Payroll is sold on two numbers, a monthly fee and a per-person fee. Neither one tells you what you will pay. The fee that looks cheapest for a director on their own is rarely cheapest at twenty staff, and the platform that is cheapest for a small team cannot price you at all at five hundred. So this report ignores the headline prices and runs every UK payroll platform we track through the same cost engine that sits behind our comparison table, at five real business sizes.
BY ADVERTISED MONTHLY FEE
BY WHAT 20 EMPLOYEES ACTUALLY COST
Every figure here is read from our own pricing dataset as the page loads, so it describes the market today and not the day this was written. Plans and pricing checked September 2026. Figures exclude VAT and reflect each provider's publicly advertised standard pricing. Methodology is at the bottom.
The short version
- 4 providers charge no monthly subscription, billing per person instead. One of them applies a monthly minimum that works as a base fee until the team passes it, marked min in the table. Billing purely per head is the cheapest shape for a single employee and the dearest at scale, which is why the ranking reorders as headcount rises.
- Among the platforms that do charge a monthly fee, it runs from £12 to £43. The gap is £31 a month before a single payslip is run.
- The cheapest platform is not the same platform at every size. Sage leads to a hundred employees and FreeAgent takes over above it, and the order behind them reshuffles at every step.
- One provider's cost does not move at all. FreeAgent bundles payroll into its subscription with no per-person charge, so its figure is identical at every business size here. Two caveats: it is the plan price, and FreeAgent is free for the life of a NatWest, RBS or Ulster business account; and we model it as a single flat plan, so treat the largest sizes as untested rather than as a published ceiling.
- One platform stops being priceable before the top of the ladder. Sage publishes a maximum headcount and no price above it, so the 500-employee column shows a quote instead of a number we invented.
What payroll actually costs, by headcount
This is the estimate our calculator produces for each platform, using each vendor's own published plans, allowances and minimums. A business with four employees on a platform that includes one person free is charged for three, and a platform with a monthly minimum is held at that minimum until the headcount passes it.
| Provider | 1 employee | 4 employees | 20 employees | 100 employees | 500 employees |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| £12 | £12 | £37.50 | £145 | Get quote | |
| £19.50 | £24 | £48 | £168 | £768 | |
| £21.67 | £86.68 | £433.40 | £2,167 | £10,835 | |
| £21.67 | £86.68 | £433.40 | £2,167 | £10,835 | |
| £21.67 | £86.68 | £433.40 | £2,167 | £10,835 | |
| £22.50 | £27 | £51 | £171 | £771 | |
| £30 min | £30 min | £60 | £300 | £1,500 | |
| £33 | £33 | £33 | £33 | £33 | |
| from £35.12 | from £62.03 | from £205.55 | from £923.15 | from £4,511.15 | |
| £43 | £43 | £45.15 | £217.15 | £1,077.15 | |
| Get quote | Get quote | Get quote | Get quote | Get quote | |
| Get quote | Get quote | Get quote | Get quote | Get quote | |
| Get quote | Get quote | Get quote | Get quote | Get quote |
Read a row across, not a column down. The platforms with no base fee start cheapest and climb fastest. The ones carrying a base fee and a small per-person charge start dearer and then flatten out.
Two labels in that table carry weight. A figure marked from is a floor: the vendor advertises a starting price and quotes what sits above it, so the real bill is higher by an amount we will not guess at. A figure tagged min is a monthly minimum, correct at that headcount but pinned to a floor the business has not yet grown past.
What a payroll platform has to do in Britain
Price is only half the question, because British payroll carries statutory duties that decide whether a platform is usable at all, and they are where a cheap plan often stops.
Real Time Information filing is the baseline, and these platforms state that they submit it: BrightPay, Deel, Employment Hero, FreeAgent, Moorepay, QuickBooks Online, Remote, Rippling, Sage, Staffology and Xero. Workplace pension assessment each pay run is the next step, and that is BrightPay, Deel, Employment Hero, FreeAgent, Moorepay, Payoneer Workforce Management, QuickBooks Online, Remote, Rippling, Sage, Staffology and Xero. Two platforms in the roster describe both as happening through an employer-of-record arrangement rather than as their own filing, which is a different product and not a gap in it.
The Construction Industry Scheme separates them, because verification and deduction statements are payroll work with their own deadlines. BrightPay, Employment Hero, FreeAgent, Moorepay, QuickBooks Online, Sage, Staffology and Xero all support it, but not all at the price this report quotes: Sage includes it from its Standard tier, not the Essentials plan costed above, and Xero sells it as an accounting add-on on top of the plan price. BrightPay includes the module at no extra cost. For a contractor paying subcontractors, that gap is the difference between the advertised price and the one that does the job.
Median platformEach platform we priceRead the top of the ladder as what the rate card says, not as what a large employer would end up paying.
What the global platforms are actually charging for
Deel, Papaya Global and Remote sit near the bottom of the table at one employee and at the top of it by twenty. The difference is the product, not the pricing. These are not competitors to Sage or BrightPay for a British pay run: they employ staff in countries where the company has no entity, and the per-person fee covers local employment compliance, statutory filing and benefits administration in every one of those countries. There is no monthly fee to dilute across a workforce, so the rate never improves with scale.
For a London company hiring one developer in Lisbon, that is the cheapest route on this page. For twenty staff in Leeds it is the wrong product at any price.
Two caveats, and both cut against these three. Their per-person figures are the least firm in the table: Papaya publishes its rate as a starting price, Deel's own page qualifies it, and Remote states that its payroll product also carries an implementation fee and a recurring delivery fee that it does not publish, so the real bill sits above the line shown here. That is why all three read identically to the penny.
The second caveat covers the whole right-hand side. These figures are arithmetic on published rate cards, each vendor's plan price extended by its own per-person rate. No vendor here sells a 500-person payroll off a web page; every one of them quotes at that size.
Which platforms publish a price
10 providers publish a monthly figure a buyer can check before speaking to anyone: Deel, Employment Hero, FreeAgent, Papaya Global, QuickBooks Online, Remote, Rippling, Sage, Staffology and Xero.
The rest quote per business. That is a normal way to sell payroll, and it is what you would expect from a bureau that runs the payroll for you or a platform priced around an implementation. It does mean their cost cannot be set against a rate card, which is why they sit as a quote in the table above instead of at the bottom of it.
A platform can be quote-only here while publishing a full rate card for what it does sell. A global employment platform with no British domestic payroll product has nothing to publish in this category and is withholding nothing.
The monthly fee, ranked
The monthly fee, ranked, with the per-person charge beside it:
| Provider | Monthly fee | Per person |
|---|---|---|
| £12 | £2.40/emp/mo (6-10) | |
| £18 | £1.50/emp/mo | |
| £21 | £1.50/emp/mo | |
| £26 | From £9/user/mo | |
| £33 | £0 (included) | |
| £43 | £2.15/payslip |
We have not published a median per-person fee. That column mixes domestic payroll software charging a pound or two a head with global platforms charging twenty times as much for a different product, and an average across the two describes nothing a buyer could act on. The cost ladder prices each platform on what it actually sells.
Employer of record is priced in dollars, wherever you are
Hiring someone abroad without opening a local entity is a different product with a different price, and it is the one figure in this dataset that is not really a British price at all:
| Provider | Per employee, per month |
|---|---|
| £149 | |
| £373 | |
| £373 | |
| £448 | |
| £522 |
Every one of those is a US dollar list price, converted at 0.7471 USD to GBP, captured 12 June 2026. From a British connection these vendors still quote in dollars, and the currency selector on their pricing pages changes the symbol without touching the number. So the table says what employer of record works out at in pounds at that rate, and no vendor here will quote you the converted figure. It does not say that employing someone abroad costs a British company more than an American one.
Two things separate this table from the rest of the page. It is drawn from our employer-of-record dataset rather than the payroll roster above, so it includes platforms that sell no British domestic payroll at all. And several of these figures are published as a starting price, so read the column as a floor.
How this compares with Australia and the United States
The same vendors sell the same products in Australia and the United States at genuinely different prices, not simply converted ones, because payroll is a local product with local compliance built into it. We publish a separate edition of this report per market, each one reading its own market's live pricing:
Methodology
We list BrightPay, Deel, Employment Hero, FreeAgent, Moorepay, Papaya Global, Payoneer Workforce Management, QuickBooks Online, Remote, Rippling, Sage, Staffology and Xero in this category.
Every cost in this report is produced by the same engine that powers our payroll comparison table and its calculator, using each vendor's published plans: plan prices, per-person charges, bundled allowances, monthly minimums and any published maximum headcount. Where a vendor publishes a ceiling we show a quote above it instead of extending their formula past what they advertise. Where a vendor publishes only a starting price, we label the figure a floor.
Prices are taken from each vendor's own pricing page, read from a British connection, because several of these vendors serve a different currency or a different rate card depending on where the visitor is. We do not take plan ladders from review sites, which cache pricing for years after a vendor has changed it.
Figures exclude VAT. Employer national insurance, pension contributions and statutory pay are employment costs, not software costs, and no figure here includes them.
