How we compare payroll software
We list 12 payroll platforms sold to US employers, and a published rate card exists for 9 providers. Where a vendor quotes instead of publishing, the table says so rather than showing a figure we invented on its behalf.
The calculator is driven by headcount, because employees are the axis almost every vendor here prices on. Enter your own number and the estimate becomes arithmetic on that vendor's published base fee and per-employee rate at your size. You can also enter what you pay today, which turns the result into a difference rather than a number floating in isolation.
Ranking follows the same arithmetic. Commission never moves a provider up or down the table, prominence is not for sale, and the cheapest row is whatever the math says it is. Prices are what each vendor publishes to a US buyer, and the billing basis matters as much as the figure, because a monthly-equivalent price on an annual commitment is not the same offer as a month-to-month one.
Base fee plus per employee: the two halves of a payroll software bill
Almost every vendor here charges in two parts: a fixed monthly fee for running payroll at all, and a recurring charge for each person on the run.
Those two halves swap places as you grow. On a team of five the base fee is most of the bill. At a hundred people the base is a rounding error and the per-employee rate is the entire negotiation. So the cheapest option for a two-person company is often not the cheapest at fifty.
The base fees on the published side of the table read $49/mo for Gusto, $49/mo for OnPay, $50/mo for QuickBooks Online, $37/mo for Patriot Software and $35/mo for Rippling. The matching per-employee charges are $6/emp/mo, $6/emp/mo, $6.50/emp/mo, $5/emp/mo and From $12/user/mo.
Part of the table inverts that shape. Deel lists a base of $0 against a per-employee charge of $29/emp/mo, and Papaya Global lists $0 against $29/emp/mo (Payroll Plus). No base fee is attractive at three employees and expensive at two hundred, because the whole bill scales with headcount.
Then there are the modules, where a headline figure stops predicting an invoice. Time tracking reads Yes (Plus) on Gusto, Yes (add-on) on Patriot Software, Limited on OnPay and Yes on Rippling. Benefits administration reads Yes on OnPay and Limited on Patriot Software. If a module is the reason you are shopping, price the tier that carries it, not the entry rung.
Commitment is the last variable. Gusto lists its contract as No, Patriot Software No and QuickBooks Online No, while Rippling lists Annual. At a couple of hundred employees the published rate is an opening position anyway: vendors negotiate the per-head figure at that size, so get it and every module quoted as one annual number before you compare.
Quote-only payroll software, and what to ask ADP and Paychex before you sign
ADP and Paychex do not publish a rate card for their small business payroll. The base fee row reads Quote on ADP and Quote on Paychex, and the per-employee row reads Quote and Quote. Both list contract as Annual and Annual.
That is worth stating plainly. Any price quoted for either on a third-party site is somebody's old deal rather than a rate card. What you can do is make their quote comparable to the published side of this table.
Ask for the per-employee rate at your actual headcount. Not a range, and not the rate at a size you might reach later.
Ask whether the quote is per pay period or per month. This is the one that most often makes a quote look cheaper than it is. A weekly payroll runs more than twice as many cycles a year as a semi-monthly one, so a per-run price is a different animal from a monthly one.
Ask about year-end form fees. Some agreements price W-2 and 1099 production per form on top of the monthly fee.
Ask for the setup fee and the renewal price. An introductory rate that steps up at renewal is normal here, and the second-year number is the one to compare.
Multi-state payroll software and the cost of one remote hire
This is the complexity with no equivalent in a single-jurisdiction country, and it is what surprises US buyers most.
There is no national payroll scheme. Each state sets its own income tax withholding rules, and a handful levy no tax on wage income at all. Each state runs its own unemployment insurance program, which means its own employer account, its own registration, and a contribution rate assigned to your business rather than a flat national percentage. Some states allow city or county taxes underneath all of that.
The practical consequence is that hiring one remote employee in a state you do not already operate in is not a payroll change, it is a registration. You generally need a withholding account and an unemployment insurance account in that state before the first check clears, and the obligation attaches to where the employee performs the work, not where your office is. Neighboring states sometimes have reciprocity agreements that change which state withholding goes to for commuters.
Where the software matters is whether it handles more than one state, and at what tier. The multi-state row reads Yes on OnPay, Yes on Patriot Software and Yes on QuickBooks Online, while Gusto lists Yes (Plus). That distinction is the point of the row: on some vendors your first out-of-state hire is a plan upgrade rather than a checkbox.
Two questions decide the rest. Does an additional state add a recurring monthly charge, because that line is often absent from the pricing page and present on the invoice. And does the provider register you in the new state, or only file once you have obtained the account numbers yourself. Most payroll software does the filing and leaves the registration to you.
W-2, 1099-NEC, 940 and 941: which forms your payroll software files
Payroll filing in the US is a calendar, not an event.
Form 941 is the quarterly federal return reporting wages, withheld income tax and both halves of FICA.
Form 940 is the annual federal unemployment tax return.
W-2 goes to each employee and to the Social Security Administration after year end, with a transmittal form alongside it.
1099-NEC goes to each unincorporated contractor you paid above the reporting threshold, and to the IRS.
State returns sit on top: withholding returns and unemployment insurance wage reports, on each state's own schedule.
Full-service filing means the provider submits those and remits the money rather than handing you the numbers. It reads Yes on Gusto and Yes on OnPay. Patriot Software reads Yes (Full Service), and its federal and state filing row reads Yes, which is the clearest case in the table of filing being a tier rather than a feature. On a self-file tier you get correct numbers and every deadline stays yours, penalties included.
Year-end form production is worth confirming separately. Gusto lists W-2 and 1099 filing as Yes and QuickBooks Online as Yes, while Papaya Global lists Not stated. Ask too whether the provider carries a tax penalty guarantee and what it covers, because one that pays only when the provider itself made the error is a narrower promise than it sounds.
Workers' compensation through payroll software, pay-as-you-go or a policy you buy
Workers' compensation is genuinely a payroll question here, not only an insurance one.
Coverage requirements, employee-count thresholds and industry rules are set state by state, so there is no single national answer. Confirm your own state's rule and talk to a licensed broker rather than taking a software vendor's summary as the last word.
What the payroll connection changes is the mechanism. A conventional policy is priced up front from your projected payroll, split by job classification code, and paid as a deposit plus installments. At the end of the term the insurer audits your actual payroll and trues the premium up or down, which is how an employer ends up with an unexpected bill in a year it grew, or a refund in a year it shrank.
Pay-as-you-go inverts that. The premium is calculated from actual wages each time you run payroll and collected with the run, so the amount tracks reality continuously and the year-end adjustment tends to be small rather than a shock. The cash flow shape is the real difference: many small payments instead of a deposit and a reckoning.
The workers' comp row reads Yes on Gusto, Yes on OnPay, Yes on Patriot Software and Yes on QuickBooks Online. Papaya Global reads Not stated.
Before you treat that row as settled:
Is the vendor the broker, or an integration? Some platforms place the policy through an affiliated brokerage, others feed payroll data to an insurer you already have.
Who assigns the classification codes? Premium is driven by class code as much as by wages, and a miscoded workforce produces a wrong premium in either direction until an audit finds it.
Is the policy portable? If coverage is tied to the payroll platform, switching payroll later can mean re-papering it mid-term.
Pay runs, deposit speed and contractors in payroll software
Two operational details decide how payroll feels week to week, and neither is visible in a headline price.
The first is deposit timing. Direct deposit is funded on a schedule, and the standard arrangement takes several business days between approving a run and money landing in an employee's account, so your own balance has to be right well before payday. Faster funding exists, is usually a higher tier, and is frequently subject to credit approval, because the provider is fronting money. QuickBooks Online lists direct deposit as Yes (next-day) and Gusto lists Yes.
The second is whether pay runs are unlimited or metered. Off-cycle runs are not exotic: a correction, a final paycheck on a termination, a commission run. Ask whether extra runs are included, because a per-run charge quietly rewards you for leaving mistakes uncorrected.
Contractors sit alongside this. Paying someone as a contractor means no withholding and a 1099-NEC at year end rather than a W-2, and the classification test is a legal question rather than a preference. On the billing side, ask whether contractors count as chargeable heads on your plan and whether their year-end filing is included. Contractor payments read Yes on Gusto and Yes on Patriot Software. Misclassification protection, where a vendor absorbs some of that exposure, reads No on Gusto and Yes on Deel.
When you need an Employer of Record instead of US payroll software
If you are paying someone who lives and works in another country, you are usually not buying US payroll software at all. You cannot put a foreign resident on a US payroll run and consider the matter handled.
An Employer of Record hires the person through its own local entity and handles that country's payroll, tax and statutory obligations, then bills you. It is priced per employee per month and sits an order of magnitude above domestic payroll: Deel lists $599/emp/mo, Papaya Global lists $499/emp/mo (from) and Payoneer Workforce Management lists $199/emp/mo (from).
Read those platforms in the other direction too. Payoneer Workforce Management lists full-service filing as No (EOR only) and multi-state as No, so it is not a substitute for domestic payroll. Going the other way, Gusto lists global payroll as Contractors only and OnPay as No, against Yes (global) on Deel.
For most US employers this is a note for later. If everyone you pay works in the United States, you probably do not need any of it yet, and buying for a hypothetical international hire is how you end up on a pricier platform for a capability you never use.