Payroll is sold on two numbers, a monthly fee and a per-person fee. Neither tells you what you will actually pay. The plan that covers four staff is usually not the plan that covers twenty, and a platform that looks cheapest on its pricing page can be several times the price of a rival by the time you are paying a hundred people. So this report ignores the headline prices and runs every Australian payroll platform we track through the same cost engine that sits behind our comparison table, at five real business sizes.
BY ADVERTISED MONTHLY FEE
BY WHAT 20 EMPLOYEES ACTUALLY COST
Every figure here is read from our own pricing dataset as the page loads, so it describes the market today and not the day this was written. Plans and pricing checked September 2026. Figures are each provider's publicly advertised standard pricing, shown on the basis the provider publishes: Australian vendors advertise inclusive of GST, while figures converted from a US dollar rate card carry no Australian tax. Those two bases sit in one table, so read a cross-vendor gap of a few per cent as noise. Methodology is at the bottom.
What the data shows
- The spread widens with every hire. At one employee the priced options run from the mid teens to a hundred dollars. By a hundred employees the dearest costs more than twenty times the cheapest, and the choice made at the start is the one still being paid for.
- 4 providers charge no monthly subscription, billing per person instead. Read that with one caveat: one of them applies a monthly minimum, which works as a base fee until the team is big enough to pass it, and the table below marks it min. Billing purely per head is competitive for a single employee and the dearest at any real team size.
- Among the platforms that do charge a base fee, it runs from $15 to $78.
- One platform stops being priceable before the top of the ladder. Its vendor publishes a maximum headcount and no price above it, so we show a quote instead of inventing one.
- 7 providers publish a monthly figure you can check before speaking to anyone. The rest quote per business.
What payroll actually costs, by headcount
This is the estimate our calculator produces for each platform, using each vendor's own published plans, allowances and minimums. A business with four employees on a plan that includes four is charged for none of them; a platform with a monthly minimum is held at that minimum until the headcount passes it.
| Provider | 1 employee | 4 employees | 20 employees | 100 employees | 500 employees |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $15 | $15 | $130 | $165 | $165 | |
| $37 | $107 | $180 | $300 | Get quote | |
| $39 | $57 | $153 | $633 | $3,033 | |
| $40.42 | $161.68 | $808.40 | $4,042 | $20,210 | |
| $40.42 | $161.68 | $808.40 | $4,042 | $20,210 | |
| $40.42 | $161.68 | $808.40 | $4,042 | $20,210 | |
| $100 min | $100 min | $200 | $1,000 | $5,000 | |
| Get quote | Get quote | Get quote | Get quote | Get quote | |
| Get quote | Get quote | Get quote | Get quote | Get quote | |
| Get quote | Get quote | Get quote | Get quote | Get quote |
Read a row across, not a column down. Several of these platforms move you onto a different plan as you grow, so the figure in one column and the figure in the next are often not the same product.
Two labels in that table carry weight. A figure marked from is a floor: the vendor advertises a starting price and quotes what sits above it. A figure tagged min is a monthly minimum, correct at that headcount but pinned to a floor the business has not yet grown past.
What a payroll platform has to do in Australia
Price is only half the question, because Australian payroll carries obligations that do not exist in the other markets we cover, and they are where a cheap plan often stops.
Single Touch Payroll Phase 2 reporting is the baseline, and these platforms state that they do it: Deel, Employment Hero, MYOB, QuickBooks Online, Remote, Rippling, Sage and Xero. Paying super from inside the product rather than as a separate transfer is the next step up, and that is Deel, Employment Hero, MYOB, Papaya Global, QuickBooks Online, Remote, Rippling, Sage and Xero. One global platform in the roster states neither way, which is why we name the platforms rather than publish a count.
Award interpretation is the harder one, and it is not a yes or no. Employment Hero, QuickBooks Online and Rippling interpret modern awards directly, and one of those three does it by licensing another's engine, which is worth knowing if you are comparing them as rivals. Xero covers basic awards, MYOB handles them through integrations with rostering tools, and Sage, Deel, Remote and Payoneer Workforce Management are each limited in their own way. Papaya Global does not offer it.
For a business paying under an award, that distinction changes what the software does for you rather than whether you can use it, and a cheaper per-person rate does not close it. The full wording for each platform is in the comparison table, because a four-way answer collapses badly into a tick.
Median platformEach platform we priceRead the top of the ladder as what the rate card says, not as what a large employer would end up paying.
The three platforms built for hiring overseas
Deel, Papaya Global and Remote sit mid-table at one employee and top it by twenty. That is a difference in what they sell. None of the three is really competing with MYOB or Xero for a domestic pay run: they exist to employ staff in countries where an Australian business has no entity, and the per-person fee buys local employment compliance, statutory filing and benefits administration in each of those countries. There is no monthly fee to spread across a team, so nothing about the price improves as the team grows.
For a Sydney business putting one engineer in Manila, that is the cheapest route on this page. For twenty staff in New South Wales it is the wrong product at any price.
Two caveats, and both cut against these three. Their per-person figures are the least firm in the table: Papaya publishes its rate as a starting price, Deel's own page qualifies it, and Remote states that its payroll product also carries an implementation fee and a recurring delivery fee that it does not publish, so the real bill is above the line shown here. That is why all three read identically to the cent, and it is a limit of what any of them publishes rather than a coincidence.
The second caveat applies to the whole right-hand side. These figures are arithmetic on published rate cards, each vendor's plan price extended by its own per-person rate. No vendor here sells a 500-person payroll off a web page; every one of them quotes at that size.
Who will quote and who will tell you
7 providers publish a monthly figure a buyer can check before speaking to anyone: Deel, Employment Hero, MYOB, Papaya Global, QuickBooks Online, Remote and Xero.
The rest quote per business. That is a normal way to sell payroll, and it does mean their cost cannot be set against a rate card, which is why they sit as a quote in the table above instead of at the bottom of it.
A platform can be quote-only here while publishing a full rate card for what it does sell. A global employment platform with no Australian domestic payroll product has nothing to publish in this category and is withholding nothing.
Where the published fees sit
The monthly fee, ranked, with the per-person charge beside it:
| Provider | Monthly fee | Per person |
|---|---|---|
| $15 | $3/emp/mo | |
| $33 | $6/emp/mo | |
| $78 | Plan-based |
We have not published a median per-person fee. That column mixes domestic payroll software charging a few dollars a head with global platforms charging many times as much for a different product, so an average across them describes nothing a buyer could act on. The cost ladder prices each platform on what it actually sells.
Employer of record is priced in US dollars, wherever the employer sits
Hiring someone overseas without opening a local entity is a separate product at a separate price:
| Provider | Per employee, per month |
|---|---|
| $277 | |
| $695 | |
| $695 | |
| $835 | |
| $974 |
Those are US dollar list prices, converted at 1.3937 USD to AUD, captured 31 May 2026. From an Australian connection these vendors still quote in dollars, and the currency selector on their pricing pages changes the symbol without touching the number. So the table says what employer of record works out at in Australian dollars at that rate. It does not say that employing someone overseas costs an Australian company more than an American one, and no vendor here will quote you the converted figure.
Two things separate this table from the rest of the page. It is drawn from our employer-of-record dataset rather than the payroll roster above, so it includes platforms that do not sell Australian domestic payroll at all. And several of these figures are published as a starting price, so treat the column as a floor.
The same platforms, priced differently overseas
The same vendors sell payroll in Britain and the United States at genuinely different prices, not converted ones, because payroll is a local product with local compliance built into it. We publish a separate edition of this report per market, each reading its own market's live pricing:
Methodology
We list Deel, Employment Hero, MYOB, Papaya Global, Payoneer Workforce Management, QuickBooks Online, Remote, Rippling, Sage and Xero in this category.
Every cost here is produced by the same engine that powers our payroll comparison table and its calculator, from each vendor's published plans: plan prices, per-person charges, bundled allowances, monthly minimums and any published maximum headcount. Where a vendor publishes a ceiling we show a quote above it instead of extending their formula past what they advertise. Where a vendor publishes only a starting price, we label the figure a floor.
One limit, stated plainly: at the largest sizes we extend each vendor's own published rate, and vendors routinely move a business that size onto a plan they quote instead of publishing. Treat the top of the ladder as what the rate card says, not what a 500-person company would negotiate.
Prices come from each vendor's own pricing page, read from an Australian connection, because several of these vendors serve a different currency or a different rate card depending on where the visitor is. We do not take plan ladders from review sites, which cache pricing for years after a vendor has changed it.
Superannuation, payroll tax and workers compensation are employment costs, not software costs, and no figure on this page includes them.
