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Only 10% of UK payroll software suppliers publish a price

HMRC recognises 177 payroll products from 144 suppliers and tells you their names. We visited every one of those suppliers’ websites on 25 September 2026 and looked for a price. 17 products come from a supplier who publishes one. 48 ask you to request a quote or book a demo. For 104 we found neither.

The counts

That last row matters and is easy to misread. Several large suppliers, including some of the biggest names in the market, return a 403 to automated requests as a matter of policy. That tells you about their bot rules and nothing whatever about their product or their pricing, and we count it separately rather than letting it pollute the other three numbers.

Openness depends on what the product is

The pattern is consistent and not surprising once you see it: the smaller and more self-serve the product, the more likely its price is published. Enterprise HR platforms almost never publish, because the price depends on a negotiation.

The list is more concentrated than it looks

177 products sounds like a wide market. It is 144 suppliers, and 128 of them have exactly one product on the list, while 16 have more than one. The largest few carry several products each, which is usually a payroll product plus a separate P11D or bureau version rather than a choice between equals.

And a third of it is not payroll

Of the 177 products, 43 are something other than payroll for an employer: P11D tools, filing-only software, HR platforms, umbrella payroll and bureau products. They sit on the same HMRC page under the same heading. An employer looking for payroll software is choosing from a shorter list than they think, and nothing on the page tells them so.

What we did

We took HMRC’s recognition list as the universe, because it is the definitive one and because using anything else would mean choosing which suppliers to include, which is how every other comparison page ends up with the twenty that pay commission. For each supplier we requested the URL HMRC links to, and where that page did not carry a price we followed one link that looked like a pricing page. A price counts only when a figure is tied to a unit, such as per employee or per month: a bare figure on a page proves nothing.

We deliberately do not publish the prices themselves. The methodology explains why, with the five examples that persuaded us, including a customer testimonial that a machine read as a supplier’s own price. The transparency measurement survives that problem because it needs only the presence of a real price, not the correct reading of it.

Sources: HMRC’s list of payroll software recognised for PAYE, used under the Open Government Licence v3.0, and each supplier’s own published web pages. Free-tier status is HMRC’s designation, for employers with fewer than ten employees, and covers 6 products.