If you run a taxi or private-hire firm, you have probably asked the question quietly: what would it actually cost to have someone else answer these phones properly? The honest answer is that it depends on how much cover you need — but the comparison most owners get wrong is the cost of doing it in-house. Here is the full picture.
What in-house cover really costs
The National Living Wage is £12.71 an hour from April 2026, rising to £13.21 from April 2027. That headline rate is only the start. On top of it you pay employer National Insurance and pension contributions, holiday pay, sick cover, training time and the cost of recruiting every time someone leaves. Then there is the maths of cover itself: one seat staffed around the clock means 168 hours a week. A full-time telephonist works about 40. So a single 24/7 seat needs more than four people before holidays and sickness are even considered — which is why most firms cover the busy hours in-house and leave the rest to ring out.
What a call answering service charges
Outsourced call operators for taxi firms are usually priced in one of two ways: a flat hourly rate for the hours you want covered, or a per-booking or per-call charge. Flat hourly is easier to compare and easier to budget. At Coredesk, cover starts from £4 per hour for trained operators who work inside your own dispatch system — iCabbi, Autocab, Cordic and others — and answer in your company name. Against £12.71 an hour before on-costs, the saving on the hours you outsource can reach up to 60%.
The questions that change the price
- Which hours? Nights and weekends are the cheapest place to start and the hours most firms struggle to staff.
- Which system? Operators who already know your dispatch system need no training period on your side.
- Answering only, or dispatch too? Straight booking-taking costs less than full fleet control.
- What happens at peak? Ask whether overflow cover is included when three calls land at once on a Friday night.
The cost nobody puts in the quote: missed calls
A ringing phone that nobody answers is not free. If just five bookings a week go unanswered at £15 each, that is £325 a month walking to the firm down the road. You can run your own numbers in the missed-call calculator on our homepage — most owners are surprised by their own figure.
How to compare fairly
Compare the full in-house cost per covered hour (wage plus on-costs plus holiday and sick cover) with the answering service’s rate for the same hours. Then test the service rather than trusting the brochure: a proper trial should put operators on your real phones, in your name, inside your system, with recordings you can listen back to. Ours runs for 7 days, free, with no card required — start with our taxi call answering service page or go straight to the free trial.
