What Employment Hero costs in the United Kingdom
Employment Hero prices UK payroll on one axis: users. The monthly base fee is £0, so there is no platform charge sitting underneath the per-user rate and no annual licence to sign (No contract required). The Core Payroll rate is £3/emp/mo.
The catch is the floor, and it is a user count rather than a pound figure. Employment Hero publishes a ten-user minimum on its UK payroll tiers, so the per-user rate is billed against ten users whether you pay ten people or three. A six-person business does not pay six times the rate, it pays ten times it. Plans and pricing checked July 2026, and every figure on this page is pulled live from our database rather than typed in by hand.
Underneath Core Payroll there is a genuinely free tier (Yes), and it is the unusual kind: it is not capped on employees at all. What it is capped on is capability. There is no pay conditions engine, no single sign-on, no support for multiple PAYE schemes and no third-party integrations, which means it will not talk to your accounting software. Our cost estimate is based on Core Payroll, because that is the tier a business running real payroll will need.
The shape of the bill
Three facts describe the whole model, and they are worth stating plainly because this listing has been wrong before.
There is no base fee. Whatever you pay is the per-user rate multiplied by a user count, with nothing added on top. There is no banded ladder, no stepped software fee and no separate charge for the payroll engine.
There is a published user minimum of ten. Below ten employees your bill does not fall. That is the mechanism most often misread as a monthly minimum spend, and while the arithmetic lands in a similar place, the distinction matters: Employment Hero publishes a user floor, not a pound floor, so the floor moves whenever the per-user rate moves.
Above ten, cost is linear. Every additional person adds exactly one more user rate. There is no volume relief published at any headcount we track, so a business of 200 pays twenty times what a business of ten pays.
A dearer fully-managed tier sits above Core Payroll, priced per user in the same way, where Employment Hero's team runs the payroll rather than your finance person doing it. Our database stores the Core Payroll rate as the headline and costs the calculator against it, so if you are pricing a managed service the figure on this page is a floor rather than your quote.
What the per-user rate actually buys
For a UK business the compliance list is the part that matters, and Employment Hero covers the statutory basics rather than approximating them. It is HMRC recognised (Yes) and files Real Time Information submissions to HMRC (Yes). Pension auto-enrolment is handled with automatic assessment (Yes) across NEST + major UK pension providers. Statutory pay is covered (Yes), as are year-end P60 and P45 documents (Yes) and the Construction Industry Scheme (Yes). The payroll engine underneath is KeyPay, which is why the statutory coverage is deeper than the product's HR-first positioning suggests.
Around that sit the things Employment Hero is actually known for: employee self-service (Yes), leave management (Yes), rostering and timesheets (Yes) and a strong mobile app (Yes). It integrates with Xero, QBO, Sage for accounting, and support is Online. Users rate it 4.4 on Capterra.
What it does not do is hire abroad. Global payroll is No, so a UK company with staff in Spain or Poland needs a different product entirely.
Where rivals are cheaper
Employment Hero is not the cheapest UK payroll software we track, and pretending otherwise would be useless to you.
Sage undercuts it at essentially every headcount. Sage's per-employee rate is £2/emp/mo against Employment Hero's £3/emp/mo, and while Sage does carry a monthly base fee of £10/mo (Essentials, 5 emp), that base plus a lower per-head rate lands below Employment Hero across the sizes our calculator sweeps. Sage also applies no user minimum, so a business paying fewer than ten people avoids the floor entirely. Both are HMRC recognised, both handle auto-enrolment and statutory pay.
Xero wins at larger headcounts, Employment Hero at smaller ones. Xero's per-employee rate is £1.50/emp/mo, the lowest here, but payroll requires the £37/mo (Grow) accounting subscription underneath it. That base fee is what keeps Xero dearer for a small team and cheaper for a large one, and the crossover sits somewhere in the mid-twenties by headcount on current figures. If you already pay for Xero accounting, the base fee is sunk and Xero's marginal payroll cost is lower than Employment Hero's at any size.
QuickBooks is dearer on both axes. Its base fee is £25/mo (sub + payroll) and its per-employee rate is £4/emp/mo, so Employment Hero beats it on price throughout, though the same sunk-cost logic applies if you are already a QuickBooks business.
BrightPay does not publish a rate. Its base fee reads Get quote in our data and its per-employee fee reads Get quote, and our record of its contract terms is Annual licence, so it cannot be costed against Employment Hero here. It remains a serious option for bureaus and accountants. Worth a look at the very small end too: FreeAgent charges £0 (included) per employee and runs a free tier (Yes (with NatWest/RBS)), which makes it close to free for a micro limited company banking with NatWest or RBS.
Who Employment Hero suits
Its target market is Growing SMB (HR + payroll), and that is exactly right. Employment Hero is not competing on payroll price. It is competing on being one system for onboarding, contracts, leave, rostering, timesheets, performance and payroll, with a single employee app in front of it. For a business between roughly fifteen and 150 people that is currently running a payroll tool plus a spreadsheet plus a leave inbox, replacing three things with one is worth more than the per-head difference against Sage.
It also suits shift-based employers. Rostering, timesheets and payroll in the same product removes the export-and-reimport step that causes most payroll errors in hospitality, retail and care.
Where Employment Hero falls short
The ten-user minimum is the sharp edge. Below ten employees you pay for users you do not have, and the effective cost per head can be double the headline rate. A sole director or a five-person team should look at FreeAgent, Sage or the free tier first.
The free tier is thinner than it looks. No integrations means no accounting sync, which for most businesses is the whole reason to buy payroll software.
There is no global payroll, support is online rather than phone-led, and cost scales in a straight line with no published volume relief, so a large employer pays full rate on every head. And if payroll alone is what you need, you are paying for an HR platform you may not use.
How we priced this
Every figure on this page is read from our database at page load, not typed into the copy, and the database is populated from Employment Hero's own UK pricing page rather than from a review site's cached tier list. This listing matters more than most: an earlier version of it carried a monthly base fee and per-employee ladder that Employment Hero does not charge in the United Kingdom, and that fabricated shape propagated into published claims before it was corrected at source. Our cost engine ranks providers purely on published rates. We earn a commission if you sign up through our link, which never changes the numbers, the ranking, or the fact that Sage is cheaper.