9 Best Payroll Software UK: Reviews & Pricing (2026)

Sage sells UK payroll as two distinct products, and choosing the right one matters more than any single feature. Sage Payroll is cloud software for up to 150 employees. Sage 50 Payroll is desktop software with cloud connectivity, licensed in bands from 15 employees to unlimited. HMRC recognises both for online PAYE and RTI reporting, though recognition signals technical capability rather than quality.

The clearest split is auto-enrolment. On the cloud tiers, pension assessment, enrolment, and contributions are included at every level. On Sage 50 Payroll, the same capability requires the additional pension module, so we’d recommend budgeting for it separately. Sage Payroll follows a similar pattern: the cloud product bundles core HR, self-service, and onboarding into all three tiers, while Sage 50 Payroll centres on payroll depth such as departments, cost centres, batch input, and individual rollback.

Cloud pricing is published rather than quoted, which is unusual in this category. Essentials starts at £12 per month excluding VAT for five employees, with per-employee rates that fall as headcount rises. Sage says the cloud product automatically retrieves and applies P6, P9, and student loan notices with a per-employee audit trail, and that RTI submissions cover FPS and EPS on each pay run.

Two limits shape the decision. The cloud product stops at 150 employees, and the option Sage markets above 200 is unnamed on its payroll page. For most small UK employers, the cloud tiers are the straightforward starting point.

Sage does not publish a customer count specific to its UK payroll products.

Sage Payroll (cloud), monthly ex-VAT, 5 employees per tier, 150 maximum:

• Essentials: £12, plus per-employee rates that fall with headcount (£2.40 for 6-10, £1.70 for 11-25, £1.40 for 26-150).
• Standard: £23 base, then tiered per-employee rates.
• Premium: £34 base, then tiered per-employee rates.
• Sage 50 Payroll (desktop): from £41/mo (to 15 employees) up to £160.50 (unlimited); auto-enrolment needs the paid pension module.

Cloud plans offer one month free or 90% off for three months; Sage 50 Payroll has a 30-day trial.

Employment Hero is Australian, founded in 2014, and describes itself as an employment operating system rather than a payroll product. The UK payroll engine came from KeyPay, a 2010 Australian payroll business with an established UK footprint that Employment Hero seed-funded in 2012 and acquired outright in 2022.

Free payroll is the entry point, and it is unusually complete. They publish RTI submissions, PAYE and NI calculations, auto-enrolment and pension contributions, statutory payments, year-end P60s, National Minimum Wage checks, and unlimited employees at no cost, with no trial period and no card required. Support on the free tier is AI-assisted self-serve backed by a help centre.

HR and payroll are reached through separate logins, and users report some functions sitting in one but not the other. Support draws consistent criticism after implementation, and the employee Work App attracts recurring complaints about clock-in reliability and navigation. For a small UK employer wanting free compliant payroll, this is the strongest offer in the category, but if looking for a wider suite with more budget, that’s a separate decision.

Employment Hero says 25,000 UK SMEs use the platform, and lists The Body Shop, Gumtree, and Hyundai Motors UK.

Employment Hero publishes full pricing, per employee per month, excluding VAT.

• Free Payroll: £0, unlimited employees, no monthly minimum.
• Core Payroll: £3 PEPM with a £20 minimum, adding multi-PAYE and live webchat.
• Managed Payroll: £12 PEPM with a £120 minimum, adding end-to-end managed pay runs.
• HR: from £4 PEPM on Essentials with a ten-user minimum, plus nine separately priced add-ons.

Billing uses the greater of the contracted minimum or actual billable employees each month.

Rippling is not really a payroll company, which is the first thing to understand about it. Parker Conrad founded it in 2016, months after being forced out of Zenefits, the HR startup he had grown to a $4.5 billion valuation before compliance investigations brought it down. Rippling passed that peak by 2021 and was valued at $16.8 billion by May 2025. We have covered the company almost as long as this site has existed. UK payroll, though, only arrived in March 2024, making Rippling the newest entrant in this guide by some margin.

Our testing across several guides has been positive on the product and consistent about its limits. The interface has always been modern, intuitive, and with a solid execution of automated workflows: onboarding a new starter can provision payroll, benefits, app access, and a laptop by running one single process. The ‘single source of data’ has always been one of the key differentiators. The idea is: if you update something (say, a candidate data point within the HRMS) it shows in any module you’re using, or may use in the future: payroll, IT, finance, you name it.

That said, the UK caveats are specific. From when we last checked, Rippling's own UK pricing page still seems to describe American payroll: federal and state tax filing, W-2s, workers' compensation. UK payroll is separately evidenced and HMRC-recognised, and Rippling says it covers RTI, PAYE, National Insurance, and auto-enrolment. While we know it’s got some adopters on the islands, we found no meaningful body of UK user feedback.

As to price, every buyer sits on a mandatory platform subscription before adding payroll, contracts run a year minimum, and phone support from HR specialists costs extra.

Rippling does not publish a UK customer count, and its named customer logos are largely US businesses.

Rippling publishes no UK pricing. The pricing page is a quote request with headcount bands running from 1-10 up to 1,001 plus.

• Rippling Platform: mandatory subscription sitting under every product, priced on quote.
• Payroll: bought as a module on top of the platform, priced per employee monthly.
• HR, IT, and Spend products: each priced separately, some carrying their own base fee.

There is no free tier and no self-serve trial, and contracts run a year minimum.

Oracle is a database company that moved into applications later, largely by buying them, and Fusion Cloud HCM is the cloud rewrite of that estate. Payroll is one workload on an infrastructure stack, which makes its UK localisation history genuinely surprising.

Oracle names the individual HMRC message types it handles, P6, P9, SL1 and the rest, where most vendors promise tax code automation and stop. It also supports Civil Service Pensions, LGPS, Teachers' Pensions reconciliation and the School Workforce Census. Workday builds UK payroll natively too, and SAP delivers it through partners, but on public sector schemes Oracle is alone here.

Then there is Birmingham. The council put Fusion in during April 2022, watched a £19m estimate become a £144.4m forecast, and spent eighteen months unable to produce auditable accounts. Grant Thornton called the failure contributory rather than fundamental; Sheffield's Audit Reform Lab put it closer to the centre. Both agree on the cause: the council customised Fusion to fit existing processes, against its own design principle, and left staff unprepared. Another major UK infrastructure programme took Fusion close to standard with a partner who knew it, and went live on time and on budget.

The rule follows from that. Below a thousand or so employees you are not an Oracle buyer, and BrightPay or Rippling will serve you better. Above it, with public sector schemes in play, Oracle is hard to beat, so long as you take it standard and choose your implementation partner as carefully as your software.

Oracle does not publish UK customer counts; Birmingham City Council is the best-documented UK Fusion payroll deployment.

Oracle publishes no list pricing for Fusion Cloud HCM. Everything runs through Oracle sales as a quote.

• Core HCM platform and Payroll are licensed as separate modules.
• Implementation is delivered mainly through partners and priced separately.
• Test environments are typically charged in addition.

Third-party licensing consultancies quote widely differing figures and disclose no methodology, so get a written quote rather than trusting any published rate.

A lot of American HR suites reach UK payroll through a partner. This is not the case with Workday. They built UK and Ireland payroll themselves, and it ships as their own product with its own line on the government framework. Their partner programme covers everywhere else.

Workday is among the most enterprise-ready tools in this guide (along with Oracle and SAP), so they are also one of the priciest ones. They published their UK rate card on GOV.UK, as do Zellis, which allows a rare enterprise vs. boutique comparison. Core HCM with UK Payroll, Time Tracking, and Expenses costs £298.70 per employee per year at 750 to 1,500 staff, against £42.48 for Zellis at a similar headcount. Workday's bundle carries far more, but the spread across this guide runs from free at Employment Hero to £12 a month at Sage. Of course, you don't buy Workday to save money.

You buy them to have one system for nearly all of your HR needs. They also tout the some of the strongest service commitments in the UK payroll space. Workday claim to answer the phone 24/7, promise a 1-hour response on Severity 1, and guarantee 99.9% monthly uptime. The trade is where your data sits: Workday spread it across the UK, EEA, and unnamed locations with no customer control, where UK specialists like Zellis keep everything local.

On the ground, the complaint is always the interface. Users routinely call it clunky and slow, and the payslip is a frequent target: where a plain summary would do, Workday shows every underlying table. Some of that reputation is unfair, since much of the "clunky" feeling comes from bouncing between badly joined-up systems rather than from Workday itself, but the ageing design has long been a frequent area for improvement, and for now, employees feel it daily. Lastly, one line in their framework entry matters more than any feature: Customisation is not available. Customising against vendor advice is exactly what the Birmingham audit blamed for Oracle's failure there, so the rigidity is arguably protection.

Workday does not publish many UK customer names, but the University of Hull and University of York are named adopters.

Workday publishes bundle rates on the GOV.UK G-Cloud framework, per employee per year excluding VAT. Figures below have held across successive filings since October 2025.

• Core HCM plus third-party payroll connector: £158.31 at 1,000 to 1,500 employees, falling to £57.57 above 50,000. This route excludes Workday payroll.
• Core HCM, UK Payroll, Time Tracking and Expenses: £298.70 at 750 to 1,500 employees, falling to £108.63 above 50,000.
• Full suite including Financials and Learning: £775.50 at 750 to 1,500 employees.

Deployment, training and extra tenants are quoted separately, and pricing assumes a three-year term.

SAP is the incumbent everyone with a large enough headcount eventually reckons with. Their engine has run large UK payrolls for decades. They bring enterprise-level experience only a few others may deliver, but there are various caveats to consider.

As briefly stated above, SAP's cloud payroll, Employee Central Payroll, runs on the same 20-year-old engine as their on-premise product, and mainstream support for that platform ends in 2027, with paid cover to 2030. SAP are migrating it onto newer infrastructure and handle most of the conversion themselves, but any purchase today is essentially anchoring your payroll into an active migration. That may be manageable, but good to understand before anything is signed. 

What you get for the trouble is arguably hard to find elsewhere. SAP's engine recalculates prior periods automatically when data changes after a finalised run, work most platforms leave to manual reconciliation. It documents Apprenticeship Levy and CIS reclaims few rivals name, holds SC clearance, and controls where data sits. On the framework the payroll licence is £79.20 per user a year, far below Workday's bundle, though that excludes the HR system it needs.

The catch has always shadowed SAP: it is powerful and heavy. Reviewers describe a steep learning curve and setup that runs long without seasoned consultants, and every UK deployment is partner-led. But if you already run SAP, payroll posts straight into Financial Accounting and cost centres, and that connected workflow is hard to argue against.

SAP does not publish UK payroll customer counts; but Birmingham City Council ran SAP payroll from the late 1990s until 2022.

SAP publishes a single figure on the GOV.UK framework, dated April 2024, excluding VAT.

• Employee Central Payroll: £79.20 per user per year, payroll only.
• Employee Central, the HR system payroll depends on, is licensed separately.
• A free trial is available on request, subject to evaluation.

Implementation is partner-delivered and quoted separately, and the framework figure predates the platform migration.

Zellis is the payroll engine running underneath a good deal of British public life. ResourceLink, its core product, has been paying council and NHS staff since the 1990s, and the company has been renamed around it twice: NorthgateArinso, then NGA, then Zellis in 2020. Apax funds have owned the group since April 2024, and Moorepay is the sister company for employers under 1,000.

Council committee papers tell you more here than any review site. Wirral has run ResourceLink since 1999, considered a move to Oracle in 2022, and kept Zellis after concluding it would cost more and reduce functionality for council and school users. Telford and Wrekin reviewed the framework and found only one supplier could meet its needs. Belfast City Council's 2025 tender notice states plainly that Zellis is the only company able to maintain its system.

Read that as strength or as lock-in. Argyll and Bute went the other way, its 2025 business case judging ResourceLink no longer fit for purpose. Highland Council has just signed through 2033.

What you get is depth in a narrow lane: multiple pay spines, union agreements, TUPE, school SLAs. What you do not get is anything outside the UK, Ireland, and the Crown Dependencies. Pricing sits on the G-Cloud framework, with a three-year minimum and licensing that counts inactive records, so read the terms as carefully as the rate.

Zellis says its payroll pays more than 5 million UK and Ireland employees; public records name Wirral Council.

Zellis publishes rates on the GOV.UK G-Cloud framework, not its own site. These are public sector framework rates dated April 2026, per employee monthly excluding VAT.

• HCM AIR, payroll and HR: £4.25 at 1,000 to 2,000 employees, falling to £1.43 above 10,000.
• HCM Cloud, payroll only: £2.71 at 1,000 to 2,000 employees, falling to £0.92 above 10,000.
• Fully managed payroll: £3.15 to £1.79 PEPM, charged on top of the software.
• Modules, implementation at £900 daily, support, and hosting are priced separately.

Private sector quotes may differ, and the minimum term is three years.

BrightPay comes from Bright, an Irish software group headquartered in Duleek, County Meath, with a UK office in Hammersmith. Thesaurus Software has written payroll software since 1992 and introduced BrightPay in 2012, adopting the Bright name in 2021 after merging with Relate Software. Payroll is the whole product here: HR, expenses, and time tracking sit in separate Bright applications.

Bureau work is what separates BrightPay from generalist payroll software. Bright ships the cloud product in two configurations, one for practices running many client payrolls and one for single employers, and its 2026 release notes cover batch payroll entry and approval, batch payslip distribution, and bureau statistics reporting. Pension APIs cover NEST, The People's Pension, and Smart Pension. Support is free on phone and email, staffed from Bright's Irish office by UK payroll specialists.

CIS deserves attention if you pay construction subcontractors. Bright told AccountingWEB in March 2025 that cloud users were then filing CIS on a complimentary desktop licence until a cloud version arrived. BrightCIS shipped that September as a separate module. Bright also said bureaus migrating early would keep desktop at no charge so they could move clients across in tranches.

Bright publishes no cloud price list, charging single employers per employee and bureaus on their combined active employers and employees, and routes anyone above 250 employees to sales.

Bright does not publish a customer count for BrightPay's UK cloud product.

BrightPay does not publish cloud pricing publicly.