Which payroll vendors publish a usable price online, and which require a quote
A yes-or-no label hides a distinction that matters. Some vendors publish fixed figures, some publish a formula or tiers, some publish a calculator, some publish a starting price only, and some publish nothing at all. Those are five different states, and they offer five different levels of reproducibility.
Eleven of the 35 payroll and HR vendors we track publish no figure whatsoever: in the United States Rippling, Paychex, ADP RUN, TriNet, Paylocity, Paycor, and in the United Kingdom PayFit, Moorepay, IRIS Payroll, QuickBooks Payroll, Pento. Several are the largest names in the market, and their absence from a price-ordered table says nothing about whether they are cheap.
How we checked this
- Dataset: the PEPM public pricing dataset, published in full at /data.json.
- Scope: all 35 payroll and HR vendors in the dataset, in the United States and the United Kingdom.
- Checked: what kind of figure, if any, each vendor's own pricing page carried, read between 2026-08-20 and 2026-09-06.
- Recorded: one of five states — fixed list price, published formula or tiers, public calculator, starting price only, quote required.
- Excluded from price-ordered tables: every vendor whose published material does not yield a reproducible monthly total.
- Limitation: this records what a vendor publishes, not what it charges. A quote-only vendor may turn out cheaper or more expensive than any figure here.
Any comparison built from published prices has a hole in it shaped exactly like the vendors that do not publish. Pretending otherwise is the most common failure in this category, and the usual fix — quoting a third-party estimate — makes it worse rather than better.
The five states, and who is in each
| Price status | Vendors | Which vendors |
|---|---|---|
| Published list price | 18 | Breathe, CharlieHR, Deel, Employment Hero, Gusto, Homebase, Justworks, OnPay, Onfolk, Patriot Software, QuickBooks Payroll, Remote, Roll by ADP, Square Payroll, SurePayroll, Wave Payroll, Xero, Zoho Payroll |
| Published formula or tiers | 2 | Sage Payroll, Staffology |
| Public pricing calculator | 1 | BrightPay |
| Starting price only | 3 | Papaya Global, PeopleHR, Zelt |
| Quote on request | 11 | ADP RUN, IRIS Payroll, Moorepay, PayFit, Paychex, Paycor, Paylocity, Pento, QuickBooks Payroll (UK), Rippling, TriNet |
The split is not random. The vendors that publish fixed figures are overwhelmingly self-serve products aimed at small businesses, where the buyer signs up with a credit card and never speaks to anyone. The vendors that publish nothing sell through a salesperson, and a price set per deal cannot be printed on a page.
Does not publishing mean a vendor is expensive?
No. It means the price is set per deal rather than per product, which cuts both ways. A quote-only vendor can come in below every published price on this site if your situation suits it, and it can come in far above. We have not surveyed buyers and do not know how the quotes are distributed, so we say nothing about which is more likely.
A quote-only model means we cannot reproduce a comparable public total. It does not, by itself, prove that the price is negotiable, and it does not predict whether a particular buyer will receive a lower quote.
Why we do not fill the gap with estimates
Because an estimate is not a measurement, and this site only publishes figures whose source and date it can show. Search for what ADP costs and you will find figures like "$79 per month plus $4 per employee" quoted without a source, without a date, and without saying which of ADP's several products they refer to. We have no way to check any of them, so we do not carry them.
Publishing that number here would make the comparison look complete and make it wrong. A reader would compare a checked, dated, sourced figure for Gusto against an unsourced figure for ADP and treat both as facts. That is a worse outcome than an obvious hole.
So on this site a quote-only vendor gets a page, gets its plan names listed, and gets its price fields marked *not stated in the vendor's published documentation* with the date we checked. It is excluded from the calculator and from every price-ordered table, and the tables say so. The vendor list shows the whole set with a column for which state each vendor is in.
What to do if you want a quote-only vendor in your comparison
Get the number, and get it in a form you can compare.
- Ask for the total monthly figure for your exact headcount, in writing. Not the per-employee rate — the total, including every fee. A vendor that will not put that in an email is telling you something about how the relationship will go.
- Ask what it is after the introductory period. Discounting the first few months is standard in this market and the discount is not the price.
- Ask what changes when you hire. Some quote-only contracts are banded, some are per-employee, and some are fixed for a term regardless.
- Then put that total next to the published totals, at your headcount, not at a round number.
Having a published figure to hold up is useful in that conversation. If you know that four vendors will run your ten-person payroll for between $57 and $158 a month, you are a much harder person to quote $400 to.
Is a published price actually binding?
Not in the sense of a guarantee, no. Published prices change without notice, and several vendors on this site carry promotional pricing that reverts after a few months. Xero's UK plans currently advertise 80 percent off for an introductory period; Gusto shows a promotional first-month figure alongside the standard one. On this site we record the standard price and note the promotion, because the promotional figure is not what you will pay for most of the time you are a customer.
What a published price does give you is a dated, checkable reference point. That is why every figure here carries the date it was read, why each vendor page lists what has changed since we started checking, and why the page says so for anything we have not re-checked in ninety days rather than letting it sit there looking current.
Who this is not for
This is not useful if you have already decided to buy from a quote-only vendor and simply want to know what to pay. We cannot tell you — that is the whole point of the section above. It is also not useful as a shortlist in itself: six of the largest and most widely used payroll products in the United States publish nothing, and a shortlist that excludes them because of how they market is a bad shortlist.
Use it the other way round. Get the published figures from the calculator, then use them as the floor you hold a salesperson to.
Sources
Publication status was determined by reading each vendor's own pricing page between 2026-08-20 and 2026-09-06 and recording what kind of figure, if any, appeared. The full record, including the URL read for each vendor, is in /data.json under CC BY 4.0. How each of the five states is handled in every table is set out on the method page.
Written by Kaz, independent publisher. No commercial relationship with the companies named unless it is listed on the disclosure page.
Page last updated: 2026-09-06. Sources: vendor pricing pages only. Figures checked between 2026-08-20 and 2026-09-06. I have not used these products. Nothing here is a personal test result.
Ranking method and formulas: Method. Listing position on this site is not for sale.
Corrections: contact form.