Best Free Payroll Software

The UK market uses the phrase “free payroll software” to cover three different things, and only one of them is what you actually want.

First, software that is permanently free, with no time limit and no headcount trap that quietly converts to paid. As of 2026 this is a real and growing group, not a single product.

Collegia FreePayroll and Employment Hero both run full HMRC-recognised payroll for unlimited staff at no cost. HMRC’s own Basic PAYE Tools is free too, but caps at nine employees and skips pensions.

Second, paid products dressed up with a 30-day free trial, after which billing starts whether you noticed or not. Third, cheap-but-not-free tools that get called free in listicles because they sit at the bottom of a pricing table.

These distinctions decide your budget. Pick the wrong one and you either pay for software you did not need, or miss compliance cover you assumed was included.

We checked which UK products are genuinely free, how each one pays for itself, where the catch sits, and the point at which free stops being enough for a growing employer.

Best Free UK Payroll Software at a Glance

Three products are genuinely free for a typical small employer with no time limit: Collegia FreePayroll and Employment Hero (both unlimited staff, with pensions built in) and HMRC Basic PAYE Tools (capped at nine, no pensions).

EnrolPay, Primo Payroll and Shape Payroll add free options too, though with tighter limits. The rest of the “free” list is low-cost paid software or trial-only products that start billing once the trial ends.

Below, we cover the free options first, in the order we would recommend them for your situation, then the paid tools as the upgrade path.

Sources: freepayroll.ai, employmenthero.com/uk, gov.uk/basic-paye-tools, enrolpay.com, brightpay.co.uk, moneysoft.co.uk, xero.com/uk, sage.com. Pricing and features verified June 2026; figures exclude VAT unless stated.

Full Comparison Table: Best Free UK Payroll Software

Every product on this page in one view: whether it is genuinely free, its headcount limit, whether pensions and payslips are covered, the annual cost where it is paid, and the situation it suits best.

Annual costs exclude VAT and assume a 10-person payroll where per-employee pricing applies. Full funding and catch detail for each free tool sits in the table further down.

Which Free UK Payroll Software Should You Actually Use?

If you want zero ongoing payroll cost and full compliance cover, including workplace pensions, start with Collegia FreePayroll or Employment Hero. Both are free for unlimited staff and HMRC-recognised.

If you have fewer than nine employees, no pension duties you cannot handle yourself, and you trust HMRC’s own tooling, Basic PAYE Tools is still a clean choice.

The honest question with the unlimited free tools is not whether they work. It is how each one earns its money, which decides what you are signing up to. We go through each product on that basis.

Collegia FreePayroll: the strongest genuinely free option for UK employers

Collegia FreePayroll is cloud payroll software that launched in 2023 as a direct alternative to HMRC Basic PAYE Tools. It is free with no employee cap, no trial countdown, and no paid tier you are funnelled toward.

We checked its HMRC recognition and pricing directly: it is HMRC-recognised and holds a 4.9 out of 5 rating on Trustpilot from over 200 reviews, which is unusually high for payroll software at any price.

What you get for free with Collegia FreePayroll.

It runs the full PAYE cycle for unlimited employees. You calculate tax and National Insurance, file Real Time Information Full Payment Submissions (FPS) and Employer Payment Summaries (EPS) to HMRC, and email payslips as PDFs to staff.

Auto-enrolment, the legal duty to put eligible staff into a workplace pension, is built in. P45s for leavers and P60s at year end are included.

That feature set matches paid tools costing £90 or more a year. For a small employer who needs pensions handled without a separate portal, this removes a real admin job at no cost.

Where Collegia FreePayroll’s catch sits.

How it is funded: Collegia is a pension provider. FreePayroll is the front door to its own auto-enrolment scheme, and the business earns from the pension assets it manages over time, not from you.

The auto-enrolment is built around the Collegia pension. You can run payroll while using a different pension scheme, but the smoothest, fully automated path assumes you adopt Collegia’s.

That is the trade-off to weigh. The software is free because your staff pensions help fund it, so check the scheme’s charges and fund options against your current provider before you move everyone across.

Employment Hero free payroll: unlimited staff with a pension link

Employment Hero offers a free payroll tier with no employee limit, which is rare. We confirmed it on HMRC's recognised-software list, and it is built into a wider HR and hiring platform, so payroll sits alongside staff records rather than standing alone.

Thousands of UK businesses run payroll on the free tier, drawn by the no-cost unlimited-staff offer.

What you get for free with Employment Hero.

The free tier covers RTI submissions for unlimited employees, payslip delivery, and P45, P46 and P60 production.

Auto-enrolment runs through PensionSync, a service that connects payroll to major pension schemes and submits contribution data automatically, so you are not keying figures into a separate portal each run.

It holds triple ISO certification (27001, 27017 and 27018), the recognised standards for information security and cloud data handling. For a buyer whose IT or security team signs off on tools, that is a box already ticked.

Where Employment Hero’s catch sits.

How it is funded: the free payroll tier carries advertising inside parts of the interface, and it is a route into Employment Hero’s paid HR, hiring and benefits products.

Compliance features are not gated behind the ads, so payroll itself stays fully usable. The pressure is upward, toward the paid platform, rather than a hidden charge on payroll.

If you already want HR and payroll in one system, that pull is a feature. If you only want payroll, expect prompts to upgrade and judge whether the in-product advertising bothers your team day to day.

HMRC Basic PAYE Tools: free, simple, and capped at nine

HMRC Basic PAYE Tools (BPT) is free payroll software built by HMRC itself, for employers with fewer than 10 staff who want to run payroll without paying for third-party software.

It is permanently free, with no trial and no upsell. In our assessment the trade-off is a narrow feature set: it does core filing and nothing more.

What you get for free with HMRC Basic PAYE Tools.

You can calculate PAYE tax and National Insurance, file RTI Full Payment Submissions, send Employer Payment Summaries, and process statutory payments including Statutory Sick Pay and Statutory Maternity Pay.

BPT runs on Windows, Mac and Linux, making it one of very few payroll tools with native Linux support.

It also has a quiet second use even if you pay for other software: you can run BPT alongside it purely to check a new employee’s National Insurance number with HMRC, or to send a standalone EPS your main tool cannot.

One reassurance, given recurring rumours that HMRC is retiring it: BPT version 26.0 shipped for the 2026/27 tax year, confirmed by the CIPP, the Chartered Institute of Payroll Professionals. The tool is actively maintained, not winding down.

Where HMRC Basic PAYE Tools runs out.

Named limitations: a hard nine-employee cap, no built-in auto-enrolment, no distributable payslips, and no agent or bureau access.

Auto-enrolment is not handled at all. BPT will not assess who is eligible, calculate pension contributions, or talk to schemes like NEST, so you run that separately through your pension provider’s portal.

For a single employee that is manageable with a NEST account and a spreadsheet. Across five or more, the manual work and the risk of a contribution error both climb. This is the main reason Collegia or Employment Hero now beat BPT for most employers with pension duties.

It produces no distributable payslips, has no self-service, no accounting integration, and no support line beyond HMRC’s general employer helpline. You get compliance filings, and the surrounding infrastructure is yours to assemble.

What Are the Other Free Tiers Worth: EnrolPay, Primo and Shape?

Beyond the three above, we found a second tier of genuinely free options. They are real, but each comes with a sharper limit, so treat them as situational rather than default picks.

EnrolPay is best understood as a free auto-enrolment management tool rather than a full payroll engine. If you already run payroll elsewhere, including on BPT, but struggle with pension assessment and submissions, EnrolPay handles that side at no cost.

Primo Payroll and Shape Payroll both offer a free tier capped at around five employees per company. Both are cloud-based, HMRC-recognised, and cover RTI, payslips, auto-enrolment and statutory payments within that limit.

For a micro-employer who will stay under five staff, either is a fair free choice. The moment you cross that cap, Collegia or Employment Hero is the cleaner unlimited path rather than upgrading to a paid Primo or Shape plan.

Is It Really Free? The Catch, Side by Side

“Free” is only useful if you know what funds it and where the limit bites. We assessed each genuinely-free product against five procurement questions buyers actually need answered.

The rule that falls out of this: if you have pension duties and any chance of growth, an unlimited free tool with built-in auto-enrolment beats a capped one you will outgrow inside a year.

When Is It Worth Paying? The Upgrade Path

Free covers compliance for most small employers. You pay when a specific need appears that the free tools do not serve well: deep accounting integration, bureau access for client payrolls, or a particular support standard.

These are the paid tools most often confused with free, and what each one actually buys you.

BrightPay: lowest-cost paid option, but never free

BrightPay shows up in “free payroll” searches because it was historically cheap and some old content mislabelled it. It is not, and never has been, free.

The desktop entry tier for 2025/26 is £79+VAT a year for up to three employees, covering RTI, auto-enrolment with direct links to NEST, The People’s Pension and Smart Pension, payslips, and statutory payments. Desktop pricing scales to £139+VAT for up to 10 and £289+VAT for unlimited.

The change that matters: 2025/26 is the final year for BrightPay desktop. Its parent company Bright is moving everyone to BrightPay Cloud from 2026/27, which drops the flat annual fee.

Cloud is priced on your highest recorded headcount in any billing period, worked out through a calculator rather than a published table. So the £79 entry price is not a stable long-term baseline, and the desktop deal is closing.

Our full BrightPay review covers the cloud migration in detail. Pick BrightPay over a free tool only if you specifically want its pension integration depth or you are already inside the Bright ecosystem.

Moneysoft Payroll Manager: best paid value at low headcount

Moneysoft Payroll Manager is a Windows desktop tool, HMRC-recognised since RTI began in 2013. The PM20 entry licence is £90+VAT a year for one employer and up to 20 staff, which works out at £4.50 per employee at full capacity.

It covers RTI, auto-enrolment, payslips, P11D reporting (the form employers file for taxable benefits in kind such as a company car or private medical cover), bulk EPS, and CIS built in rather than as an add-on. CIS is the Construction Industry Scheme, the HMRC rules under which contractors deduct tax from subcontractors’ pay and report it. For a builder running 15 subcontractors, that CIS support is the reason to pay.

The limits: desktop-only, Windows 11 only (Windows 10 reached Microsoft end-of-support in October 2025), single-user, no cloud, no self-service, no accounting integration, and no published cloud roadmap.

If your payroll operator works remotely, or Finance wants to query data without an export, that architecture creates friction fast. Our Moneysoft review covers the bureau licences in depth.

Xero and Sage: trials, not free products

Xero Payroll is a 30-day trial of a paid product, and it needs an active Xero accounting subscription to work at all. After the trial, the cost adds up quickly: Xero’s Grow plan is about £37 a month plus about £1.50 per employee per month, and the plan includes one employee. At nine additional staff that is £37 + (9 × £1.50) = £50.50 a month, or roughly £606+VAT a year for a 10-person payroll.

If you already run Xero for accounting, adding payroll removes the manual journal step and is worth it. If you do not, this is an accounting platform decision, not a payroll one. See our Xero Payroll review.

Sage Business Cloud Payroll offers a trial too, then quotes pricing on application rather than publishing it. It is a capable, cloud-native product with UK support, but pricing opacity is the consistent complaint from evaluators on AccountingWEB and Trustpilot.

You cannot budget for Sage without contacting sales, which is hard to defend when free, compliant tools sit one tab away. Our Sage review has the figures we have verified.

The headline is hard to argue with: at 10 employees with full compliance, two products cost nothing and three cost between £90 and £606. The paid options are an upgrade, not a baseline.

When Does Free Payroll Software Stop Being Enough?

With Collegia or Employment Hero, “free runs out” arrives far later than it used to, because both are unlimited and pension-capable. From our cross-product comparison, the triggers now are about fit, not headcount alone.

You outgrow Basic PAYE Tools’ nine-employee cap. If you are still on BPT and hit 10 staff, you need new software at once, and the migration itself carries a real risk.

Moving payroll mid-year means carrying over year-to-date figures and re-entering employee records, and the new system’s first RTI submission must not create duplicate employee records at HMRC. A duplicate means HMRC thinks one person is two, with two tax positions.

The sensible time to migrate is the start of a tax year, in April. That means planning the switch before you hire your tenth employee, not on the day it happens.

You need deep accounting integration. If payroll must post straight into your accounts ledger, a tool like Xero earns its fee. The free engines file with HMRC well but do not plug into accounting platforms the same way.

You run payroll for clients. Free tools are built for single employers. A bookkeeper or bureau handling multiple clients needs a bureau-grade product such as Moneysoft’s multi-employer licences or BrightPay’s bureau tier.

You need a contractual support standard. Free support is best-effort. If your business needs a guaranteed response time on a payroll question, that is a paid feature, and worth pricing honestly against the cost of a missed deadline.

How Did We Evaluate Free Payroll Software for UK Businesses?

We applied five criteria specific to this buying context, because the usual review angles matter less when the first question is simply whether a product is genuinely free and compliant.

Free-status accuracy. We verified whether each product is permanently free, trial-only, or paid with a free-tier label, checking provider sites and HMRC’s recognised-software guidance in June 2026.

HMRC recognition. Every product here appears on HMRC’s recognised payroll software list. We excluded UK-marketed tools without recognition, since RTI non-compliance creates employer liability.

Auto-enrolment coverage. Whether pension assessment and contribution calculation are built in, or left to you. This is a duty for almost all UK employers with eligible staff.

Funding model and the catch. For every free product we asked who pays, so the lock-in or conflict is visible before you commit, not after.

Operational fit for small employers. Whether the tool is practical for a business with a handful of staff, run by a non-specialist, which is the realistic profile for anyone searching for free payroll software.

Frequently Asked Questions About Free Payroll Software in the UK

Methodology and Disclosure