How to read a payroll pricing page without being misled

Nothing in this list requires calling anyone. It is a reading exercise, and it takes about four minutes a vendor.

1. Find the base fee before the per-employee fee

The per-employee figure is the one set in large type. The base fee is usually beside it, sometimes below it, occasionally in a footnote under the plan card. Find it first, because at small headcounts it is most of your bill — Gusto's Simple plan is $49 plus $6 a head, and for a three-person business the $49 is 73 percent of the cost.

If you cannot find a base fee, check whether there genuinely is not one. Several products — Deel's Global Payroll at $29 a head, Onfolk's Standard at £8 — really do charge per person with no fixed fee. That is a meaningful difference and worth noticing rather than assuming.

2. Check how many employees the base fee already covers

Some plans include a number of people before per-employee charges start, and the pricing page states it in passing. Sage's UK Payroll Essentials is £12 a month and includes five employees; Xero's Comprehensive plan includes five people on payroll and charges £1.50 for each additional one.

This changes the arithmetic completely at small sizes. Sage at five employees is £12 — £2.40 each. Sage at ten is £24, because employees six to ten are charged at £2.40. Treating the £12 as a flat fee for any headcount, or as £12 plus £2.40 for all ten — either reading gives the wrong answer.

3. Look for banding

A third pricing shape charges a flat monthly figure per headcount band and no per-employee fee at all. Breathe charges £24 for one to ten employees and £44 for eleven to twenty. CharlieHR runs ten bands from £20 to £735.

Banded pricing is simple to read and sharp to cross. Hiring an eleventh person at Breathe raises the bill by 83 percent on that hire alone. If a vendor uses bands, find the band boundary above you before you sign, not after.

4. Separate the promotional price from the price

Introductory discounting is standard in this market and it is not subtle: Xero's UK plans currently advertise 80 percent off for an introductory period; Gusto shows a promotional first-month figure beside the standard one; CharlieHR advertises 75 percent off for six months.

The number that matters is the one after the promotion ends, because that is what you will pay for most of the time you are a customer. On this site we record the standard price and note the promotion separately, which is why some figures here look higher than the ones on the vendor's page today.

5. Treat "from" as a floor, not a price

When a page says "From £3" or "starting at $8 per user", that is a lower bound with unstated conditions attached. PeopleHR publishes almost its entire range this way, and Zelt publishes a starting price rather than a price. Rippling did the same until 2026-09-06, when the figure came off its pricing page and the page became a quote request.

A floor cannot be compared with a price. On this site, plans published as "from" figures are recorded but excluded from every calculation, and the page says which ones those are. If you are doing the comparison yourself, do the same thing — a "from" figure in a comparison table quietly becomes a real number in the reader's head.

6. Check whether the figure includes tax

In the United Kingdom this is routine and easy to miss. Sage, Xero, CharlieHR and Staffology all publish ex-VAT figures, which is normal practice for business software, but a UK reader comparing against a US dollar figure is comparing an ex-tax number with a tax-inclusive one.

We record the ex-VAT figure as published and note it. If you are budgeting rather than comparing, add 20 percent.

7. Read what the cheapest tier does not do

Does the entry plan actually do your payroll? Not always. The cheapest tier is cheapest because something is missing, and the missing thing is often the reason you are shopping — multi-state filing, benefits administration, time tracking, or an integration with your accounting software.

Comparing everyone's entry plan is only meaningful if the entry plan is sufficient for all of them. Check the feature list on the tier you priced, not the tier above it, and if the tier above is the one you need, re-run the comparison there. Two vendors can swap places entirely between tiers.

Does any of this mean vendors are being dishonest?

No, and that matters for how you read a pricing page. Every one of the seven items above is published; none of them is hidden. What is happening is ordinary marketing emphasis — the flattering number is large, the qualifying number is small — and it works because comparison shoppers read quickly and compare the number they were shown.

The defense is not suspicion. It is arithmetic: take both numbers, apply your own headcount, and compare totals. The calculator does that for every vendor that publishes enough to make it possible, and each vendor page shows the components separately so you can check the working.

Who this is not for

This is not for anyone comparing on capability rather than cost. A pricing page tells you almost nothing about whether a product files correctly, handles your state, or has anyone on the end of a phone in March. Reading pricing pages well will stop you overpaying; it will not stop you buying the wrong product.

It is also of limited use for the eleven vendors on our list that publish nothing at all. There is no page to read.

Sources

Every pricing structure and promotional term described above was read on the named vendor's own pricing page between 2026-08-20 and 2026-09-06 and is recorded, with its source URL and the vendor's own wording, in /data.json under CC BY 4.0. How each pattern is handled in our own tables is set out on the method page.