the old service only after the new one has handled a full week of real calls.

1. Write the brief. Use the briefing sheet below.
2. Make five test calls before you divert. Ring as a new customer, an existing customer, an urgent case, a caller with a hard question, and a salesperson. Check each message for the name, the number, the reason and the spelling.
3. Switch on forwarding. Use the codes below, or the call rules in your phone system.
4. Run both for a week. Read every message. Call back a few callers and ask how it went.
5. Fix the brief. Every wrong or missing answer in week one is a line to add.
6. Give notice on the old service. Check its minimum term and notice period first.

These codes work on most UK mobiles and BT lines. Not every network or plan supports forwarding. Our guide to forwarding calls to another phone has the details for each network.

What to give the service: a briefing sheet

Fill in the square brackets and send it before your first call.

ANSWERING SERVICE BRIEF
Answer as: "Good [morning/afternoon], [Business name], how can I help?"
What we do: [one sentence]
Areas we cover: [towns or postcodes]
Opening hours: [days and times, and bank holidays]
Take from every caller: name, best number, email, reason for calling
Also ask: [postcode / type of job / how urgent / new or existing customer]
Never promise: [prices, dates, refunds, anything only we can decide]
Urgent means: [e.g. water leak, no heating with a vulnerable person, lock-out]
For urgent calls: ring [name, number]. No answer in 2 minutes: ring [backup].
Send messages to: [email] and text [mobile]
Callers asking for [name]: [put through / take a message]
Sales calls: [no message / one-line message]

Add these scripts to the brief for the words the receptionist says.

More greetings and scripts are in business voicemail greetings and receptionist scripts.

The best telephone answering services in the UK, by need

There is no single best telephone answering service. The right one depends on your volume, your hours and what a call is worth to you. These groups use only the published facts above. We have not rated providers we have not tested.

• Cheapest pay as you go: The Answer Centre at 99p a call with no monthly fee (hours not stated), and ReceptionHQ at £15 a month plus £1.10 a call with 24/7 included.
• Cheapest at volume: ReceptionHQ's bundles, down to 85p a call at 300 calls and 82p at 500.
• 24/7 with UK staff at night: Posh (every plan, staff in Reading), Message Direct (UK-based PAs, from £19.20 a month) and Moneypenny (by quote, three-month minimum).
• Law firms and firms that want a named team: Face For Business, with UK-based PAs, a dedicated lead PA and call recordings from £99 a month, and Moneypenny, with UK-based receptionists and CRM integrations. Verbatim's UK team includes transfers in its price.
• Lettings and block management: any 24/7 service above, with your emergency repair procedure written into the brief.
• AI-first: Line gives UK businesses a UK number and a team phone system with an app. Its pre-built AI receptionist, Molly, answers calls in a natural voice, and also answers texts, WhatsApp, web chat and email. It takes the caller's details, and the call and its transcript are kept for your team to read in the Line app, alongside texts and WhatsApp in a shared inbox. Opening hours and a workflow builder decide who answers when. Voicemails are transcribed, and unanswered callers get a missed-call text back. Keep your number by forwarding, or move it to Line. Prices are on the pricing page, and a demo in our guide rings you after reading your website.

Sources and how we checked

We checked every price on the provider's own UK page on 3 October 2026. Where a provider publishes no price, we say so rather than estimate. We found no published UK answering-service price for Kelly Office, Get Me Answered, Calls9 or Call Handling Services, so they are not listed. If a price has changed, tell us at hello@useline.io.