Paying people in another country: what payroll and EOR actually cost
Every tool here answers the same question with a different meter, and the meter is what decides your bill.
Hiring someone abroad turns one decision into three. You have to employ them somewhere, pay them in their currency, and stay on the right side of a labour code you have never read. The tools below each solve a different slice of that, and they are almost never alternatives to one another — which is exactly why comparing their headline prices leads people wrong.
The useful question is not which is cheapest. It is which meter you are about to attach yourself to, and what happens to it when the team grows. A per-contractor fee that looks trivial at three people is a different animal at thirty, and an employer-of-record fee buys you something a payroll tool does not sell at any price: someone else carrying the compliance risk.
How we picked
- We only list a figure when we read it on the vendor’s own page, and we date it. Where a vendor does not publish rates, we say so instead of repeating a number from a comparison site.
- We look at the meter rather than the entry price, because the entry price is the one number that never survives contact with a growing team.
- We say who should skip each tool. A page that recommends everything recommends nothing.
The picks
The one to look at when you have no legal entity in the country you are hiring in. Everything is priced separately, so the number that matters is the one attached to the product you actually need — contractor management and employer-of-record are different orders of magnitude, and the EOR fee is the price of transferring risk, not of software.
Skip it if your team is all-domestic (a local payroll tool is far cheaper), or you hire enough people in one country that opening your own entity beats paying per-employee EOR fees forever
Visit Deel →Read our full Deel review →The straightforward answer if your whole team is in the United States. It does not stretch abroad, and that is a feature: the product is narrow because US payroll, benefits and tax filing in one place is already a lot of surface. Note that we could not retrieve a figure from their pricing page in either July or August 2026, so treat any number you see elsewhere as unverified.
Skip it if you employ people outside the US or need enterprise, multi-entity HR — Gusto is built for US SMB payroll
Visit Gusto →Read our full Gusto review →Sits one step earlier in the chain than the other two. If the reason you are reading this page is that you have no US entity yet, this is the tool that creates one; it is not a payroll system and does not pretend to be. Worth it mainly if you are outside the US, where doing it yourself means learning a filing process you will use once.
Skip it if you're a US resident comfortable filing formation yourself — the state fee plus a cheap registered agent costs far less than the bundle
Visit doola →Read our full doola review →Compared at a glance
| Tool | What it meters | Pricing, as we read it |
|---|---|---|
| Deel | per worker, per product | Pricing is per worker and demo-led, and each product is priced separately. read 2026-08-21 |
| Gusto | per employee, US only | Gusto blocks plain fetches of its pricing page and neither our July nor our August 2026 capture retrieved an amount, so today's figures are not independently confirmed. read 2026-08-17 |
| doola | per formation, then per year | The August sale has ended, so these are the list prices again. read 2026-09-01 |
The meter changes what growth costs you
Per-worker pricing is comfortable while the team is small and becomes the largest line on the invoice surprisingly fast. Before you commit, multiply the per-person fee by the headcount you expect in eighteen months rather than the one you have today — that is the number you are really signing up for.
The second thing to check is what is bundled versus what is an add-on. Two vendors can quote the same per-person figure and mean quite different things by it, and the difference usually shows up in benefits administration, local filings and support.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between EOR and payroll?
A payroll tool pays people you already employ. An employer of record employs them on your behalf in a country where you have no entity, which is why it costs several times more — you are paying for the legal relationship, not the software that runs it.
Do I need an entity in every country I hire in?
Not if you use an employer of record, which is the whole point of that product. You do need one if you want to employ people directly, and past a certain headcount in a single country opening your own entity usually becomes cheaper than paying per-employee EOR fees indefinitely.
Are contractors cheaper than employees?
On the invoice, usually. In risk, not necessarily: misclassifying an employee as a contractor is the expensive mistake in this category, and it is the reason contractor-of-record products exist at a premium over plain contractor management.
Free tools for this decision
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Some links on this page are affiliate links: if you sign up we may earn a commission, at no cost to you, and it never changes what we write. Every figure above was read on the vendor’s own page on the date shown.