Employer of record or your own entity: where the number flips

The shape of each cost

The published EOR prices on this site run from $99 to $699 per employee per month. Call it $599, which is what Deel and Atlas both publish. One employee costs $7,188 a year in fees. Ten employees in the same country cost $71,880.

An entity does not work like that. Incorporation, a registered address, a local payroll bureau, statutory accounts and an audit where one is required do not multiply by headcount. They are a fixed annual cost that varies by country far more than by staff count.

Two lines, one flat and one sloping. They cross at a headcount.

Where the crossover usually sits

We do not publish a number for the entity side, and neither should anyone who has not seen your quotes. Incorporation and ongoing compliance costs are quoted per country by local firms and are not published as rates by any statutory body, which is why they are excluded from every figure on this site.

What we can say is which way each variable pushes the crossover:

• A high EOR fee pushes it down. At $699 per employee per month, five people is $41,940 a year in fees alone.
• A cheap, simple jurisdiction pushes it down: fewer filings, no statutory audit, no works council.
• So does a short expected horizon. An entity you close in eighteen months rarely repays the cost of opening it.
• A single senior hire pushes it up. One person is almost never worth an entity, whatever the salary, because the fee is flat and does not scale with pay.

The thing both options share

Neither route changes what the state takes. The statutory employer contributions on the country pages are invoiced by the EOR at cost, on top of its fee, and they are paid directly by an entity. In France that is up to 37.3% of salary; the $599 fee on a 70,000 euro salary is about 10%. The provider fee is the smaller number in almost every country on this site, which is worth remembering when a comparison is presented as being about fees.

Where the EOR fee actually hurts

Because it is flat, the fee is regressive against salary. On a $120,000 salary, $599 a month is 6% of pay. On a $30,000 salary it is 24%. If you are hiring junior or support roles in a lower-cost country — the Philippines and India are the two on this site where this is likely to bite hardest — the fee can be a larger share of cost than every statutory contribution combined.

That is the case where the price differences between providers stop being trivia. The published prices span a factor of seven, and five of the fourteen providers we checked publish no price at all.

Before you decide

Run the country at the salary you intend to pay, with and without a provider fee, in the calculator. Then get an entity quote for the same country from a local firm, and compare annual totals at the headcount you expect in eighteen months rather than the headcount you have today.

The costs an entity brings that an EOR absorbs

An entity is more than a fixed cost. It brings a set of obligations with it, and most first-time budgets miss them.

Statutory filings do not scale down for a two-person operation. A German entity with a works council threshold in sight, a French entity crossing the 11-employee mark where the training contribution starts and the 20-employee mark where the autonomy contribution starts, a UK employer approaching the 3 million pound pay bill that triggers the Apprenticeship Levy — each of these is a step change that an employer-of-record arrangement handles as somebody else's problem.

Termination is the other asymmetry. With an EOR, ending an employment is a commercial conversation with a provider who has done it before in that country. With your own entity it is your notice period, your severance calculation and your exposure. Spain's unfair dismissal compensation is 33 days' salary per year of service capped at 24 months; Brazil's FGTS penalty is 40% of the accumulated balance. Those are not fees, and they are not on any price list.

What actually decides it in practice

• Do you expect more than a handful of people in that one country within eighteen months? If yes, price an entity. If no, the fee almost always wins.
• If the country is one you intend to sell in as well as hire in, the arithmetic changes completely, because the entity's cost is already committed.
• Then there is the compliance work. An entity needs someone who owns local payroll, filings and employment law. If that person does not exist, the provider fee is buying you that person as much as it is buying the entity.
• How stable is the headcount? Opening and closing an entity around a team that shrinks is expensive in both directions.

The number to put next to both

Whichever route you take, the statutory employer cost is unchanged. Run the country at your intended salary on the country pages or in the calculator, and treat the entity-versus-provider question as a separate line on top of it rather than as the whole decision. What the number leaves out lists the items neither route removes.

Who this is not for

If you already have an entity in the country, this is not a live decision and the only relevant page here is the country file. If you are hiring a genuine independent contractor rather than an employee, neither route applies — though the classification question behind that is its own problem. And if your headcount question is about a country not among the fifteen here, the shape of the argument still holds but none of our figures do.

Sources

• EOR list prices, read from each provider's own pricing page on 21 August 2026: Deel, Remote, Oyster HR, Multiplier, Atlas.
• France, employer contribution rates and size thresholds: LégiSocial. Checked 21 August 2026.
• United Kingdom, Apprenticeship Levy threshold: gov.uk. Checked 21 August 2026.
• Brazil, FGTS and the dismissal penalty: Receita Federal. Checked 21 August 2026.