Base fee or per-employee fee: which one decides your bill

Every published payroll price in this market is two numbers pretending to be one. Understanding which of the two is doing the work at your size is most of what there is to know about payroll pricing.

Which number matters more at my size?

It depends on how many people you have, and the switch is sharper than most buyers expect. The base fee is a fixed cost, so its weight in your bill falls as headcount rises. The per-employee fee is a variable cost, so its weight rises. They cross.

Here is the same set of published US plans at four sizes, monthly total:

Scroll sideways on a phone.

Read the QuickBooks row against the Justworks row. At three employees QuickBooks costs 47 percent more. At two hundred and fifty it costs 10 percent less. Nothing changed about either product; only the divisor changed.

Where exactly is the crossover?

Because it is set by two published numbers, you can solve for it exactly: the crossover is the headcount where the difference in base fees equals the difference in per-employee fees multiplied by the number of people. Written out, for two plans A and B:

For QuickBooks against Justworks: ($88 - $50) / ($8.00 - $7.00) = 38, so at thirty-eight employees the two swap places. Below that Justworks is cheaper; above it QuickBooks is.

This is arithmetic, not judgment, and it is why our head-to-head pages print a crossover number wherever one exists in a sensible range. A comparison that gives you a single winner without telling you at what size it wins has not finished the job.

Why do vendors advertise the per-employee fee?

Because it is the smaller of the two numbers and it scales with something the buyer already accepts as a cost. Six dollars a head sounds like the price of a coffee; eighty-eight dollars a month sounds like a subscription you have to justify. The layout of almost every pricing page in this market reflects that: the per-employee figure is large and central; the base fee sits beside it in smaller type or in a footnote.

That is a presentation choice rather than a deception — the base fee is published, and on most pages it is published clearly. But the effect is that buyers compare on the number they were shown, and the number they were shown is the one that varies least between vendors.

Three patterns worth recognizing

Low base, high per-employee. Patriot Software at $17 plus $4.00 is the clearest example among the US domestic plans: cheapest for very small teams, and it climbs steadily as the team grows. Plans with no base fee at all sit almost entirely outside domestic payroll — several global payroll and employer-of-record products are priced that way — and they are the extreme case: perfectly flat per-employee pricing, no small-team penalty, and no volume benefit either. They answer a different question from the plans here, so this site does not rank them against them.

High base, low per-employee. QuickBooks at $88 plus $7.00 is the clearest example in this set. It is expensive at three people and competitive at a hundred. Vendors in this shape tend to be bundling something else into the base — accounting, in QuickBooks' case — which is worth checking before treating the base fee as pure overhead.

Banded flat fees. A third pattern, common in the United Kingdom and rare in the United States, drops the per-employee fee entirely and charges a flat monthly figure per headcount band. Breathe charges £24 a month for one to ten employees and £44 for eleven to twenty. CharlieHR runs ten bands. The arithmetic is simpler but the steps are sharp: hiring your eleventh person at Breathe raises the bill by 83 percent in one go.

What to do about it

Work out your headcount, then look at the two components separately rather than at the advertised rate.

1. If you are under ten people, sort by base fee first. It will be most of your bill.
2. If you expect to double within the year, sort by per-employee fee instead, and check the crossover against your projected size rather than today's.
3. If a vendor uses banded flat fees, find out which band your next hire puts you in before you sign. The step can be larger than a year of the difference between two vendors.

The calculator does all of this for every vendor at once, and the vendor list shows the base and per-employee components separately for each. If you want the arithmetic before you trust it, the method page has all of it.

Who this is not for

This is not for anyone choosing on features. Payroll products differ on multi-state filing, benefits administration, time tracking, and how quickly a human answers when a pay run goes wrong, and none of that is on this page. Cost is one column. It is a useful column for ruling options out and a poor one for ruling them in.

It is also not much help above two hundred and fifty employees, where most vendors stop publishing altogether and pricing becomes a negotiation.

Sources

All figures are published prices read on each vendor's own pricing page between 2026-08-20 and 2026-09-06: Patriot Software, Roll by ADP, Zoho Payroll, Gusto, Justworks, QuickBooks Payroll, Deel, Breathe and CharlieHR. Source URLs and check dates for every figure are in /data.json, published under CC BY 4.0.