Free payroll software, and whether there is any free payroll software worth running

How to judge whether a free payroll product fits

1. Find out what it will not file. The commonest limit is reporting rather than calculation. A free tool may calculate correctly and leave you to submit, or submit some returns and not others, or not handle year-end at all. Write down every return you owe and check each one against the product before you rely on it.
2. Count the employees the free tier allows. Free tiers usually cap headcount, and the cap is often below the point at which payroll becomes tedious. Establish the cap, the price above it, and whether crossing it mid-year forces a migration, because the migration is the real cost of a cap.
3. Ask who fixes an error. Free products rarely come with payroll support. If a run is wrong you have documentation and a community forum, which is fine if you know payroll and expensive if you do not. Be honest about which of those describes you before choosing on price.
4. Price your own time at something. A free product that takes two extra hours a month costs more than a paid one for most employers with a dozen staff. Time the process on your own data during a trial rather than assuming, because the difference between products is mostly in the dull parts.

The tax authority tools

Some tax authorities publish basic payroll tools for small employers, and where they exist they are the most trustworthy free option on filing, because the filer and the publisher are the same body. The trade-off is scope: they tend to cover the statutory minimum, cap the number of employees and offer nothing for reporting, pensions administration or anything an HR system would do.

For an employer with a handful of people and simple pay, that is often exactly enough, and the honest advice is to use it rather than pay for a suite whose features you will not touch.

Free tiers of commercial products

These are marketing, which is not a criticism: a vendor giving away a small tier to reach buyers who will grow is a fair exchange. Read the tier's limits as a description of when you will start paying, and check whether your data moves with you when you do.

Watch for the features that are missing from the free tier rather than the ones that are present. Support, multi-user access, historical reporting and integrations are the usual omissions, and each of them is the thing that makes payroll manageable rather than possible.

Open source and self-hosting

Open-source payroll can be excellent and is never free of effort. You take on hosting, backups, upgrades and, critically, keeping statutory rates and formats current, which in payroll change every year and sometimes mid-year. That is a real job. Choose this route when you have the engineering capacity and want control, not when you want to save a subscription.

Common questions

Is there any genuinely free payroll software?

Yes: tax authority tools for small employers, free tiers of commercial products, and open-source software you host yourself. All three are free of a licence fee, and all three shift cost into filing scope, support or your own maintenance time.

Is free payroll software safe to use?

It can be, if the filing obligations are covered and the product is maintained. The risk is not the price, it is running a product whose statutory calculations or formats are out of date, which is a real hazard with abandoned open-source projects.

When should we start paying?

When an error would be expensive, when more than one person needs access, or when you notice you are keeping a spreadsheet beside the product. Each of those is a sign the free tier has stopped fitting.

Will we lose our history if we move off a free tier?

Not if you check the export first. Ask for a full export of pay history in a readable format during your trial, not at the point you decide to leave.

Coverage by country

• Employer of record vendors covering Singapore
• Employer of record vendors covering Mexico
• Employer of record vendors covering Spain
• Employer of record vendors covering Colombia
• Employer of record vendors covering United Kingdom
• Employer of record vendors covering France
• Employer of record vendors covering Hungary
• Employer of record vendors covering New Zealand