A 60-second TikTok about the International Butler Academy housed in a sprawling mansion in the Netherlands racked up hundreds of comments about the same thing: what does being a butler pay?
‘They probably get paid more than teachers, nurses, and [members of the] defence force,’ one message read.
The TikTok user who speculated on a butler’s salary isn’t far off the mark.
According to the International Butler Academy’s website, a butler in Europe can earn anywhere between €40,000 to €75,000 per year – with some raking in €100,000 or more per year.
The average base salary for a teacher in the UK, by comparison, is £31,000, according to PayScale.
Salaries for butler jobs listed on Bespoke Bureau, a London-based home help service agency, range between £31,000 to £60,000 – depending on various factors such as location and years of experience.
Unsurprisingly, wage rates advertised by the bureau’s clients in Middle Eastern countries such as Qatar and Bahrain are considerably higher than their European counterparts.
In a 2020 interview with Vice, professional butler André Meester said he made nearly £4,000 working 60 hours per week for his Dutch principal (or employer).
Vincent Vermeulen (not pictured) described how his School for Butlers in Belgium equips its students with all the skills required to be a modern-day butler in a new interview
Vermeulen, whose great-grandfather Frans worked as butler to a Belgian baron 140 years ago, also noted a surge in the demand for butlers trained in the British aristorcratic way of life to ease their billionaire employers into high society
‘That’s less than in some other countries’, he told the outlet. ‘Many butlers make between €5,000 (£4,550) and €15,000 (£13,700) a month, but I’m off on weekends.’
The perks of being a butler to wealthy individuals aren’t too shabby either; Andre’s benefits include international travel, pricey dinners, and a brand new Mercedes-Benz SL worth £145,000.
He added: ‘Recently, my wallet broke and I got a new one from Cartier. That wallet costs more money than there’s ever been in it.’
A modern-day Jeeves with actor good looks to boot, Bertold Weisner told The Times he has heard of butlers being offered six-figure salaries north of $300,000 (£239,000) as well as million-dollar cash bonuses.
The University of St Andrews dropout, who rubbed shoulders with the Princess of Wales during her time at the Scottish university, added: ‘One ex-colleague worked for ten years for someone and every year got a watch; $100,000 of watches.’
As word about these job benefits has gotten out, there’s been a rise in the number of people exploring butling as a career path – and applying to training institutes that turn out world-class butlers employed all over the world.
Speaking to The Times, Vincent Vermeulen described how his School for Butlers in Belgium equips its students with all the skills required to be a modern-day Butler – from wine pairing and shining shoes to protecting their employers against intrusions of privacy.
Vermeulen, whose great-grandfather Frans worked as butler to a Belgian baron 140 years ago, also noted a surge in the demand for butlers trained in the British aristorcratic way of life – linked to the rise of tech billionaires.
According to the International Butler Academy’s website, a butler in Europe can earn anywhere between €40,000 to €75,000 per year – with some raking in €100,000 or more per year
‘If you look at the old aristocrats it took them decades, if not centuries, to build their wealth,’ he said. ‘Ultra high net worth families these days might have built that wealth in a few years. So the place they’re coming from could be completely different.’
He noted the rise of ‘dot.com billionaires’ from countries like China, India, or the United States, explaining they have a ‘completely different mindset’ from a ‘fifth-generation aristocrat…brought up with silk napkins and silverware’.
The director of recruitment agency Bespoke Bureau, Sara Vestin Rahmani suggested ‘it is the accent – Queen’s English – the etiquette and status of the British butler an d his style that’ the nouveau riche are buying into in an interview with the BBC.
Rahmani, who also runs her own British Butler Academy, told The Times that her roster of mega-rich clients looking for househod staff largely comprises oligarchs, Chinese business people, and Middle Eastern families with oil money.
‘We have a few aristocrats and British royals, but the lord and lady of the manor often don’t have enough money to keep staff full-time any more,’ she said.
Having high-end staff, including professionally trained butlers, has become a new status symbol in India, with Wiesner telling the Business Standard that ‘Luxury today means attaining the levels of sophistication that others merely aspire to’ in a 2012 interview.
The Suffolk native also told the outlet he earned £100,000 per year while working for an Indian businessman in Chennai, the capital city of southern state Tamil Nadu.
His job description reportedly included everything from transplanting a fully-grown tree into his principal’s garden to using an army helicopter to search for the family’s lost dog.
Perks of being a butler include expensive gifts, international travel, and fancy meals
Despite the occasionally bizarre demand, however, Simeon Rosset – who has worked for Tony Blair and Cliff Richard – being a butler is the best job in the world.
‘People have taken me to places on private jets and helicopters just to serve them,’ he told The Sun.
‘There are not many jobs where you get to do that, other than if you’re a celebrity or CEO of a FTSE 100 company.’
He also recounted meeting celebrities such as Quincy Jones, U2 frontman Bono, and ‘a lot of very influential people’ including prime ministers, presidents, billionaires, and ‘several of the richest people in the entire world’.
While butlers are usually paid handsomely, the cost to their personal lives are quite high.
‘There was just no way under any circumstances that I could have kept my own dog, a girlfriend or a home. Everything was tied to his movements.’
Despite its disadvantages, there has been a revival of buttling as a profession over the past decade.
In 2013, the International Guild of Professional Butlers estimated there were 10,000 professional heads of households working in the UK.
There has been a revival of buttling as a profession over the past decade – linked to the rise of tech billionaires in countries like China and India
This was up from around 100 butlers in the Eighties, with the Guild’s former Chairman Robert Wennekes telling the BBC that ‘countries such a China and Russia are screaming for top staff’ in 2012.
On the back of a marked surge in the demand for British butlers, institutes promising world-class training have mushroomed all over the world – including in Europe.
Wennekes runs his Internation Butler Academy in the Netherlands that offers an eight-week program that costs a cool €12,750 (£10,592 at the time of writing).
Some of the example lessons outlined in the curriculum include ‘How to deal with a greedy guest’, ‘The art of bed-making’, and ‘How to understand and prevent the causes of food poisoning’.
Vermeulen’s rival School For Butler academy runs programs of varying lengths – including a five-day ‘taste for service’ course for €1,795 (£1,500).
The institute’s eight-week ‘head butler’ course will set you back by €12,075 or £10,000 – including €4,125 for food and boarding.
Important components of the curriculum include handling silverware, dressing a table, handling different types of guests, and the ‘three golden rules of behaving with your principal’.
At Rahmani’s academy, students are taught the nuances of silver service, butler service, and Russian service, as well as how to pack a suitcase and decant wine.
And while the course of study at these institutes has, over time, evolved to include modern-day technologies and aspects of cybsersecurity and surveillance, Wiesner believes the basics of being a butler haven’t changed much over the last century.
Regardless of whether they are English atristocrats or ‘dot.com billionaires’, ‘they are just craving something wealthy people throughout history have wanted’.
‘And that is for someone else to do their dirty work for them.’
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