How this site produces its figures
Every number on this site comes from a vendor's own published pricing page, and every ordering is by computed monthly cost — nothing else.
No vendor pays to appear, to rank higher, or to be removed. There is no scoring model, no weighting, and no editorial judgment in any ordering on this site.
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.
- Estimated add-ons. Tax filing surcharges, year-end fees, state registration fees and multi-state costs vary too much to estimate honestly, so we do not estimate them. Your real bill will be higher than ours.
- 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:
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Published list price | The vendor publishes fixed figures, so the monthly total can be reproduced from its own page. |
| Published formula or tiers | The vendor publishes a banded or tiered rule rather than one figure; the total is computed from that rule. |
| Public pricing calculator | The vendor publishes a pricing calculator rather than a list price. A figure is obtainable, but only by entering your own numbers on the vendor's site, so it is not in our tables. |
| Starting price only | The vendor publishes a lower bound (“from”) and not a price, so it is shown but not ranked. |
| Quote on request | The vendor publishes no figure at all; a quote is required. |
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.
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 2026-09-06. 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.
The data itself
The full dataset behind every page is published at /data.json, including the source URL and check date for every figure. 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 110 published plans, and generates 128 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.
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.