How this site produces its figures

The arithmetic, in full

That is the entire calculation. There is no adjustment, no normalization and no hidden weight. If you take a vendor's published base fee and per-employee fee and do this arithmetic yourself, you will get the number we show.

What is deliberately not in the calculation

• Promotional pricing. Where a vendor shows a discounted first-month price, we record the standard price and note the promotion.
• Add-on fees no vendor publishes. Tax filing surcharges, state registration fees and off-cycle charges vary too much to estimate honestly, so we do not estimate them. Where a vendor does publish an add-on fee, we record it with the vendor's own wording and the calculator can add it to the annual total under its advanced options, kept visually apart from anything you estimate yourself. Your bill may still be higher than ours, because of fees that are not published anywhere.
• Currency conversion. US prices stay in dollars and UK prices stay in pounds. We never put them in the same table.
• Quality of any kind. We have not used these products.

How ordering is decided

Every ranked table on this site is sorted by monthly total at the headcount named in that page's title, ascending. That is the only sort key. Where two vendors tie, the one whose figures were checked more recently comes first.

Listing position on this site is not for sale. We have never been offered payment for placement and would not take it. If that ever changes, this paragraph changes first and the change will be dated.

How we handle what a vendor does not publish

A vendor that quotes only on request is still listed, with its price fields marked not stated in the vendor's published documentation and the date we checked. We do not fill those gaps with third-party estimates, and we do not quietly drop the vendor. Several of the largest names in this market publish nothing, and their absence from a price-ordered table says nothing about whether they are cheap.

What counts as one product category

Four things are sold in this market that look comparable and are not: domestic payroll (running a pay run in one country), payroll bundled with an HR platform, a PEO (co-employment of your US staff), and an employer of record or global payroll service (employing or paying staff abroad). A vendor is only ever ranked against vendors in its own category, and a plan is only ranked inside the category it belongs to — so a global payroll plan sold by a company we list as an employer of record does not enter an EOR ranking, and contractor-only plans enter none of them.

How much of a price counts as published

“Publishes prices” is not a yes or no. We record five states, because they differ in whether you can reproduce the figure yourself:

Which sources we read

In order: the vendor's own pricing page; then its official product or help documentation where the pricing page refers to it; then its published terms. We do not use third-party estimates, resellers, or review sites at any point, and a figure without a vendor URL and a date does not go in.

Every figure on a vendor page carries the page it was read from and the day it was read, field by field, in Where each figure comes from on that page. The same field-level record is the sources column of plans.csv.

How old the figures are

Every figure carries the date it was read, and the date a page was edited is not that date. The oldest figure in the dataset is from 2026-08-20 and the most recent check was 2026-10-03. We aim to re-read the commercially important vendors every 7 to 14 days and the rest about every 30, and a figure that has not been re-checked for more than 90 days is labeled as such on the page where it appears, rather than being left to look current.

When a figure changes, the old value is kept: every vendor page carries the changes we have observed, with the date and what moved, and the price history collects them by month with an RSS feed. Changes made by a vendor and corrections to our own reading are counted separately there. We do not reconstruct history from before we started checking a vendor.

Who has reviewed this

This site is written and checked by Kaz. No outside subject-matter reviewer has read it — no accountant, no payroll professional, nobody in the industry. We would rather say that than leave the question open.

What runs instead is mechanical, and it runs before every publication: the arithmetic is checked against fixed expected values, every generated page is checked against the dataset it came from, and the dataset is checked against its own column rules. A page that fails any of them is not published. That catches our mistakes in arithmetic and in wording. It cannot catch a vendor's page we read wrongly, which is exactly what an outside reviewer would be for.

So the check that matters is one you can run yourself: every figure on every vendor page names the page it was read from and the day it was read, under Where each figure comes from. Open the vendor's page and compare. If it differs, tell us and we will re-read and re-date it.

If a US payroll professional or a qualified accountant ever reviews the method on this page, their name, their qualification, the date and the scope of what they read will appear here, and this paragraph will be replaced. Anything short of that is not a review and will not be described as one.

The data itself

The full dataset behind every page is published at /data as two CSV files and data.json, including the source URL and check date for every figure, with every column defined. It is available under CC BY 4.0 — reuse it, including commercially, as long as you say where it came from.

It currently holds 35 vendors and 113 published plans, and generates 182 pages on this site.

Corrections

If a figure here is wrong, it is wrong on our side or the vendor has changed it. Either way we want to know: send it through the contact form and we will re-check the vendor's page and re-date the entry.