Ghostwriter or in-house hire?

The comparison usually gets made on salary, which is the wrong number.

The actual cost of the hire

A content marketer with two or three years' experience is somewhere around £35,000–£45,000 in the UK outside London, more in it. Call it £40,000.

That is not what they cost.

Employer National Insurance runs at 15% above a £5,000 threshold — roughly £5,250 on a £40,000 salary. Auto-enrolment pension adds at least 3%, so another £1,000 or so. A recruiter will take 15–20% of first-year salary, call it £7,000, though you might get lucky.

Then equipment, software, and the part nobody costs: three to six months before they're producing anything you'd publish under your own name.

Realistically £55,000–£60,000 in year one, and a meaningful chunk of your own time spent managing them.

Those are 2026/27 figures. The rate and the threshold are frozen to 2030/31 as things stand, but check they still hold before you build a business case on them.

The comparison nobody makes properly

| | In-house hire | Senior ghostwriter | | --- | --- | --- | | Year-one cost | ~£55,000–£60,000 | £42,000 at £3,500/month | | Time to useful output | Three to six months | Two to three weeks | | Seniority | Two or three years in | Twenty | | Who manages them | You | Nobody | | Holiday, sickness, notice | Yours to cover | Not your problem | | Leaves after eighteen months | Frequently | Also possible | | Knows your industry | Learns it | Learns it |

Where the in-house hire genuinely wins

We're not going to pretend this is one-sided.

An employee is in the building. They hear the thing said in the corridor that never makes it to a scheduled call. Over a year that proximity produces material a weekly conversation won't reach.

They also do everything else. Social, email, the website, the deck nobody wants to make. A ghostwriter does one thing and won't touch the rest.

And if you need volume across many people — five executives, a company blog, a newsletter, case studies — a person in-house is the more sensible structure. We take five clients in total. We're not built for breadth.

Where the ghostwriter wins

Seniority, immediately and permanently.

The reason executive content usually fails isn't a writing problem. It's that a junior writer cannot push back on a senior person. They can't say "that's the boring version of this argument" to someone three levels above them, so they write down what they're told and everyone quietly wonders why it's flat.

We can. That's most of what you're paying for.

The other one is that we've done this across a lot of industries, and pattern recognition across industries is the thing an in-house person structurally cannot develop, because they only ever see one.

The hybrid that actually works

The most sensible version we see: an in-house marketer running everything, and a ghostwriter on the founder or CEO specifically.

The exec voice is the highest-stakes and the hardest to delegate internally. It's also the one where a junior mistake is most expensive. Everything else — the company channels, the campaigns, the operational work — is better in-house and cheaper there.

If you've already got someone in-house, we'd usually rather work alongside them than replace them. They know things we don't.

When to hire instead of engaging us

If you need more than about twenty pieces a month across multiple people, hire.

If the writing is a core part of your product — you're a media business, or an education business — hire, and hire well.

If you want someone in the room every day, hire. We won't be.

And if £3,500 a month is a number that would make you anxious rather than merely careful, don't do either yet.