Guide

Staffing and Running a Private Island

An island does not run itself, and the gap between owning one and living well on one is almost entirely a question of people. This is an orientation to the roles, the indicative wages, the logistics of housing a team, and the realities of being an employer in a jurisdiction that is not your own.

The romance of a private island is solitude. The reality is that solitude is manufactured, quietly, by other people: the person who keeps the generator running, who meets the supply boat, who notices the salt corrosion on a hinge before it becomes a failed door in a storm. A house on the mainland can be neglected for a season and forgiven. An island in the tropics cannot. Salt, sun, storm and distance work on it continuously, and the only thing that holds them off is a competent, present team.

On an island, staff are not a luxury layered over the asset. They are the mechanism by which the asset continues to exist.

The caretaker minimum

Every inhabited island needs, at the irreducible minimum, a caretaker or a caretaker couple who live on site year-round. Their job is presence: running and maintaining the plant, the power and energy systems and the water supply, keeping ahead of corrosion and rot, receiving deliveries, and being the pair of hands and eyes on the ground when the owner is away, which on most islands is most of the year.

A live-in caretaker couple is the classic and most efficient arrangement: one leaning toward maintenance and boats, the other toward housekeeping and provisioning. As a broad indication, a capable caretaker couple in the Caribbean might cost in the region of USD 60,000 to 120,000 a year in combined salary, on top of housing, utilities, food and the boat they run. That is the floor. It buys custody of the island, not a staffed household. The moment you want to arrive to a running, provisioned, serviced home rather than to open up a shuttered one, the team grows.

The full household and estate team

A fully staffed island in regular family use looks less like a house and more like a small, self-contained hospitality operation. The roles are familiar from large estates and from yachting, and indeed the yachting labour market is where many island staff are recruited, because the skills, self-sufficiency, discretion and comfort with marine logistics transfer directly.

These are indicative ranges drawn from the private-household and yacht-crew markets, not quotations; a specific island in a specific jurisdiction with a specific standard of service will land where the local labour market and your expectations meet. What the table shows is the shape of the thing. A modestly staffed family island might carry six to ten people in season. A larger estate, or one that also earns, carries many more.

Annual staffing budgets

Owners consistently underestimate the total, because salary is only part of it. To salary you must add housing and its utilities, food for the staff, insurance and statutory contributions, recruitment and turnover, rotation travel, uniforms and training. A useful planning discipline is to take the headline salary bill and add a meaningful margin, often a third to a half again, to reach the true cost of the household.

In round terms: a caretaker-only island might run a staffing budget of USD 100,000 to 200,000 a year all-in. A comfortably staffed family island in regular use runs from perhaps USD 500,000 into seven figures once a manager, chef, housekeeping, boat crew and grounds are counted with their overheads. A large, fully serviced estate can exceed that severalfold. Staffing is, for most owners, the largest single line in the annual running cost, ahead of energy, insurance and maintenance, which is why it sits at the centre of our note on the true cost of ownership.

Housing the team

Where the staff sleep is not a detail; it is a building programme. On the mainland, staff can live off site and commute. On an island there is no off site. Everyone who works there full-time lives there, which means staff housing is part of the original build, sited for both dignity and discretion: close enough to serve, far enough to preserve the separation that privacy depends on. It should be built to the same storm standard as the main house, since the team shelters there in a cyclone, and it draws on the same water and power that everything else does. Under-providing here is a false economy; cramped, poorly separated staff quarters are a leading cause of the turnover that quietly erodes the running of an island.

Rotation and logistics

Isolation is demanding on people. The yachting model of structured rotation, time on and time off, exists because continuous service in a remote place burns staff out, and burnt-out staff make the mistakes that sink an operation. A serious island plans for rotation: relief cover so the caretaker couple can leave, travel arrangements to and from the mainland, and a provisioning rhythm that keeps the larder and the fuel stocked between supply runs. All of this depends on the island's access and transport, which is why staffing and access have to be planned together rather than in sequence.

Being an employer abroad

Employing people on an island means being an employer under the labour law of that country, which is frequently more protective of the employee than owners expect. Work permits and quotas often require you to prioritise local hire for roles a national could fill, reserving foreign permits for genuinely specialist positions. Minimum wages, mandatory contributions, notice periods, severance and repatriation obligations all apply and all differ by jurisdiction; the picture in the Seychelles is not the picture in the Bahamas. Payroll, contracts and statutory filings usually have to run through a local entity or agent. This is orientation, not advice, and it is exactly the sort of ground you want mapped before completion, which is why employment sits alongside title and tax in our acquisition brief and belongs in every island dossier.

• Work-permit quotas and local-hire requirements
• Minimum wage, statutory contributions and severance rules
• The local entity or agent that will run payroll and contracts
• Repatriation obligations for foreign staff
• Whether an income use changes the employment picture

Security and privacy

An island's isolation is a form of security in itself, but it is not the whole of it. On a working island, security is mostly the ordinary vigilance of a present team, controlled arrivals at the jetty, awareness of the boats that pass, a calm relationship with the nearest coastguard, rather than a visible guard force, which tends to announce exactly what discretion is meant to hide. The deeper point is that staff are the largest standing threat to privacy and the largest guarantee of it. Every person on the island knows who visits and when. Discretion is therefore hired, through careful selection, proper contracts with confidentiality terms, fair treatment and low turnover. A small, loyal, well-housed team that stays for years is worth more to privacy than any fence.

When the island earns

If the island carries a resort, a villa-rental operation or any commercial use, staffing crosses from household into hospitality, with a different scale, different regulation and a different budget, covered in island income and resorts. The team then serves paying guests, the standards become contractual, and the payroll grows accordingly. What does not change is the underlying truth: the quality of the people determines the quality of the asset. Everything else, the architecture, the water, the power, the resilience against storms, is only as good as the hands that keep it running.

Staffing is the least glamorous and most decisive part of island ownership. It is where the annual budget is really set and where the experience of ownership is really made. When you are weighing a specific island, or preparing to register one, our office can help you model a realistic team and a realistic budget for it, before the romance meets the payroll.

General orientation, not legal, tax or insurance advice. Enquiries: the enquiry form.