What HR & Payroll Costs in 2026

The median entry price for HR & Payroll in 2026 is $29 a month. Across all 252 tools we price-check the median is $19.99, so this category runs 1.5x the software average.

That comes from 5 tools in the category whose monthly price the vendor publishes on its own site. The range runs from Gusto at $6 to Deel at $49 — a spread of 8x for products that sit on the same shortlist.

Every published price in the category

How much of this category is free

Only 1 of 9 offer a free tier (11%), against 56% across all categories. You are going to pay to find out whether the product works, so keep that evaluation short and structured: buy one month rather than one year, and write down what it has to do before you start.

Per seat or flat

9 of 9 charge per seat (100%). Where that is the model, the entry price is not the price: it is the price of one person. Multiply by your real headcount before comparing anything, and check whether viewers are free — on a team with more readers than writers that distinction can halve the bill.

The ones that will not say

4 tools in this category (BambooHR, HiBob, Personio, Rippling) do not publish a price we can verify. Figures circulate for them on comparison sites; none come from the vendor, so we do not average them into anything above.

Where to start

The floor is Gusto at $6, with no free tier. Below $29 the category is Gusto at $6, Justworks at $8. Those are real products, not trials, and for a small team they are usually the right place to start: the expensive tiers in this category buy scale and administration, which are worth paying for once you have the problem and not before.

Where the price jumps

The widest step in the category is between Justworks at $8 and Oyster HR at $29 — $21 a month, or $252 a year, for the next rung. A gap that size is rarely about features you will use on day one; it usually marks the line between a self-serve product and one sold to a team. Work out which side of that line you are on before you shortlist, because it is a harder question than which tool you prefer.

What the headline price leaves out

An entry price is a plan, not a bill. The caveats we recorded while verifying this category are the ones most likely to change what you actually pay:

• Gusto — unchanged; a Contractor Only plan sits below it at $35/mo (currently promoted at $0) + $6/person, and Plus $80 + $12, Premium $180 + $22 above
• Deel — EOR platform fees plus statutory costs add up; pricing varies by country. Verify on deel.com.

The free tiers in this category, for the record: Deel. Whether each is usable or decorative varies, and the only reliable test is running a real piece of your own work through it before the card comes out.

For what each of these actually does rather than what it costs, see our HR & Payroll comparison. Every price here is verified from the vendor’s own page on a recorded date and kept in our public pricing dataset.