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 compares the employer of record (EOR) and global payroll platforms that solve that problem, from a UK buyer's point of view. If your team is all in the UK for now, our guide to payroll software for small business prices UK PAYE from 1 employee to 25.
One thing to know about the comparison table above: its estimated cost is domestic payroll pricing, the cost of running UK PAYE at your headcount. Employer of Record costs are separate, per overseas employee: the table lists them in its Employer of Record row, each pick quotes them, and the section below sets them out.
How we chose
We weighted five things: whether the platform can legally employ someone in a country where you have no entity; the published cost of doing so, both for employees through an Employer of Record and for contractors, and whether that figure is firm or a starting price; 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 October 2026, and every figure on this page is read from our database when the page loads.
The two decisions that actually cost money
Everything else on this page is downstream of two questions.
Employee or contractor? 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. The difference 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. The other figures in our database, per person per month:
- Remote: Employer of Record £522/emp/mo; contractors Yes (£22/contractor). See our Remote pricing guide.
- Payoneer Workforce Management: Employer of Record from £149/emp/mo; contractors Yes (from £14/contractor). Both are starting prices; our Payoneer Workforce Management pricing guide explains what "from" covers.
- Papaya Global: Employer of Record from £373/emp/mo; contractors Yes (£4/contractor).
- Rippling: Employer of Record Quote.
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 can cost less, and platforms like Remote, Deel and Rippling 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: compare the annual cost of the EOR seats in that country with the cost of setting up and maintaining an entity there. If your shortlist is down to two platforms, our head-to-heads of Deel vs Remote and Deel vs Rippling compare them row by row for a UK employer, and our Deel pricing guide sets out the rest of Deel's bill.
Running an employer of record alongside UK PAYE
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 platforms differ: our record lists CIS support as Limited for Deel, Limited for Remote, Limited for Rippling and Yes for Employment Hero. For Papaya Global, our record of HMRC recognition reads No, which is fine when its job is paying people abroad 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. Our Employment Hero pricing guide covers one UK-native option, and if you are weighing Rippling for both halves, our Rippling pricing guide sets out what it publishes for UK buyers and what it leaves to a quote.
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, Rippling, Payoneer Workforce Management and Papaya Global all list 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
Choose on the shape of your team, then use the table for the UK payroll side. Deel fits a business that wants HMRC-recognised UK PAYE and Employer of Record hiring in one system, with no annual contract, at £448/emp/mo per overseas employee. Remote fits a business for which compliance and IP ownership, which Remote ties to owning its entities, are the point, at £522/emp/mo; ask for its implementation and payroll delivery fees before you compare. Payoneer Workforce Management fits a business budgeting a first overseas employee from a published starting price, from £149/emp/mo. Employment Hero is the UK PAYE half of a split team. Papaya Global fits a business whose overseas people are mostly contractors. Rippling fits a business whose real cost is running payroll, HR and IT as three systems that keep falling out of step. If most of your overseas people are contractors, our guide to payroll software for contractors compares per-contractor pricing. Set your headcount in the calculator above to cost the UK payroll side.
