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Methodology
What we publish, where it comes from, how it is checked, and the one thing we decided not to publish at all. If you find an error in any of it, tell us and we will correct it in public.
The universe: HMRC’s own list
Every product on this site comes from HMRC’s list of payroll software recognised for PAYE: 177 products from 144 suppliers, of which 6 are in HMRC’s free tier for employers with fewer than ten employees. HMRC content is used under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
We use that list and nothing else as the universe, deliberately. The moment a comparison site decides for itself which suppliers to include, the list becomes a reflection of who pays commission. Taking HMRC’s list whole removes that decision from us. It also means we carry products that will never pay us anything, including HMRC’s own free Basic PAYE Tools, which is the correct answer for a lot of small employers.
HMRC’s page gives two columns: the supplier’s name and the product’s name. It states that HMRC “cannot recommend one product over another” and advises the reader to consider which features they need. It provides nothing to consider them with. That gap is why this site exists.
What we add, and how confident we are in each part
What the product is
Derived from the product’s own name. “Sage 50 P11D” is an expenses and benefits return, not payroll. “Easy Cloud Bureau Payroll” is for bureaux, not employers. Where a name is only a brand, with no clue in it, the product is classified as payroll, because HMRC recognising it for PAYE is itself the fact and guessing further would be inventing.
On this basis 43 of the 177 products are something other than payroll for an employer. That is a derivation, not a supplier’s own description, and we say so on every page that uses it.
Whether the supplier publishes a price
We requested the URL HMRC links to for each supplier. Where that page carried no price we followed one link that looked like a pricing page, and no further. A price counts only when a figure is tied to a unit, such as per employee, per month or per year. A bare figure on a page proves nothing: it could be a webinar fee, a competitor’s price or a penalty.
Result, as at 25 September 2026:
- 17 products from suppliers who publish a price
- 48 that ask for a quote or a demo instead
- 104 where we found neither
- 8 whose sites declined our automated request
That last group is reported separately and never counted against a supplier. A 403 to an automated request is a bot policy. It says nothing about the product, and several of the largest suppliers in the market do it.
Why there is no price column
Because we built one, tested it, and found it was wrong about half the time. These are the figures it produced and what they actually were:
| What the machine read | What the sentence actually said |
|---|---|
| Workforce.com, £1,200 a month | A customer testimonial: “reduced the cost of payroll from £1200/month via an accountant to £200/month in-house”. Somebody else’s old bill. |
| PayFit, £10 per employee | A sentence about what accountants charge: “As an example, accountants can charge between £4”. Not PayFit’s price. |
| FreeAgent, £5 a month | Copy about optional receipt and bill capture add-ons, not the subscription. |
| Hirelo, £149 a month | A figure sitting beside “(Contact us to find out the cost)”, on a page whose headline price is quoted per year. |
| Xero, £1.80 a month | A promotional rate for the first six months, presented as the price. |
| Solus Online Payroll, 60p per employee | The price of a different product from the same supplier, because both were listed against one website. |
Tiers, promotional rates, “from” pricing, per-user-per-month, third-party costs and customer quotes all look identical to a pattern match. Each of those six errors was caught and fixed, and each fix revealed another. At that point the honest conclusion was not “try harder”, it was that machine-read prices across 177 products cannot be published as fact.
A comparison site whose prices are wrong half the time is worse than one with no prices, because the reader cannot tell which half. So the price column went, and what remains is the thing that can be established reliably: whether the supplier will tell you the price at all. That needs only the presence of a real price on their page, not the correct reading of it, and it turned out to be the more interesting question anyway.
Prices will appear here when a person has checked them one at a time, on the record, with the date and the page. Not before. If you see a site confidently listing a price for all 177 recognised products, that is worth a moment’s thought.
What we do not do
- No scores, stars or rankings. We have not used these products. A five-star rating we cannot support is an invention, however much it helps a page rank.
- No paid inclusion and no paid position. The order of every table is set by the data, and the universe is HMRC’s. We cannot add a supplier who pays, because HMRC decides who is on the list.
- No advice. We are not accountants. Choosing payroll software is a compliance decision, and we report what is published rather than telling you what to buy.
- No invented reviews. Where we hold four facts about a product, its page says four things and stops.
How often it is checked
HMRC updates its recognition list periodically, and suppliers change their pricing pages without warning. We re-read both, and every page carries the date its data was checked rather than the date the site was last built. A price can change the day after we look, so treat the supplier’s own page as the authority and use ours to find it.
Corrections
If a product is misclassified, a supplier is missing, or we have said pricing is not published when it is, write to editor@solutionspayroll.co.uk. We correct errors and say what changed. The whole dataset is downloadable from the data page so you can check the counts yourself.
Source: HMRC recognised payroll software under the Open Government Licence v3.0, plus suppliers’ own published pages, read 25 September 2026. Published by Domain Farm Ltd, company number 13544286.