What Employment Hero payroll costs
Employment Hero prices payroll on a single axis: your headcount. It publishes two figures and no more: a per-employee fee of $10/emp/mo (Payroll), and a monthly floor listed as $100/mo min. No lock-in contract is required (No). Plans and pricing checked July 2026, and every figure on this page is pulled live from our database rather than typed in by hand.
That is the whole rate card, and it is refreshingly short. The complication is not how many figures there are. It is how the two of them interact.
The monthly minimum is a floor, not an addition
This is the single most misunderstood thing about Employment Hero's pricing, and getting it wrong will make you budget close to twice what you should.
The minimum is not added to your per-employee total. It replaces that total whenever the total comes in below it. You pay whichever of the two is larger, and you never pay both.
Work it through and the shape becomes obvious. Divide the minimum by the per-employee fee and you get ten. Below ten employees, your per-employee total is smaller than the floor, so the floor is your bill and it does not move at all. At ten employees exactly, the two meet. Above ten, the floor stops mattering and the cost becomes a straight per-head line that steps up with every hire.
The consequence is uncomfortable for very small employers: being small buys you nothing. A business with three staff and a business with nine staff pay Employment Hero the same amount every month, and the three-person business is effectively paying more than three times the headline per-employee rate for the privilege. If you run payroll for a handful of people, the advertised per-employee figure is not the number that describes your bill. The minimum is.
What that means at your headcount
Below ten staff, your Employment Hero cost is fixed and adding people is free until you reach the floor. That is genuinely useful if you are hiring fast: a business going from four to nine people in a year sees no change in its payroll bill at all.
Above ten staff, the cost is linear, and it stays linear. Employment Hero does not publish a stepped ladder, a banded plan or a volume break above the minimum in its payroll product, so a hundred-person employer pays ten times what a ten-person employer pays. There is no point on the published rate card where growth earns you a lower rate per head. That is unusual among the Australian payroll options and it is the thing to model before you commit, because it is exactly where a banded competitor starts to pull ahead.
The calculator above prices this at your real headcount rather than at a headline, which is the only sensible way to read a fee that behaves this differently at either end of the range.
What the price buys: payroll built for Australian rules
Employment Hero's case for costing more than a bolt-on payroll module is compliance, and on this specific point the case is strong. It is built in Australia, and built against Australian employment law rather than localised into it after the fact (Yes (AU-built)).
Award interpretation is the part that matters most, and Employment Hero covers Yes (100+ awards). If you employ people under a Modern Award with penalty rates, overtime, allowances and shift loadings, that is the difference between payroll being a calculation and payroll being a liability. Global platforms typically treat award interpretation as a configuration exercise you own, which shifts the compliance risk onto you.
The reporting and payment plumbing is complete: STP Phase 2 (Yes), super payments (Yes) and Payday Super readiness (Yes), paid out via EFT, PayTo. It writes back to Xero, MYOB, QuickBooks, so it sits alongside your ledger rather than replacing it, and support is Business hours AU. Our payroll for award interpretation guide ranks it against the rest of the field on this exact capability.
Where the pricing bites
Three things are worth naming before you sign up.
The floor punishes micro employers hardest. Under ten staff you are paying for capacity you are not using, and the smaller you are the worse the effective rate per head. A four-person business is the worst-value customer Employment Hero has.
The linear scaling has no published relief. Because there is no volume break above the minimum, the payroll line grows in lockstep with headcount forever. Model it at the size you expect to be in two years, not the size you are now.
Payroll is one module, not the platform. Employment Hero also sells its HR product on its own per-employee fee and its own monthly minimum ($100/mo), so a business buying both is carrying two lines, not one. And it does not do overseas payroll (No), so a team with staff in other countries needs a second system regardless.
Who Employment Hero suits
The sweet spot is an Australian employer with somewhere between ten and a few hundred staff, employing under Modern Awards, with no overseas headcount. Target market is SMB to Mid-Market, and that is an accurate description. Hospitality, retail, aged care, construction and any other award-heavy roster business gets more out of Employment Hero than a general accounting package can offer, because the award engine is doing genuine work every pay run.
It also suits a business that wants payroll, HR and employee self-service in one place and is willing to pay for that consolidation. Users rate it 4.4 out of five, which is solid rather than exceptional.
Where a rival is cheaper, plainly
Employment Hero is one of our affiliate partners. It makes no difference to what follows, and here is the honest position.
For a straightforward Australian employer that only needs payroll, MYOB and QuickBooks Online both undercut it. MYOB starts at $15/mo (Payroll Only, up to 4 emp) and charges $3/emp/mo, a fraction of Employment Hero's per-head rate. QuickBooks Online starts at $33/mo (Simple Start) and charges $6/emp/mo. Both of those base figures also buy you an accounting subscription, which Employment Hero's fee does not, so the gap is wider than the headline suggests if you need accounting anyway.
Xero is the interesting one, because it prices payroll in headcount bands (Plan-based) rather than per head, starting at $78/mo (Grow). Bands beat a linear per-head fee once headcount is high enough, and lose to it in the middle of the range, so which is cheaper genuinely depends on where you sit. Use the calculator rather than a rule of thumb. Xero's award interpretation is thinner though (Limited), so a cheaper bill can cost you elsewhere.
Deel is not really a competitor for domestic payroll at $41/emp/mo, but it is the answer if your problem is overseas staff (Yes (150+ countries)), which Employment Hero does not solve.
The short version: Employment Hero is rarely the cheapest way to run Australian payroll, and it is often the best way to run award-heavy Australian payroll. If your roster is simple, buy on price. If it is not, the award engine is what you are paying for. Our payroll software for small business guide runs the same providers against a smaller headcount.