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Free payroll software: all six HMRC recognises
HMRC recognises six free payroll products for employers with fewer than ten employees. This is the complete list, not a selection, and one of them is HMRC’s own.
Free means free for PAYE, as recognised by HMRC for employers with fewer than ten employees. Some of these suppliers also sell paid products, and a free tier is not a judgement about the product beyond its price.
| Product | Supplier | What it is | Pricing | Their page |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Primo Payroll | Accentra Technologies Ltd | Payroll | Price published | Pricing |
| Enrolpay Small Payroll | Enrolpay Ltd | Payroll | No pricing found | Supplier |
| RTI Lite | Hartigan Software Design Ltd | RTI filing | No pricing found | Supplier |
| Basic PAYE Tools | HMRC | Payroll | No pricing found | Supplier |
| 1 A Simple Payroll | IT Contractors Ltd (1 A Simple Payroll) | Umbrella and contractor | No pricing found | Supplier |
| Stansoft Linux | Stansoft | Payroll | No pricing found | Supplier |
What the pricing column means
There is no price on this page, and that is deliberate. We tried reading prices off supplier pages automatically and got about half of them wrong: a customer testimonial became one supplier’s price, a promotional first-six-months rate became another’s, and a sentence about what accountants charge became a third’s. The methodology sets out exactly what went wrong. So the column reports the one thing we can establish reliably, which is whether the supplier is willing to tell you the price before you talk to a salesperson.
Across the whole HMRC list, 17 of 177 products come from suppliers who publish a price and 48 do not. The transparency report has the detail.
Other lists
Source: HMRC’s recognised payroll software list, under the Open Government Licence, plus each supplier’s own published pages. Inclusion is never paid for. We are not accountants and this is not advice about which product suits your business.