What published payroll prices include, and which fees vary by plan

Any figure on this site, including the ones the calculator produces, is a published floor. Your invoice may be higher, depending on fees that are not in it. This page is about the distance between the two, and why we do not try to close it with estimates.

What is actually inside the published price?

It depends on the plan, and the difference can be the whole product. Patriot Software is the clearest example: its Basic Payroll is published at $17 a month plus $4.00 per worker, its Full Service Payroll at $37 plus $5.00, and the published difference between them is that Full Service adds federal, state and local tax filings and deposits, and year-end payroll tax filings at no additional fee (checked 2026-09-06). A site-wide statement that tax filing is included in the published price would erase that distinction — and Basic Payroll is the cheaper of the two, so it is the one a price-ordered table puts at the top.

The table below records what each of these vendors states on its own pricing page. It is deliberately incomplete: where a vendor does not state whether something is included, the cell says so rather than guessing.

Scroll sideways on a phone.

Anything beyond what a vendor states is a plan tier, an add-on, or a per-event charge, and the split differs by vendor in ways that make the cheapest published plan and the cheapest actual bill two different things.

The five that move the bill

1. Filing in more than one state. In the United States this is the largest and most common surprise. Several vendors charge a monthly fee per additional state, and one remote hire in a state you do not already file in turns that on permanently. SurePayroll publishes a multi-state add-on at $9.99 a month and Patriot Software publishes $12 a month per additional state on its Full Service plan; others fold it into a higher tier, which can be a larger step. If you have any intention of hiring outside your home state, this is the first question to ask, not the last.

2. Year-end forms. W-2 and 1099 preparation, printing and postage are inside the plan on some products and billed per form on others. OnPay publishes W-2s, 1099s and year-end filings as included; Square Payroll includes digital delivery and publishes optional paper mailing at $3 per form per year; SurePayroll publishes year-end W-2 and 1099-NEC forms as billed annually at a $50 base fee plus $5 per form, and Zoho Payroll publishes W-2 postal delivery at $3 per employee. At a few dollars a form and thirty employees it is not enormous, but it lands in January as a single charge on a bill you had budgeted as flat.

3. Off-cycle runs. A correction, a bonus, a final paycheck for a leaver — anything outside the normal schedule. Patriot Software, OnPay, SurePayroll, Gusto and Roll by ADP all publish unlimited or off-cycle pay runs; QuickBooks Payroll and Wave Payroll do not state a position on their pricing pages. A business with regular commission payments should get this in writing before signing.

4. How contractors are counted. This one runs in both directions. Wave Payroll publishes its $6.00 fee as charged per active employee *and* per independent contractor paid; Patriot Software publishes that contractors are paid inside payroll at the same per-worker fee. Several products sell contractor payments as an entirely separate plan — Gusto, Square Payroll and Deel all publish contractor-only pricing that is different from their employee pricing, and on this site those plans are excluded from employee payroll comparisons because they do not do the same job. If half your workforce is on 1099s, the plan you were comparing may not be the plan you need.

5. The tier you actually need. The cheapest published plan is cheapest because it excludes something. Frequently the thing it excludes is the reason you were shopping — tax filing, time tracking, benefits administration, multi-state, or integrations with whatever runs your accounting. Comparing everyone's entry tier is only meaningful if the entry tier does the job for all of them, and it usually does not.

Why not just estimate these and add them in?

Because an estimate here would be a number we made up, and it would be indistinguishable on the page from the numbers we read off a vendor's pricing page. Every one of these five varies by vendor and by your situation, and several of them are not published at all.

A site that adds an invented $30 a month to every vendor for "typical extras" produces a table that looks more complete and is less true. The honest version is the one where the figure is narrow, sourced, dated, and labeled as a floor — which is what the method page commits to and what the calculator says on its own results.

Does this mean the comparison is useless?

No — it means it answers a narrower question than it appears to. The published figures are reliable for two things: ruling vendors out on price, and holding a salesperson to a floor. They are unreliable as a forecast of your invoice, and we have not measured how large the gap between the two typically is, because that would require real invoices rather than published pages.

What the table above does show is that the gap is not the same size for every vendor. Two plans a few dollars apart on published price can differ by whether tax filing is in the price at all. That is a reason to check the inclusions at the two or three plans on your shortlist rather than to assume the extras cancel out.

The five questions that close most of the gap

Ask these before signing, and ask for the answers in writing:

1. What is the total monthly figure for exactly my headcount, including every fee?
2. What changes if I hire one person in another state?
3. Are year-end forms included, or billed per form?
4. What does an off-cycle run cost?
5. What is this price after any introductory period ends?

The first one does most of the work. A written total for your actual headcount collapses four of the five uncertainties into one number, and a vendor that will not produce it has answered a different question.

Who this is not for

This is not for anyone who needs a budget figure today and cannot make a phone call. We cannot give you one and neither can anyone else working from published prices — the honest answer is a range with a floor we can source and a ceiling we cannot.

It is also not for businesses with unusual payroll: multiple entities, international staff, union agreements, or anything where the pay run itself is the complicated part. Published small-business pricing is not built for those and comparing it will mislead you.

For the ordinary case — one country, one or two states, salaried and hourly staff — start with the calculator, read the two closest vendors on the vendor list, and take the five questions to both.

Sources

Every inclusion in the table above is quoted from the named vendor's own pricing page, read between 2026-08-20 and 2026-09-06, and recorded with its source URL in /data.json under CC BY 4.0: Patriot Software, OnPay, Square Payroll, Wave Payroll and SurePayroll. The contractor-only plans named above are published by Gusto, Square Payroll and Deel. Where a vendor does not state whether something is included, our record says so rather than guessing.