The top 5 most affordable payroll services for 2024.

A payroll service can assist business owners in managing labor expenses by balancing affordability and functionality.

CNBC Select has identified the top four affordable payroll services based on pricing, features, benefits administration, and HR tools. (For more details on our selection process, please refer to our methodology.)

Best for simplicity

This payroll service is suitable for businesses seeking a straightforward solution without numerous complex features. While it offers competitive pricing, it does not include benefits administration or a comprehensive range of HR tools like many other competitors.

Self-service tax states offer business owners the lowest pricing tier at $20 per month plus $6 per employee plus $6 per contractor. You won't be charged for inactive contractors or seasonal employees.

Best for free trial

Is SurePayroll suitable for you? It provides a six-month free trial for new users to test its full-service or no-tax filing service. This is one of the longest free trial offers among service providers on this list.

To reduce the cost of payroll services, SurePayroll enables users to exclude tax filing from their package. Additionally, SurePayroll provides an easy-to-use mobile app for managing payroll on the go and offers free direct deposit.

Best for unlimited monthly pay runs

What is OnPay? It is a payroll platform that offers a comprehensive set of features at an affordable price. One of its main advantages is its ability to handle multiple pay schedules across different states and provide unlimited pay runs. This means that you won't have to pay more to make payments to employees multiple times per month, which allows you to make biweekly pay runs without any limitations.

OnPay offers integrated accounting services with Quickbooks and Xero, as well as HR and employee benefit features such as time-off requests and new employee onboarding.

Best for international payments

This platform is designed for businesses with employees and contractors in the U.S. and abroad. Rippling simplifies the process of onboarding and paying international employees and contractors in their local currency, eliminating the hassle of figuring it out on your own.

Rippling provides compliance with local and international tax laws for businesses with a global workforce, along with a range of HR, IT, and finance features and benefits administration.

Best for mobile payroll

The ideal solution for managing payroll on the go is Roll by ADP. It's a cutting-edge AI-driven, chat-based mobile payroll app that allows business owners to onboard themselves in just 15 minutes and run payroll in under one minute, all through the app.

ADP's Roll by AI provides chat support, HR assistance, and payroll advice to businesses, allowing employees to receive payment as quickly as the same day payroll is processed.

More on our top cheap payroll services

Wave Payroll

In self-service states, businesses can most affordably use Wave for tax filing. There are 14 tax service states where businesses can automatically file taxes: Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, New York, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin. All other states are considered self-service states.

Customers can benefit from features such as direct deposit, W-2 and 1099 processing, and an online portal for employees. Additionally, a 30-day free trial is available.

Cost

The cost of self-service is calculated as $20 per month, plus $6 per employee, and $6 per contractor.

The tax service declares that the monthly fee is $40, with an additional $6 for each employee and $6 for each contractor.

Benefits administration

None

SurePayroll

SurePayroll offers two pricing tiers: the full-service tier includes features such as free 2-day direct deposit, unlimited payroll runs, the ability to set multiple pay rates and payout bonuses, live help, access to online pay stubs, and tax filing and submission services, while the slightly cheaper version does not include these features.

The company offers a range of services, including HR management, health insurance, 401(k) options, and pre-employment screening.

Cost

Full service: $29.99 per month + $5 per employee

No tax filing: $19.99 per month + $4 per employee

Benefits Administration

401(k), health insurance and workers' compensation

OnPay

OnPay offers small business owners affordable access to a range of corporate benefits for their employees, such as HR and benefits tools and features including W-2 and 1099 processing, PTO, health insurance, 401(k) plans, life and disability insurance, liability insurance, commuter benefits, and HSA and FSA access.

Cost

$40 per month plus $6 per employee per month

Benefits Administration

Insurance options such as health, retirement, vacation and PTO, life and disability, liability, commuter benefits, HSA, and FSA are available.

Rippling

Rippling offers over 500 integrations with popular platforms such as Brex, Carta, Slack, AWS, Zoom, PayPal, Salesforce, Google Workspace, Checkr, Jira, Github, and Microsoft365. The platform provides a comprehensive experience for business owners and their employees. One of its unique features is the ability to create a custom holiday time-off calendar, which is particularly useful for employees working globally. Additionally, Rippling offers the ability to offer equity as an employee benefit.

Cost

You must get a customizable quote for the monthly subscription fee that starts at $8 per user.

Benefits Administration

Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA), Health Savings Accounts (HSA), commuter benefits, medical, dental, and vision insurance, as well as 401(k) plans, are all important components of a comprehensive employee benefits package.

Roll by ADP

ADP's Roll is a mobile-first payroll service designed for small businesses. With the app, small business owners can run payroll in under a minute, and receive notifications when it's payday. The platform also calculates payroll taxes and deducts the correct amount. Additionally, Roll integrates with QuickBooks Online to help track payroll expenses.

Cost

$39 per month plus $5 per employee

Benefits Administration

Deductions for retirement planning

Why trust CNBC Select?

Our mission at CNBC Select is to deliver top-notch service journalism and in-depth consumer advice to our readers, enabling them to make well-informed decisions when it comes to managing their finances. Each payroll service review we publish is the result of thorough reporting by our team of expert writers and editors, who possess extensive knowledge of small business products. At CNBC Select, we maintain the highest journalistic standards and ethics, and we earn a commission from affiliate partners on many offers and links. However, our content is created independently, without any input from our commercial team or external third parties. To learn more about our methodology and how we select the best cheap payroll services, please refer to our detailed guide.

Our methodology

CNBC Select evaluated various payroll software companies and assessed their pricing, features, user reviews, and ratings to determine the most affordable options for small businesses.

The software we've chosen received high marks for:

• Affordability
• Having an easy-to-navigate user interface
• Having helpful integrations with other business software
• Having automation features that make payroll easier
• Easy to customize based on your company's needs and policies

To improve our understanding of each platform's functionality in terms of user experience, customer service, features for full-time and contract employees, and HR resource implementation, we analyzed online reviews.

Our payroll services come with tiered packages and payment processing options for contractors, making them ideal for businesses of all sizes.

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