Employment Hero Payroll Review

Employment Hero Payroll's free tier is the real product: unlimited employees, no expiry, no forced upgrade. The catch is the broader HR and recruitment platform sitting next to it, which is where the pricing pressure lives.

The platform grew out of KeyPay, a cloud payroll engine acquired by Employment Hero in December 2021. Since the rebrand, the product has been rebuilt into a broader employment operating system covering HR, onboarding, recruitment, and payroll in one place.

That bundling is the central tension: your answer to it shapes whether Employment Hero Payroll is a genuine fit or an expensive detour.

For UK payroll specifically, the platform covers HMRC RTI, auto-enrolment via PensionSync, P11D submissions, statutory pay, and a full employee self-service app. The free payroll tier is real: unlimited employees, no trial expiry, no forced upgrade.

That headline is unusual enough that it warrants scrutiny, so it goes through the same tests every tool in this category gets. The pricing structure becomes considerably more complex once you add HR modules or move to a managed service.

One important scope note: Employment Hero also offers an EOR (Employer of Record) service for hiring internationally without a local entity. That is a separate product. This review covers the domestic UK payroll software only.

Employment Hero Payroll at a Glance

Our Verdict

Employment Hero Payroll is a cloud-native UK payroll platform with a genuinely competitive free tier. For businesses that want both payroll and HR in one place, the value proposition is clear.

For businesses that want payroll only, the platform asks you to navigate an HR-first product to get to the payroll features, which adds friction and eventual cost once you move beyond the free tier.

Best For

You are the right buyer for Employment Hero Payroll if your team is growing and you want payroll, onboarding, and leave management to sit in one system rather than three.

The free payroll tier is particularly strong for small businesses that cannot justify per-employee monthly fees. If you later need HR functionality, you can add it without migrating platforms.

Not Ideal For

If you run a construction or CIS payroll, or need complex shift-based pay structures, you may find the platform lighter than dedicated payroll-only tools.

If your Finance team needs transparent, quoted pricing before any supplier conversation, the opacity on Core Payroll costs will be a friction point.

And if your organisation already has a mature HRIS and wants a payroll-only bolt-on, paying for Employment Hero’s HR overhead will not sit well in a business case.

Key Facts

• Founded: Employment Hero 2014 (Australia); UK market via KeyPay acquisition December 2021
• Payroll engine: formerly KeyPay, now Employment Hero Payroll
• HMRC-recognised: Yes
• Free tier: Yes. Unlimited employees, no trial period.
• Managed Payroll: £12/employee/month
• Capterra/Trustpilot: 4.5 stars
• Review scope: Domestic UK payroll software only (not EOR)

What Is Employment Hero Payroll?

How Employment Hero Payroll Works

Employment Hero Payroll is a cloud-based payroll system built for UK businesses.

You configure pay schedules, employee records, and pension settings once; the platform then runs each pay cycle with automated PAYE/NI calculations, RTI submissions to HMRC, and payslip distribution to employees via the self-service app.

The underlying engine is the same one that powered KeyPay before the March 2023 rebrand.

The cloud-native architecture has not changed, but the interface now sits inside the broader Employment Hero product.

The platform runs entirely in-browser, with no desktop installation required. Multiple admin users can access it simultaneously, which matters for businesses where payroll is shared between HR and Finance.

Pay run approval workflows let a second user review before submission, reducing the risk of unchecked errors going directly to HMRC.

What Payroll Tasks It Covers

The free tier covers the full core payroll task list: PAYE and NI calculations, RTI submissions, payslip generation, P60 year-end reports, holiday pay calculations, statutory payments (SSP, SMP), attachment of earnings orders, and auto-enrolment management.

That is not a stripped-back trial version. It is the complete compliance toolkit, without an employee cap or time limit.

P11D reporting (the annual declaration of benefits-in-kind provided to employees) is also handled. Employment Hero lists P11D among its automated HMRC submissions alongside FPS, EPS, P11, P32, and P60.

This matters because some comparable platforms at this price point treat P11D as a premium feature or exclude it entirely.

Whether It Is UK-Focused or Global

Employment Hero operates in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, and Canada. The UK payroll product is built to UK-specific compliance requirements: RTI, auto-enrolment, National Minimum Wage checks, GDPR. It is not a globalised payroll engine that happens to cover the UK.

The KeyPay origin was UK and Australia from the start, which gives the UK compliance build genuine depth, a distinction that matters when comparing against US-origin platforms that treat the UK as a localisation afterthought.

The EOR product (for hiring internationally without a local entity) is a separate offering. Do not conflate the two when building your business case. The payroll software reviewed here is for paying UK-employed staff compliantly, not for global expansion.

How Much Does Employment Hero Payroll Cost?

Entry-Level Pricing

The Free Payroll tier costs nothing. There is no employee ceiling, no trial period, and no forced upgrade path.

Employment Hero is explicit about this: “£0 cost for payroll, forever.” The free tier includes RTI, auto-enrolment, payslips, P60s, statutory payments, employee self-service, accounting integrations, and mobile app access.

Its UK pricing page sets out what the £0 Free Payroll tier covers, naming automated pay runs, automated payslip generation, multiple pay schedules, and PensionSync integration among the included features. None of those are gated behind a paid upgrade.

Details last checked: 2026-06-30; primary source: employmenthero.com/uk/pricing

That is a meaningful competitive position. Xero Payroll requires a Grow plan (£37/month plus £1.50 per additional employee) before payroll is even accessible. BrightPay desktop starts at £79/year.

Employment Hero’s free tier is not a marketing trick.

It is a genuine, sustained zero-cost product covering real payroll compliance for UK employers.

Higher-Tier Plans

Core Payroll is the paid upgrade above the free tier. Employment Hero does not publish the per-employee price as a flat figure on its pricing page. The number is rendered dynamically and requires either a demo call or a quote request.

That opacity is a legitimate criticism.

If you are comparing Employment Hero to Xero or BrightPay in a Finance approval process, being unable to put a number in a spreadsheet creates an avoidable barrier.

Managed Payroll is priced at £12 per employee per month. At that level, Employment Hero runs your payroll end-to-end: pay runs, HMRC reporting, RTI submissions, pension enrolment, and Declaration of Compliance. For context: at 25 employees, Managed Payroll costs £300 per month.

Employment Hero describes Managed Payroll as a full managed service, listing end-to-end managed pay runs, managed HMRC reporting, and managed RTI and pension enrolment. In practice that means the provider carries the submission work, not just the software, which is the line that separates it from the self-service free tier.

Details last checked: 2026-06-30; primary source: employmenthero.com/uk/products/payroll-software

At 50 employees, £600 per month. Those figures approach entry-level EOR pricing for some providers.

Worth flagging if your Finance team asks why you are outsourcing payroll entirely.

Add-Ons and Extra Costs

Source: employmenthero.com/uk/pricing/, verified April 2026. Prices ex-VAT where applicable. Minimums apply.

Watch the minimums if you are a micro-business. Employment Hero applies a floor on certain plans, with its HeroForce subscription stating that a subscription must include a minimum of 10 users. A five or six-person team can therefore end up paying for headcount it does not have, which pushes the effective per-staff cost well above the headline per-employee figure.

Details last checked: 2026-06-30; primary source: employmenthero.com/pricing

What Affects the Total Price

If you stay on Free Payroll, your cost stays at zero regardless of headcount. The cost curve only activates when you add HR modules or move to managed services. A 50-person business on Free Payroll plus HR Essentials pays £200/month minimum.

Add Rotas and Time at £2/employee, and that becomes £300/month.

The free payroll tier is real, but the platform is structured to grow with you, and growth here means cost growth.

Billing is based on the greater of your contractual minimum or your actual active employee count each month. A short-term headcount spike does not trigger a permanent tier change, but it does affect that month’s bill. This matters if you hire seasonally.

What Are the Key Features of Employment Hero Payroll?

Payroll Processing and Payslips

Pay runs are configured once and then automated. The platform supports multiple pay frequencies (weekly, fortnightly, monthly) across different employee groups within the same business.

Payslips are distributed automatically to employees via the Employment Hero Work app or their online account. Employees do not need to email payroll to get their slip.

Past employees can access historical payslips via Hero Passport, which removes a common admin tail after offboarding.

HMRC RTI and Tax Compliance

Real Time Information (RTI) submissions to HMRC are automatic after each pay run. Full Payment Submissions (FPS) and Employer Payment Summaries (EPS) are generated and sent without a third-party bridge or manual export step.

The platform also auto-submits P11, P11D, P32, and P60 reports directly to HMRC, covering the full statutory reporting calendar in one place.

National Minimum Wage checks run automatically against current thresholds. The platform flags discrepancies before submission, not after, when the error has already reached HMRC.

Tax rate and threshold updates are managed by Employment Hero and applied automatically, so you are not manually updating tax tables at the start of each tax year.

Pension Auto-Enrolment

Auto-enrolment is managed through PensionSync, Employment Hero’s direct integration with UK pension providers. The platform assesses employee eligibility, enrols qualifying workers, calculates contributions, and submits pension returns automatically.

Re-enrolment triggers are built in, so you are not manually tracking the three-year re-enrolment window.

For the Managed Payroll tier, Employment Hero also handles Declaration of Compliance, the filing you make to The Pensions Regulator confirming you have met your auto-enrolment duties. That is a meaningful step up from self-service payroll software that expects you to handle the declaration yourself.

Employee Self-Service

The Employment Hero Work app is the employee-facing layer. It gives employees access to payslips, leave balances, leave requests, employment contracts, and company documents from a mobile device.

This is one of the strongest self-service implementations in the UK payroll software market.

The app is consistently cited in user reviews as a genuine quality-of-life improvement for employees who previously had to email HR for a pay slip.

For you, the operational benefit is fewer inbound admin requests from employees. The leaver workflow is also cleaner.

Past employees retrieve their own payslips and employment history via Hero Passport, without you needing to maintain a shared drive or respond to data requests months after someone has left.

Reporting and Analytics

Standard payroll reporting covers pay run summaries, P32 employer payment records, pension contribution breakdowns, and statutory pay ledgers. The HR-integrated plans add headcount reporting, leave liability tracking, and engagement metrics.

These are useful if you are running People Ops rather than pure payroll.

Integrations with Accounting, HR or Time Tracking

Employment Hero Payroll integrates with Xero, QuickBooks, and Sage for journal posting. After each pay run, payroll data is pushed automatically to your accounting software. No manual export or CSV upload required.

The Xero integration is available on the free tier, which is unusual; most payroll tools reserve accounting integrations for paid plans.

One point for buyers researching API integrations: some documentation and third-party connector references still use the KeyPay name rather than Employment Hero Payroll. This is a legacy of the December 2021 acquisition and the subsequent rebrand.

The underlying API is the same; the naming inconsistency can cause confusion when searching for integration documentation or connecting middleware tools.

What Are the Pros and Cons of Employment Hero Payroll?

Pros

• Free tier with no employee cap. No other major UK payroll platform offers unlimited employees at zero cost with full RTI and auto-enrolment compliance. This is a genuine differentiator, not a trial hook.
• P11D included without an upgrade. Benefits-in-kind reporting is covered in the automated HMRC submissions, which saves the manual P11D process that catches small employers out at tax year-end.
• PensionSync removes pension admin double-handling. The direct provider integration means contributions and returns go straight to your pension scheme without a separate export step.
• Employee app is a meaningful quality-of-life improvement. Employees accessing their own payslips and leave balances reduces HR admin; the Hero Passport feature for leavers is a practical operational improvement most payroll tools do not offer.
• HR and payroll in one platform. If your roadmap includes onboarding automation, performance management, or leave management, adding them within Employment Hero costs less than integrating a separate HRIS with a different payroll tool.

Cons

• Core Payroll pricing is opaque. The per-employee cost for the Core Payroll upgrade is not published as a flat rate. For businesses that need a number before any vendor conversation, this is a real procurement friction point.
• HR-first product for payroll-only buyers. The platform is designed with HR at the centre. If you only need payroll, you are navigating an HR operating system to reach payroll features. The paid plans are priced as HR suites, not payroll-only tools.
• Support quality is inconsistent. The 4.5-star aggregate rating masks a consistent theme in user reviews: onboarding support is good, ongoing support for complex issues is slower and harder to escalate. This is a known weakness in scale-up SaaS platforms with Australian headquarters and UK support teams.
• Limited CIS depth. Businesses running Construction Industry Scheme payroll may find Employment Hero’s CIS feature set lighter than dedicated payroll-only tools like Staffology or Moneysoft.
• KeyPay naming in API documentation. A persistent legacy detail that creates confusion for developers and integration teams investigating the platform for the first time.

Who Is Employment Hero Payroll Best For?

Best Fit by Business Size

1 to 50 employees on free payroll. The free tier is effectively built for this range. You get compliant UK payroll, RTI, auto-enrolment, and employee self-service at zero cost. The value is hardest to argue against at this scale.

50 to 200 employees building an HR stack. If you are hiring fast enough that onboarding, leave management, and payroll are becoming distinct problems that currently sit in separate tools, Employment Hero Payroll lets you consolidate.

The per-employee cost of adding HR Essentials (£4/employee/month) compares reasonably with standalone HRIS platforms.

200-plus employees. At this scale, the Managed Payroll cost (£12/employee/month, equating to £2,400/month for 200 employees) becomes a serious line item. You will want to benchmark it against specialist payroll bureaux and dedicated mid-market systems before committing.

Best Fit by Payroll Complexity

Employment Hero Payroll works well for standard PAYE, salaried, and hourly payrolls. Multiple pay frequencies across different employee groups are supported.

It is a reasonable fit for moderate complexity: mixed full-time and part-time staff, statutory leave calculations, attachment of earnings. It is less strong on high-complexity CIS payrolls, agency contractor arrangements, or highly bespoke benefit structures.

When to Consider an Alternative

Consider an alternative if any of these describe you: your payroll has heavy CIS requirements; you need a payroll bureau model where a third party processes everything and you just approve; or you want flat published per-employee pricing before any vendor call.

Or you already have a mature HRIS and want a payroll-only tool that integrates with it rather than replacing it.

How Easy Is Employment Hero Payroll to Use and Set Up?

Getting Started

Employment Hero provides an implementation hub and help desk for onboarding. The free tier is self-service: you sign up, configure your company settings, add employees, and connect your pension provider via PensionSync.

For most small employers, initial setup is manageable without specialist payroll knowledge.

The platform guides you through PAYE reference setup, pension scheme connection, and pay schedule configuration in sequence.

Paid tier onboarding, particularly for Managed Payroll, involves an Employment Hero team working through setup with you. User reviews are consistently positive about the implementation experience. Where complaints arise, they tend to come later, during ongoing support rather than at launch.

Day-to-Day Payroll Use

Running a pay cycle involves reviewing automated calculations, approving the pay run, and confirming RTI submission.

The platform flags discrepancies (missing information, NMW breaches, unusual variances) before you approve, so errors surface before they reach HMRC rather than after. Payslips are distributed automatically to the employee app on approval.

The day-to-day workflow is genuinely low-friction for a standard PAYE payroll.

Learning Curve

The learning curve is steeper than payroll-only tools like BrightPay or Moneysoft, because you are learning a broader HR platform, payroll tool.

Non-payroll HR features sit alongside payroll in the navigation, which can add cognitive load for administrators focused solely on running pay. If your People team already runs the HR layer, that integration is intuitive.

If it is just you managing payroll, it can feel like navigating a system with more rooms than you need.

How Does Employment Hero Payroll Handle Compliance, Security and Support?

UK Payroll Compliance

Employment Hero Payroll is HMRC-recognised. RTI submissions (FPS and EPS) are automated and sent directly to HMRC after each pay run. The platform auto-updates tax rates, thresholds, and NMW rates as HMRC publishes changes.

You do not manually update tables at the start of each tax year.

Auto-enrolment compliance is handled through PensionSync, including re-enrolment triggers and Declaration of Compliance filing (on Managed Payroll).

P11D reporting is included in the automated HMRC submissions list. This covers benefits-in-kind declarations that employers with company cars, private medical, or other benefits must file annually. Automated P11D is a meaningful compliance advantage over comparable tools in this price range.

Data Security and Access Controls

The platform is GDPR-compliant and cloud-hosted. Multiple admin users can be configured with role-based access, so your Finance team and HR team can have appropriate permissions without sharing a single login.

Employees access their own data through the Work app without being able to view other employee records.

Customer Support Options

Support channels include a help desk, service centre, and Hero Academy (self-serve documentation). Live support is available for paid tier customers. The pattern in user reviews is fairly consistent: implementation support is good, and the product documentation is broad.

Ongoing support for complex or urgent issues, particularly for UK-based businesses dealing with time-sensitive payroll queries, gets mixed ratings.

If you need guaranteed same-day UK support for payroll issues, verify the current SLA before signing up.

What Do Employment Hero Payroll Customers Say?

Review Scores

Employment Hero scores 4.5 stars on both Capterra and Trustpilot, based on figures cited across Employment Hero’s own UK product pages (April 2026). G2 lists the product and shows a star rating widget on the platform’s product pages.

These aggregate scores cover the full Employment Hero platform, not the UK payroll product specifically, and include Australian and other market reviews alongside UK feedback. Weight them accordingly.

What Users Like

The employee self-service app is the most consistently praised element. Employees accessing their own payslips and documents without contacting HR is a quality-of-life improvement that users across review platforms mention without prompting.

Onboarding automation (paperless contracts, employee data capture on day one) is a close second.

For businesses moving off spreadsheets or a desktop payroll tool, the gap in user experience is noticeable.

Common Complaints

The most common criticism across review platforms is support escalation speed for complex issues. A payroll problem that needs a specific answer from someone who understands UK tax (not a help article link) can take longer to resolve than small businesses find comfortable.

The second common theme is the complexity of the platform for teams that only need payroll: the HR feature set adds navigation overhead and, on paid plans, cost.

How Does Employment Hero Payroll Compare to Alternatives?

Employment Hero Payroll vs Xero Payroll

For businesses already using Xero for accounting, Xero Payroll offers a tighter accounting-payroll loop: payroll journals post automatically to Xero accounts with no integration step required. Employment Hero Payroll integrates with Xero but requires a separate connection.

Xero Payroll carries a hard 200-employee ceiling; Employment Hero Payroll has no such cap.

Xero Payroll also lacks native P11D reporting, a material gap for UK employers with company benefits.

If you are not a Xero accounting user, the case for Xero Payroll weakens considerably. If you are and your headcount is under 200, the accounting integration is a genuine differentiator.

Employment Hero Payroll vs BrightPay

BrightPay is the payroll-only alternative for cost-conscious buyers. The desktop licence started at £79/year for up to 3 employees, significantly cheaper than Employment Hero’s paid tiers for small headcounts.

BrightPay’s cloud product has moved to subscription pricing, but it remains a payroll-first tool without the HR bundling overhead.

If you want payroll only and want to keep costs as low as possible without the zero-cost trade-off of Employment Hero’s free tier, BrightPay is the direct comparison.

Employment Hero wins on self-service and HR integration; BrightPay wins on payroll-only simplicity and bureau pricing for accountancy practices.

Employment Hero Payroll vs Staffology

Staffology is a mid-market UK payroll platform with deeper CIS support and more complex pay structure handling.

If your payroll involves Construction Industry Scheme deductions, subcontractor payments, or highly bespoke benefit calculations, Staffology is worth a serious look alongside Employment Hero.

Employment Hero is broader in HR functionality; Staffology goes deeper on payroll complexity.

For standard PAYE payroll, the Employment Hero free tier wins on cost. CIS-heavy payrolls should not default to Employment Hero without verifying CIS capability first.

Is Employment Hero Payroll Worth It?

Where It Offers Good Value

On the free tier, Employment Hero Payroll offers the best pound-for-pound value of any HMRC-recognised UK payroll platform. You get full compliance (RTI, auto-enrolment, P11D, statutory pay) with no per-employee cost and no employee ceiling.

No comparable competitor matches that at zero price.

For businesses that want to consolidate HR and payroll, the per-employee cost of adding HR Essentials (£4/employee/month) is competitive with standalone HRIS tools that do not include payroll. The bundling advantage is real if you were going to buy both anyway.

Where It Falls Short

The value proposition deteriorates when you are a payroll-only buyer on a paid plan. At that point, you are paying for HR infrastructure you are not using, and the opacity on Core Payroll pricing means you cannot benchmark it without a sales conversation.

The Managed Payroll tier (£12/employee/month) is expensive relative to UK payroll bureau services, which typically price per payslip or per pay run rather than per employee per month.

Final Verdict

Where this gets decisive is the upgrade path. The free tier carries you through the early headcount years at zero cost, and when onboarding and leave management stop fitting in a spreadsheet you add HR Essentials at £4 per employee per month without changing platforms or re-keying employee records. The trade-off is that the same design penalises the payroll-only buyer: you pay for an HR operating system to reach payroll features you would rather use on their own. Note too that billing follows your active headcount, so a seasonal spike lifts that month's bill even if your contract minimum does not move.

The platform earns its 4.5-star rating on ease of use and employee experience. It does not earn it on pricing transparency or specialist payroll depth. If your payroll is standard PAYE and your budget is tight, start here.

If you need CIS, transparent per-employee pricing, or payroll-bureau-level support, look at the alternatives first.

Frequently Asked Questions About Employment Hero Payroll