How we compare payroll software
We list 13 ways to run UK payroll, spanning software you operate yourself and bureaus that run it for you, and 10 providers publish a rate card we can cost from. The rest quote, and where a vendor quotes we show that rather than a figure invented on its behalf.
The calculator is driven by headcount, because per employee per month is the axis almost everything in this category is priced on. Ranking is arithmetic on the published rate at the number of employees you enter. Nothing commercial moves a row: prominence is not for sale here, and a vendor we have no relationship with keeps exactly the place the arithmetic gives it.
Prices are what each vendor publishes to a UK buyer, and the billing basis deserves as much attention as the figure. Part of this table is a monthly subscription you can leave at short notice, and part of it is an annual licence or a managed-service contract.
RTI, auto-enrolment and what UK payroll software has to file
Two statutory jobs sit underneath every product here, and between them they are the reason payroll stopped being a spreadsheet task.
The first is Real Time Information. Every pay run has to reach HMRC as a Full Payment Submission on or before the day you actually pay people, carrying each employee's pay, PAYE tax, National Insurance and tax code. An Employer Payment Summary reports what an FPS cannot, such as statutory payment recovery and the Employment Allowance. Late and missing submissions attract penalties, so this is the function that has to work every month without exception.
HMRC publishes a register of recognised payroll software, and it is worth checking rather than assuming. Sage reads Yes, BrightPay Yes, Staffology Yes and Remote Yes. Papaya Global reads No, which tells you plainly what it is built for, and Payoneer Workforce Management reads Via EOR, meaning the filing is done by the entity that legally employs the person rather than by you.
The second job is pension auto-enrolment. You must assess every worker in every pay period, enrol those who qualify into a qualifying workplace pension, and re-declare compliance to The Pensions Regulator on a recurring cycle. The software side of that is assessment plus producing a contribution file the scheme will accept, so the row worth reading is which schemes a product talks to directly. BrightPay lists NEST, TPP, Smart, Aviva, FreeAgent lists NOW:Pensions, Penfold and Sage lists NEST + major. If your scheme is not on that list you are uploading a file by hand each period, which is tolerable at ten people and miserable at a hundred.
If you pay subcontractors under the Construction Industry Scheme, verification and deduction statements are payroll work too, and the table prices that differently. BrightPay lists CIS as Yes (free), Sage as Yes (Standard) and Xero as Yes (add-on). A plan gate or an add-on charge on CIS changes the real price for a construction business, and it will not show up in the headline.
Per-employee pricing, and which payroll software publishes a rate card
Nearly every product here uses the same two-part shape: a monthly base fee, plus a fee for each employee who appears on a payslip that month. Understanding which half dominates at your size is most of the comparison.
The base fee is rarely just software. Sage publishes £12/mo (Essentials, 5 emp) as its base with a small allowance of employees folded into it, then £2.40/emp/mo (6-10) beyond that allowance. Staffology publishes £43/mo (up to 19) and then bills £2.15/payslip, which is the shape a bureau tool takes because payslips, not people, are the unit of work.
Where payroll is a module on an accounting subscription, the base fee is really the ledger. QuickBooks Online shows £21/mo (sub + payroll) and then £1.50/emp/mo, and Xero shows £18/mo (Ignite) with £1.50/emp/mo. Note that the plan a ledger needs for payroll is not always its entry plan, so the payroll base fee can be higher than the subscription you were quoted for bookkeeping. FreeAgent takes the other route entirely, listing £0 (included) on £33/mo (or free w/ NatWest), and its free tier reads Yes (with NatWest/RBS), which is a genuine consideration for a small limited company banking with those brands.
A per-employee price with no base fee is a third shape. Employment Hero lists £0 and £3/emp/mo, and the vendor applies a monthly minimum underneath it, so a very small team pays that floor rather than the per-head arithmetic. Our calculator applies the floor rather than pretending the headline scales all the way down.
Transparency is genuinely split in this category. That applies to 3 providers here, and it is not evasiveness so much as a different sales model: managed services and modular mid-market platforms are scoped before they are priced. Enter your real headcount and read the estimate, because an entry figure is the floor of a ladder rather than a price.
Managed payroll bureaus and payroll software you run yourself
Buyers shop across these two without always noticing they are different purchases, and comparing a licence fee to a bureau quote produces a nonsense answer.
With software, you hold the responsibility. You enter the starters and leavers, you check the assessment, you press submit, and you are the person HMRC corresponds with. With a bureau, a payroll professional runs the cycle from data you send them, and the service usually carries the checking as well as the processing. Moorepay lists its support model as Dedicated service and its RTI position as Yes (managed), which is the distinction in a single row.
The commitment differs accordingly. Moorepay lists its contract as Annual and BrightPay lists Annual licence, while Sage lists No, Xero No and Staffology No. A bad month on a monthly subscription costs you a month. A bad month on an annual managed contract costs you the year.
When you do collect bureau quotes, make them comparable before you read them. Ask for the cost per payslip at your actual headcount and your actual pay frequency, because a weekly payroll produces roughly four times as many payslips as a monthly one for the same people, and a bureau bills the payslip. Ask what an off-cycle or corrective run costs, because that is where a quote turns out to be a starting point. Ask what year-end and P11D work costs, whether it sits inside the fee or beside it. Ask what happens if your data is late. And ask what the notice period is, because leaving a bureau mid-tax-year means migrating year-to-date figures rather than starting clean.
The honest guidance is that a business paying a handful of people on a stable monthly cycle rarely needs a bureau. The case for one is complexity you cannot staff for: high turnover, variable hours, multiple pay frequencies, or a finance function of one person who cannot be on holiday in week four.
Paying someone abroad is not a job UK payroll software can do
This is the point where a lot of UK searches go wrong, so it is worth stating flatly. UK payroll software operates a PAYE scheme for people employed in the UK. If someone lives and works in another country, they are subject to that country's employment law, payroll taxes and social security, and adding them to a UK payroll does not make that go away.
You have three legitimate routes. Set up a legal entity in that country and run local payroll, which is the right answer once you have a real team there and a very expensive one before that. Use an Employer of Record, where a provider that already holds an entity in that country employs the person on your behalf and you pay a fee per person per month. Or engage them as a genuine contractor, which is cheapest and puts the classification risk on you.
The pricing shapes are quite different from UK payroll. Employer of Record cover reads £448/emp/mo at Deel, £373/emp/mo (from) at Papaya Global and £149/emp/mo (from) at Payoneer Workforce Management. Engaging a contractor is a payment and compliance rail rather than an employment relationship, and it is priced accordingly: Deel lists Yes (£37/contractor), Remote lists Yes (£22/contractor) and Papaya Global lists Yes (£4/contractor).
The difference between those two lines is the price of somebody else carrying the employment risk, which is why the misclassification row matters. Remote lists Yes, Deel lists Yes and Payoneer Workforce Management lists Yes (AOR), while the UK-native tools list No because it is not the job they do. If you need visas as well, Deel lists Yes and Remote lists Yes.
If everyone you pay sits on a UK PAYE scheme, you can ignore this half of the table completely, and you should. The global platforms are priced for a problem you do not have, and buying one to run a small UK payroll means paying cross-border rates for a domestic job.
What changes when payroll software has to run 250 payslips
The arithmetic inverts as you grow. At five people the base fee is most of the bill and the per-employee rate barely registers. At a couple of hundred, the base fee is a rounding error and the per-head figure is effectively the whole price, so a difference of pennies per employee per month is worth more than any discount on the subscription.
Three things start to matter that did not before.
Plan tiers, not just the entry rung. Features you assumed were included frequently sit above the cheapest plan, and both the base fee and the per-employee rate move when you climb. Sage lists CIS as Yes (Standard), which names a plan rather than saying yes outright. Price the tier that carries what you actually need, because an entry rate belongs to the entry plan.
Employee self-service stops being a nicety. At scale you are not fielding payslip requests by email. Employment Hero lists Yes, BrightPay lists Yes (Connect) and Xero lists Yes, while FreeAgent lists Limited, which is a fair signal that it is built for the small end rather than for a workforce.
Variable hours have to arrive as data. If a meaningful share of your people are hourly, someone is keying timesheets unless the system collects them. Employment Hero lists Yes, Sage lists Yes and BrightPay lists Limited.
Support changes character too, because at this size a failed submission is a lot of people not being paid. BrightPay lists UK phone, Sage lists UK phone + online and Staffology lists UK (IRIS), against Online at Employment Hero and Online at Rippling. A UK phone line during a UK working day is not a luxury on the afternoon a pay run will not reconcile.
Finally, the journal has to land in the ledger without being retyped. Staffology lists Xero, Sage, QBO (API), Rippling lists Xero, QBO, NetSuite, Sage and Moorepay lists Exports. An export is workable at fifteen people and a monthly chore at two hundred and fifty, and it is the sort of cost that never appears on a quote.