Why US and UK payroll prices cannot go in the same table

Plenty of comparison sites do convert. The result reads well and answers a question nobody is actually asking, since nobody chooses between a US payroll product and a UK one.

Would converting really be that misleading?

Yes, on four separate counts, and they compound.

The exchange rate is not the price. A rate is a snapshot. A price recorded in dollars on one date and converted at another date's rate produces a figure that was never true anywhere. On this site the currency is recorded as published and stays that way.

VAT. UK business software prices are published excluding VAT — Sage, Xero, CharlieHR and Staffology all do this, and it is normal practice. US prices are published as charged, with sales tax handled separately and often not at all for software. Converting an ex-VAT pound figure into dollars and comparing it with a US figure compares a pre-tax number with a post-tax one, on top of the exchange rate problem.

The pricing shapes differ. The dominant US shape is a base fee plus a per-employee fee: Gusto at $49 plus $6, OnPay at $49 plus $6, Patriot at $17 plus $4. The UK has that shape too, but it also has a great deal of banded flat-fee pricing that is rare in the United States — Breathe at £24 for one to ten employees, CharlieHR across ten bands, Staffology at £43 for up to nineteen payslips. Those two shapes do not sort against each other on a single per-employee number, even within one currency.

The products are not the same product. US payroll carries multi-state filing complexity that has no UK equivalent. UK payroll carries RTI submissions, auto-enrolment pension duties and a different year-end. A product that handles one is not a cheaper or more expensive version of a product that handles the other; it is a different product.

What the two markets look like separately

At ten employees, from published prices read between 2026-08-20 and 2026-09-06:

The spread within each market is roughly three to one, which is large. The spread between markets is not a number we will state, because it is not a meaningful one.

Is one market cheaper than the other?

It depends on things this data cannot settle, so the honest answer is that we do not know and this site cannot tell you. The nominal figures at ten employees look lower in the UK, but that comparison runs into all four problems above at once — VAT treatment, exchange rate, different pricing shapes, and different regulatory work being done by the software.

Anyone quoting you a clean "UK payroll software is X percent cheaper" figure has quietly resolved four judgment calls without telling you which way.

What about vendors that operate in both?

Because currency decides, not the company. Vendors selling into both markets are the interesting case, and we sort them by the currency they bill in rather than by where they operate. Xero and Employment Hero appear in our UK tables because their published prices are in pounds. Deel, Remote and Papaya Global appear in the US tables because theirs are in dollars, even though all three sell into the UK.

A vendor whose UK customers are billed in dollars is a real and relevant fact — currency risk sits with the buyer — and burying it by converting would hide it. On this site the plan belongs to the market whose currency it is priced in, and where that produces a surprising result, that surprise is information.

What we would need to compare them properly

Three things we do not have, and are not going to invent.

1. A dated exchange rate applied consistently, disclosed on every page, and updated on the same schedule as the prices. Doable, but it makes every figure move for reasons that have nothing to do with the vendors.
2. A decision on VAT — either add it to the UK figures or strip equivalent taxes from the US ones. Both choices are defensible and neither is neutral.
3. Some way of normalizing for what the software actually does in each jurisdiction, which is the part with no honest answer at all.

Rather than make those three choices silently, we do not make them. The method page states this as a rule: US prices stay in dollars; UK prices stay in pounds, and the two never appear in the same table.

Who this is not for

This is not for a business that genuinely operates in both countries and wants one bill. That is a different product category — global payroll and employer-of-record services such as Deel, Remote and Papaya Global — priced per employee per country, usually in dollars, and generally far above domestic payroll. Deel and Remote both publish global payroll at $29 per employee per month against domestic US figures around $6, and that gap is doing real work rather than being a markup.

It is also not for anyone who wants a single ranked list of the world's payroll software. There isn't one, and a site that shows you one has made choices it did not tell you about.

For a single market, the calculator and the vendor list will do the comparison properly, with everything in one currency.

Sources

All figures are published prices read on each vendor's own pricing page between 2026-08-20 and 2026-09-06, recorded in the currency published, with source URLs and check dates in /data.json under CC BY 4.0. The rule against currency conversion, and against mixed-currency tables, is stated on the method page.