Independent · No paid placement

What payroll software actually costs per employee

Vendors quote a per-employee fee and a base fee separately. We divide the whole bill by your headcount and show the figure that comes out.

How to use this

1. Put your headcount into the calculator. Not a round number — the number of people you actually run payroll for.
2. Read the per-employee column, not the headline price. Every vendor page has one, and why the advertised per-employee fee is never the price you pay explains the gap in one page.
3. Check the date next to each figure. If it is old, we say so rather than letting you assume it is current.

Start here

What changed lately

18 entries across 7 vendors in September 2026: 16 on the vendor's own page, 2 correcting a figure we held. Every entry keeps the old figure, the new one and the date we saw it: the price history lists them by month, and there is an RSS feed if you would rather be told than remember to look.

What this is not

It is not a review site. We have not used any of these products and we do not rate them. There are no stars, no badges and no “editor's choice”. If you want to know whether a payroll product is pleasant to run, this is the wrong site.

It is not complete. It holds 35 vendors, of which 11 publish no figure at all and 4 publish only a starting price or a calculator, so none of those can be put in a price-ordered table here. The list says which is which.

And no vendor has paid to be on it, to be ordered above another, or to have anything removed. That is the whole of our method, and the method page sets out the arithmetic in full so you can check it.