Enter your business details to see what each option would cost you. Prices are live from our database and shown in pounds sterling.
Hiring beyond the UK changes the question you are asking of a payroll platform. RTI submissions, pension auto-enrolment and CIS are table stakes for a UK-only team, and a decent UK payroll tool does them all. None of that helps you the day you want to employ a developer in Portugal or a salesperson in Germany, because your UK company has no legal right to employ anyone in either country. This guide ranks the platforms that solve that problem, from a UK buyer's point of view, with a live cost calculator so you can compare in pounds.
How we chose
We weighted five things, in this order: whether the platform can legally employ someone in a country where you have no entity, and in how many countries; the published cost of doing so, both for employees through an Employer of Record and for contractors; whether it also runs compliant UK PAYE, because most global teams still have a UK core; the strength of its misclassification and IP protection, which is where the real money is lost when this goes wrong; and contract terms, because an annual lock-in is a poor fit for a headcount that moves. Plans and pricing checked July 2026, and every figure on this page is pulled live from our database rather than typed in by hand.
The two decisions that actually cost money
Everything else on this page is downstream of two questions.
Employee or contractor? The price gap is not marginal, it is an order of magnitude. On Deel, contractor cover is billed per head at a rate our table records as Yes (£37/contractor), while employing that same person through its Employer of Record costs £448/emp/mo. That gap is the price of local employment law: notice periods, statutory leave, social security, severance and the liability that comes with them. It is also why the temptation to call an employee a contractor is so strong, and why every serious platform here sells misclassification cover. Papaya Global is the outlier on the contractor side (Yes (£4/contractor)), and on the employee side Payoneer Workforce Management undercuts everyone at £149/emp/mo.
EOR or your own entity? An Employer of Record is a rental. It is the right answer for your first hire in a country and stays the right answer for a while. Once you have enough people in one place, incorporating a local subsidiary and running your own payroll there becomes cheaper, and platforms like Remote and Deel will run that payroll for you at a per-employee fee instead of the EOR fee. The crossover is a matter of arithmetic, not principle: divide the annual cost of an EOR seat by the cost of setting up and maintaining an entity in that jurisdiction. Use the calculator above with your real headcount before you assume you have outgrown the rental.
What still has to work in the UK
The mistake we see most often is treating a global platform as a drop-in replacement for UK payroll. It usually is not.
Your UK staff still need RTI and FPS submissions to HMRC on every pay run, statutory sick and parental pay, and workplace-pension auto-enrolment with the re-assessment that goes with it. If you employ subcontractors in construction, you need CIS as well, and that is where the global-first platforms thin out: Deel and Remote both list their CIS support as limited, while Employment Hero handles it natively. Papaya Global is not on HMRC's recognised-software register at all, which is fine when its job is paying people in sixteen other countries and a problem the moment you try to run Manchester payroll on it.
The practical answer for most UK businesses with a global team is a split: a UK-native payroll engine for the PAYE staff, and a global platform for everyone else. That is not a failure of consolidation, it is what the compliance surface actually looks like.
Right to work, visas and the direction of travel
Right-to-work checks cut both ways and people forget the outbound half. Bringing someone into the UK means a share code check or a Home Office identity-verification service check before their first day, and a sponsor licence if they need a visa. Sending work the other way means the receiving country's immigration rules apply, and an Employer of Record does not automatically solve that: employing someone through a local entity is not the same as having the right to relocate them there. Deel, Remote, Payoneer Workforce Management and Papaya Global all offer immigration or visa support as a service, which is worth asking about specifically if relocation is part of your plan rather than an afterthought.
The verdict
For most UK businesses hiring abroad, Deel is the best starting point: it is the only pick that covers HMRC-recognised UK PAYE and Employer of Record hiring across 100+ countries in one system, with no annual contract. Choose Remote if compliance and IP ownership through owned entities are the point, and you can live with a quote for own-entity payroll. Choose Payoneer Workforce Management if the cost of a first overseas employee is what is stopping you, because its EOR rate is the cheapest published here by a wide margin. Add Employment Hero for the UK PAYE half of a split team, and consider Papaya Global if most of your overseas people are contractors rather than employees. Set your headcount in the calculator above to see what each would actually cost you.