Gusto vs OnPay: Which Small Business Payroll Costs Less?

On single-state payroll, Gusto vs OnPay is a genuine dead heat: both charge $49 per month plus $6 per person, so at 10 employees both bill $109 and there is nothing to choose between them on price. The decision only becomes a real decision the day someone on your payroll lives in a second state, because OnPay includes multi-state payroll in its single plan while Gusto moves you up to Plus at $80 per month plus $12 per person. That fork is worth roughly $2,000 to $4,000 a year at the headcounts most small businesses actually run at, which is more than the difference deserves to be an afterthought.

TL;DR

• If you pay everyone in one state and expect to for the next year, treat this as a tie on price and decide on product fit. The bill is identical to the dollar: $109 at 10 employees, $199 at 25, $349 at 50.
• If you already pay people in two or more states — or expect to inside 12 months — choose OnPay. Multi-state is included at $49 + $6; on Gusto it costs $80 + $12, which at 50 employees is $680/month against OnPay's $349, a gap of $3,972 a year.
• Budget $549/month at 50 employees if you want OnPay with every add-on (HR add-on $15 + $2 per worker, Compliance Resources $10, Live HR Support $75). That is still $731/month less than Gusto Premium at $1,280.
• Do not upgrade to Gusto Premium just to get migration help. Three months of Premium at 25 employees costs $2,190 against $1,140 on Plus — you are paying $1,050 for assistance you can substitute with one parallel pay run.
• If you pay contractors only, Gusto is structurally cheaper: the contractor-only plan is $35 + $6 per contractor against OnPay's $49 + $6, a fixed $14/month, $168/year saving at any headcount.
• Choose Gusto if benefits administration or the integration catalogue is load-bearing. OnPay's benefits marketplace is thinner and it has fewer integrations; if either gap forces manual work every cycle, the $331/month you saved at 50 employees is not really saved.
• Ignore headline per-employee rates below 25 people. The $49 base is 45% of a 10-person bill and 14% of a 50-person bill; base fee dilution, not the per-seat rate, drives your effective cost at small headcounts.

Pricing at a glance

The first thing worth noticing is the column on the right. In payroll and HR software, published pricing is the exception rather than the rule — plenty of vendors in our roundup of the best payroll software will not quote you a number without a discovery call. Gusto and OnPay both publish every rate, including add-ons. None of the figures in this article are third-party estimates or reconstructed list prices; they are the vendors' own published rates, and every derived number below is arithmetic performed on them with the working shown.

That matters practically, not just philosophically. It means you can model your exact bill at your exact headcount before you speak to anyone, build it into a budget line, and hold the vendor to it. It also means the usual small-business advice — get three quotes and play them against each other — does not apply here. There is no quote to negotiate. What you see is what you will be invoiced, and the only variable you control is which plan you land on and which add-ons you take.

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What each product actually is

Gusto is a payroll product with a real HR layer stacked on top of it, sold as a ladder. HROpsLab ranks it #5 overall and describes it as the best HRIS-plus-payroll combination for small businesses, and the tiering reflects that ambition. Simple is the payroll engine: unlimited pay runs, federal and state tax filings and payments, basic PTO policies, one state. Plus adds the three things growing companies tend to discover they need at roughly the same time — multi-state payroll, time tracking and next-day pay. Premium is where the human services live: a dedicated service advisor, access to certified HR experts, priority support, custom reporting, performance and compensation management, and payroll migration assistance. There is also a contractor-only plan at $35 plus $6 per contractor for businesses with no W-2 employees at all.

The structural consequence of that ladder is that Gusto's per-person rate is not fixed. Moving from Simple to Plus does not just raise the base fee from $49 to $80; it doubles the per-head rate from $6 to $12. Moving to Premium takes it to $22. So the cost of a feature upgrade scales with your headcount, which means the same upgrade that costs a 10-person company $91 a month costs a 50-person company $331.

OnPay is the opposite design. There is one plan, at $49 per month plus $6 per employee, and everything the product does is in it: multi-state payroll, tax withholding, remittance and filing, an employee self-service portal for pay stubs and tax forms, online onboarding with in-app I-9 and W-4 and e-signatures, employee records, PTO tracking and document storage. It is billed month-to-month with no long-term contract, no annual fees, and cancellation at any time at no charge. Three optional add-ons sit outside the plan — an HR add-on at $15 plus $2 per worker, Compliance Resources at $10 a month, and Live HR Support at $75 a month — and they are the only way your bill deviates from base-plus-headcount.

The honest limitation is scope. OnPay's benefits marketplace is thinner than Gusto's and it has fewer integrations. That is a real product gap, not a positioning quibble, and it is the main reason a business would knowingly pay Gusto more. What OnPay buys you in exchange is a bill you can predict two years out and a feature set that does not move when your org chart does.

How the pricing really works

Both products use a two-part tariff: a fixed monthly base fee plus a per-employee rate. Small businesses consistently underestimate what the fixed half does to their effective cost. At $49 base and $6 per person, a 10-person company pays $109, of which the base is $49 — 45% of the bill. At 25 employees the base is $49 of $199, or 24.6%. At 50 it is $49 of $349, or 14%. Your effective per-employee cost is therefore not $6; it is $10.90 at 10 people, $7.96 at 25 and $6.98 at 50, converging on $6 as you grow.

That has a counterintuitive implication for a five-person business, which is where the reader range for these products starts. Five employees on either product is $49 + (5 × $6 = $30) = $79/month, or $15.80 per employee — more than twice the effective rate a 50-person company pays. Nothing about that is a criticism of either vendor; it is what fixed fees do. But it means that if you are at five or six people and comparing payroll costs to a bookkeeper running it manually, use the effective rate, not the headline $6.

The second mechanic matters more: the plan tier multiplies the variable component, not just the fixed one. Here is what each product costs per employee, all-in, across the headcount band these tools serve.

Working, using 50 employees as the example: Gusto Simple and OnPay are $49 + (50 × $6 = $300) = $349; Gusto Plus is $80 + (50 × $12 = $600) = $680; Gusto Premium is $180 + (50 × $22 = $1,100) = $1,280. Divide each by 50 for the per-employee figures.

The third mechanic is marginal cost per hire, and it is the one to put in front of your finance lead. Every additional employee costs $6/month on OnPay or Gusto Simple, $12 on Gusto Plus, and $22 on Gusto Premium. Hiring ten people adds $60, $120 or $220 to your monthly run rate depending on which rung you are standing on. Over a year that is $720, $1,440 or $2,640 for the same ten hires. Note also what does not drive the bill: neither product prices per pay run. Gusto's published Simple description explicitly includes unlimited pay runs, so moving from monthly to semi-monthly or adding an off-cycle bonus run does not change the software line. OnPay's single plan is likewise quoted as a monthly base plus a per-employee rate rather than a per-run charge. If you pay weekly, or run frequent off-cycles for commissions, confirm the run policy during a trial — but on published pricing, pay frequency is a free variable on both, which is not true of every vendor in this category.

Gusto vs OnPay on single-state payroll: identical to the dollar

If every person you pay lives and works in one state, there is no price argument to have. Gusto Simple and OnPay's single plan carry the same base fee and the same per-person rate, so the bills are identical at every headcount.

Gusto's own published worked example puts 10 employees on Simple at approximately $109 a month, which matches the arithmetic exactly. Three years at 50 employees is $4,188 × 3 = $12,564 on either product.

So what decides it? Included scope, and the two products load it differently at the same price point. Gusto Simple covers single-state payroll, unlimited pay runs, tax filings and payments, and basic PTO policies. OnPay at the same $49 + $6 covers multi-state payroll, tax withholding, remittance and filing, a self-service portal where employees pull their own pay stubs and tax forms, online onboarding with in-app I-9 and W-4 completion and e-signatures, employee records, PTO tracking and document storage.

Read those two lists side by side and OnPay is carrying more included functionality at the identical price — particularly the onboarding and document layer. For an office manager who currently emails a W-4 PDF to every new starter and files the signed copy in a shared drive, in-app I-9 and W-4 with e-signature is not a nice-to-have; it removes a recurring half-hour of admin per hire and puts the completed forms where an auditor can find them.

Gusto's counterweight is the benefits marketplace and the integration catalogue, both of which are broader. If you administer health insurance, a 401(k) and ancillary benefits through your payroll vendor, that breadth is the whole ball game — deduction setup, carrier feeds and open enrolment either happen inside the payroll system or they happen in a spreadsheet. And if your accounting, time-tracking or applicant-tracking tools need native connectors, more integrations means fewer CSV exports.

The practical test at identical price: write down the three things you touch weekly. If two of them are benefits-related or integration-dependent, Gusto. If two of them are onboarding, document handling or employee self-service, OnPay. Do not agonise — the price is the same and both are month-one reversible in a way that a two-year HRIS contract never is.

One caveat that only shows up later. Choosing Gusto Simple because it matches OnPay on price today means choosing a plan that cannot process a second state tomorrow, and the upgrade is not a $31 base-fee step — it doubles the per-person rate. A 25-person company that picks Simple on the strength of an identical $199 bill has, without noticing, accepted a $380 future bill in the scenario where one person relocates. OnPay's $199 does not have that property. If your workforce is genuinely fixed in one state — a restaurant, a clinic, a single-site operation — this is a non-issue and you should ignore it. If you employ anyone who works from home and could plausibly move, it is the whole decision, and it is covered in the next section.

The multi-state cliff: what your second state actually costs

This is the section that decides most of these evaluations. Multi-state payroll is not available on Gusto Simple; it is a Plus feature. OnPay includes multi-state payroll, along with the associated tax withholding, remittance and filing, at no extra cost in its single plan. So the moment one employee's home address is in a different state from the rest, Gusto's bill changes shape and OnPay's does not.

Gusto's published worked example puts 10 employees on Plus at exactly $200, which again matches. In percentage terms Gusto Plus costs 83.5% more than OnPay at 10 employees ($91 ÷ $109), 91.0% more at 25 ($181 ÷ $199) and 94.8% more at 50 ($331 ÷ $349). The gap widens with headcount because the per-person rate doubles, not because the base fee moves.

Now the number that should go in the board pack. Take a 25-person single-state company on Gusto Simple at $199/month. It hires one salesperson who lives in a neighbouring state. Headcount goes to 26, and the plan has to go to Plus: $80 + (26 × $12 = $312) = $392/month. The old bill on Simple at 26 people would have been $49 + (26 × $6 = $156) = $205. So that one hire raises your payroll software cost from $199 to $392 — an increase of $193 a month, or $2,316 a year. On OnPay the same hire takes you from $199 to $49 + (26 × $6 = $156) = $205, an increase of $6 a month, or $72 a year.

The failure mode here is not that Gusto is expensive. It is that the trigger is a single employee's home address, which nobody prices into a hiring decision. Recruiting does not check the payroll plan before extending an offer to a remote candidate, and by the time finance sees the invoice the person has started. If you are on Gusto Simple and you have any remote hiring plans at all, put the Plus number in the hiring budget now.

There is also an amortisation point worth making, because it cuts the other way. If you end up paying people in six states at 50 employees, the $331/month premium spreads across five additional states — roughly $66 per extra state per month. That is defensible. If you are paying it because one person moved to Colorado, you are paying $331 a month for one address. The arithmetic is identical; the value is not. Over three years at 50 employees the totals are $680 × 36 = $24,480 on Gusto Plus against $349 × 36 = $12,564 on OnPay, a difference of $11,916 — which is worth checking against the rest of the market in the wider payroll software shortlist before you commit.

Growth makes it worse rather than better. A company that runs 10 employees in year one, 25 in year two and 50 in year three, multi-state throughout, pays $2,400 + $4,560 + $8,160 = $15,120 on Gusto Plus against $1,308 + $2,388 + $4,188 = $7,884 on OnPay. That is a three-year difference of $7,236, or 1.92 times the cost, for the same payroll runs.

What Gusto Plus and Premium actually buy

It would be unfair to frame the entire Plus premium as a multi-state surcharge, because Plus bundles two other things: time tracking and next-day pay. Whether that bundle is good value depends entirely on whether you would otherwise buy those capabilities.

Time tracking is the significant one. If you run hourly staff, shift workers or anyone whose pay depends on recorded hours, integrated time tracking removes the weakest link in the payroll process — the hand-transcription of hours from one system into another. OnPay's published included feature list covers PTO tracking, but does not establish integrated time tracking as an included capability, so if hours capture is central to your payroll, confirm it explicitly during a trial rather than assuming it. If it is not included and you have to add a separate time tool, the effective gap between Gusto Plus and OnPay narrows by whatever that tool costs, and at 50 employees you have $331/month of headroom before Gusto becomes the cheaper total.

Next-day pay is a treasury feature dressed as a payroll feature. Shorter funding lead time means your payroll cash stays in your account longer, which matters if you are managing a tight balance around collections, and matters not at all if you keep a comfortable buffer. Do not pay for it because it sounds better; pay for it if your controller has ever moved money early to make a payroll deadline.

Premium is a different proposition again. At $180 + $22 per person it costs $180 + (25 × $22 = $550) = $730/month at 25 employees and $180 + (50 × $22 = $1,100) = $1,280/month at 50. Stepping up from Plus to Premium at 50 people costs $1,280 − $680 = $600 more per month, $7,200 a year. For that you get a dedicated service advisor, certified HR experts, priority support, custom reporting, performance and compensation management, and payroll migration assistance.

Compare that against how OnPay sells the same category of value. Live HR Support is $75/month flat and Compliance Resources is $10/month flat — both fixed fees that do not scale with headcount. An OnPay customer at 50 employees taking both pays $349 + $75 + $10 = $434/month. A Gusto customer at 50 on Premium pays $1,280. The difference is $846/month, or $10,152 a year, and what it buys over the OnPay configuration is the dedicated advisor relationship, custom reporting, and performance and compensation management.

The judgement: performance and compensation management is rarely a good reason to stay on a payroll vendor's top tier. At 50 people those workflows are usually better served by a dedicated HRIS or performance tool — a BambooHR-class product sits above payroll for exactly this reason. Buying them at $22 per person inside a payroll subscription means you cannot drop them without dropping your service level too.

Fully loaded: OnPay with every add-on against Gusto

The fairest comparison for a business that wants HR content as well as payroll is OnPay with all three add-ons against the Gusto tier that offers comparable scope. OnPay's fully loaded fixed component is $49 + $15 + $10 + $75 = $149/month, and its per-person rate becomes $6 + $2 = $8.

Two things fall out of this table, and one of them is inconvenient for the "OnPay is always cheaper" narrative.

First, at 10 employees, fully loaded OnPay at $229 costs $29 more per month than Gusto Plus at $200. Below roughly 18 people, stacking every OnPay add-on makes it the more expensive option against Plus. The crossover is exact: solve $149 + $8n = $80 + $12n, giving $69 = $4n and n = 17.25. At 17 employees OnPay all-in is $149 + $136 = $285 against Gusto Plus at $80 + $204 = $284 — Gusto is $1 cheaper. At 18 it is $293 against $296, and OnPay takes the lead permanently. That threshold is worth knowing if you are a 12-person company convinced OnPay is the budget option; with all three add-ons, it is not.

Second, almost nobody needs all three add-ons. The most common realistic configuration is the base plan plus the HR add-on: $49 + $15 = $64 fixed, $8 per person. That gives $64 + $80 = $144 at 10, $64 + $200 = $264 at 25 and $64 + $400 = $464 at 50 — cheaper than Gusto Plus at every one of those headcounts, by $56, $116 and $216 a month respectively. Against Gusto Plus, OnPay-plus-HR-add-on never loses at any headcount, because both its fixed fee and its per-person rate are lower.

Against Gusto Premium the fully loaded OnPay configuration wins comfortably and increasingly: $400 − $229 = $171/month at 10, $730 − $349 = $381 at 25, and $1,280 − $549 = $731 at 50. Annualised at 50 employees that is $8,772 a year.

The decision rule that comes out of this is unglamorous but useful. Add-ons on OnPay are worth taking one at a time and only when a specific need appears — Live HR Support at $75 flat when you first face a termination you are unsure about, Compliance Resources at $10 when you cross a state or headcount threshold that changes your obligations. Taking all three on day one, at a small headcount, is the one configuration where OnPay's pricing advantage disappears.

Where Gusto is worth paying for

Three situations justify Gusto's higher multi-state cost, and it is worth being precise about them rather than gesturing at "more features".

The first is benefits administration. OnPay's benefits marketplace is explicitly thinner than Gusto's. If you offer health insurance, a retirement plan and ancillary cover, and you want carrier connections, deduction setup and enrolment handled inside the payroll system, breadth is the product. The operational failure mode of a thin marketplace is not that you cannot offer benefits — it is that deduction codes get maintained by hand, carrier changes arrive by email, and someone reconciles a spreadsheet against a bill every month. That work does not appear in any price comparison, and it is the single most common way a cheaper payroll system ends up costing more.

The second is integrations. Gusto has more of them. If your accounting system, time-tracking tool or applicant tracking system needs to exchange data with payroll, a native connector is the difference between a sync and a recurring CSV export owned by whoever is least busy on Tuesday afternoon. At 50 employees you are protecting $3,972 a year of savings by choosing OnPay on the multi-state scenario; if the integration gap costs you several hours of finance time every month plus the error rate that comes with manual imports, that margin is not as thick as the table makes it look. Run the specific check: list every system that must talk to payroll and verify each one before you sign, not after.

The third is the contractor-only case, and it is the one scenario where Gusto is unambiguously cheaper on headline price. Gusto's contractor-only plan is $35/month + $6 per contractor. OnPay's published rate is $49/month + $6 per employee. For a business paying 10 contractors and no employees, Gusto is $35 + (10 × $6 = $60) = $95 against OnPay at $49 + (10 × $6 = $60) = $109. The gap is the difference in base fees — a flat $14/month, $168/year — and it holds at any contractor count, because the per-head rates are identical. At 25 contractors it is $185 against $199; same $14. It is not a large number, but it is real, and for an agency or production company running exclusively on 1099s it is the correct answer.

Where Gusto is not worth paying for is narrower but sharper: paying $12 per person on Plus when multi-state is the only Plus feature you use, and buying Premium primarily for HR advice that OnPay sells as a $75 flat monthly line.

Where OnPay wins, and where it will let you down

OnPay's advantages are structural rather than feature-led, which is why they hold up under scrutiny.

The first is that the price does not change when your company does. One plan, everything included, means the only two variables in your bill are headcount and which optional add-ons you have chosen. There is no feature gate that fires when someone relocates, no upgrade conversation when you add your first hourly employee, no tier review at renewal. For a finance lead building a three-year model, a formula of $49 + $6n is a materially better input than a plan ladder whose rung depends on facts about your workforce that you cannot forecast.

The second is contract terms, which are unusually explicit: month-to-month, no long-term contract, cancel at any time at no charge, no annual fees. The practical value of that is not the flexibility itself — it is that the cost of being wrong is capped at one month. You can run OnPay in parallel for a single cycle, hate it, and walk away having spent $349 at 50 employees. That changes how much diligence this decision deserves. It does not warrant a six-week evaluation.

The third is that the included HR layer is genuinely useful at the price. Self-service pay stubs and tax forms, online onboarding with in-app I-9 and W-4 and e-signatures, employee records, PTO tracking and document storage cover the administrative core of a sub-75-person people function without any additional spend.

Now the honest part. OnPay will let you down in two specific places. Its benefits marketplace is thinner, so if benefits administration is a weekly job for you rather than an annual one, you will feel the gap. And it has fewer integrations, which means some proportion of your data movement will be manual. Neither of these is fatal, but both are the kind of problem that gets discovered in month three rather than during a demo, and both are worse at 50 employees than at 10 because volume amplifies manual process.

There is also a category limit worth stating plainly. Neither of these products is an international payroll or employer-of-record solution — if you need to hire outside the US, that is a different category and a different comparison, closer to Deel or Rippling territory. Both Gusto and OnPay are US payroll products for US businesses, and the multi-state question discussed here is about US states, not countries. If your growth plan includes an overseas hire in the next 12 months, neither of these decisions is the one you should be spending time on. Our payroll software comparison hub covers where the boundaries between these categories sit.

Migration, implementation and the first two pay runs

Neither vendor's published pricing includes a separate implementation or setup charge — both bill a monthly base fee plus a per-person rate and nothing else. That is a meaningful difference from the HRIS market, where implementation fees of 10-25% of annual software cost are routine. Get it confirmed in writing anyway; the absence of a published fee is not the same as a contractual commitment that none exists.

The sequencing that actually determines whether a migration goes well has little to do with the vendor. Switch at a quarter boundary if you can and at 1 January if you possibly can, because a mid-year change requires loading year-to-date wage and tax totals for every employee into the new system so that W-2s reconcile at year end. A January switch means the new system starts from zero and the old system produces the prior year's W-2s cleanly. A July switch means someone owns a YTD import, and if it is wrong you find out in the following January, which is the worst possible time to find out.

Run one full parallel cycle before you cut over. Process the same pay period in both systems, compare gross-to-net for every employee, and reconcile the tax liability totals line by line. Discrepancies almost always come from three places: benefit deduction codes that did not map, PTO balances that imported as zero, and employees with mid-period status changes.

The multi-state piece deserves its own checklist, because it is the work that Gusto's Plus tier gates and OnPay includes. For each state you pay into you need a registered state withholding account and a state unemployment insurance account, with the account numbers and assigned rates entered before the first run. Registration is your obligation, not the software vendor's, and lead times vary — a company that hires in a new state on the first of the month and expects to pay them correctly on the fifteenth is frequently disappointed. OnPay's in-app I-9 and W-4 with e-signature helps here, because the new starter's forms are captured in the system rather than chased by email while you wait on a state account number.

Gusto's payroll migration assistance is a Premium feature, which creates an awkward calculation. Taking Premium for a three-month migration window at 25 employees costs $730 × 3 = $2,190, against $380 × 3 = $1,140 on Plus — a $1,050 premium for the help. At 50 employees it is $1,280 × 3 = $3,840 against $680 × 3 = $2,040, a premium of $1,800. Whether that is good value depends on your controller's hourly cost and how much YTD data has to move. If you are switching at 1 January with clean data, it is money you do not need to spend.

Contracts, lock-in and what you can negotiate under 75 employees

OnPay's terms are published and unambiguous: month-to-month, no long-term contract, cancel any time at no charge, no annual fees. Gusto's contract terms are not stated in the pricing data available here, so treat the commitment length, any annual billing incentive and the cancellation terms as open questions to be answered in writing before you sign. Ask three specific questions: is there a minimum term, is there a fee to cancel, and what happens to the rate at renewal.

On negotiation, the honest advice is that you have almost none. At 50 employees on Gusto Plus you are a $680 per month, $8,160 per year account. At 25 on OnPay you are $199 a month, $2,388 a year. No vendor builds a discount desk for accounts that size, and neither of these companies needs to discount anyway — both publish their rates, which is itself a signal that the price is the price. Below roughly 100 employees, published pricing is worth more to you than a discount you cannot win, because it removes the risk that you are the customer paying more than the one who negotiated harder.

The lever you do control is plan selection, and it is far larger than any discount you would have won. At 50 employees the difference between Gusto Simple and Gusto Plus is $680 − $349 = $331 a month, 94.8% of the Simple bill. No small-business discount comes close to a 94.8% swing. So the negotiation that matters is with yourself: are you genuinely multi-state, or are you about to buy Plus because one person might relocate next year?

A related discipline: get the multi-state number approved at the same time as the initial spend. If you present finance with $199 a month for 25 employees and return four months later asking for $392 because a hire lives in another state, you have burned credibility on an outcome that was entirely foreseeable. Present both numbers up front, with the trigger stated: "this becomes $392 the day we hire outside our home state."

Finally, use the month-to-month structure as an evaluation tool rather than a comfort blanket. Because OnPay carries no cancellation charge, the cost of testing it properly is one month's fee — $109 at 10 employees, $349 at 50. Running a real cycle beats any demo, and it costs less than the meeting you would hold to discuss whether to run one. If you are currently on Gusto Simple and staring at a Plus upgrade, that is exactly the moment to spend $349 finding out whether OnPay does the job.

Who should pick which

Rules, with the thresholds attached.

Single-state, under 25 employees, no remote hiring planned: it is a tie at $109 to $199 a month and you should stop comparing prices. Decide on benefits. If you administer health insurance and a retirement plan through payroll, take Gusto for the deeper marketplace. If you do not, OnPay's included onboarding, I-9 and W-4 e-signature and document storage give you more usable functionality for the same money.

Two or more states, at any headcount: OnPay, unless a Gusto-only capability is genuinely load-bearing. The gap is $1,092 a year at 10 employees, $2,172 at 25 and $3,972 at 50, and it grows with every hire because the per-person rate is double.

Single-state today but hiring remotely within 12 months: price the Gusto decision at Plus rates, not Simple rates, or you are comparing the wrong numbers. At 25 employees that means comparing $380 against $199, not $199 against $199.

Hourly workforce that needs integrated time tracking: Gusto Plus bundles it, and that materially changes the value of the $12 per person rate. Verify OnPay's time-tracking position in a trial before assuming the cheaper product covers it; if it does not and you must add a separate tool, the real gap at 50 employees is somewhere below $331 a month.

Contractor-only businesses: Gusto, at $35 + $6 per contractor against $49 + $6. It saves $14 a month, $168 a year, at any count. Small, but it is the correct answer and it costs nothing to be right.

You want HR advice but not a tier upgrade: OnPay, with Live HR Support at $75 flat and Compliance Resources at $10 flat. Gusto's equivalent human services live on Premium at $180 + $22, which is $1,280 a month at 50 employees against OnPay's $434 with both add-ons.

You want performance and compensation management from your payroll vendor: only Gusto Premium offers it, and at $730 a month for 25 people or $1,280 for 50 you should buy a dedicated tool instead and keep payroll on the cheapest tier that covers your states.

Under 18 employees and planning to take every OnPay add-on: check the arithmetic first. Fully loaded OnPay is $229 at 10 employees against Gusto Plus at $200, and OnPay only pulls ahead above 17 people.

If you genuinely cannot decide: the tiebreaker is the number of states on your payroll, not a feature matrix. One state, and you are choosing between two identical bills — flip on benefits depth and stop spending time on it. Two or more, and you are choosing between $199 and $380 at 25 people for the same pay runs, which is not a close call unless benefits administration or an integration is doing real work for you. The one thing not to do is default to the better-known brand and discover the multi-state rate at the point where you have already migrated employee data, YTD totals and state tax accounts into it. Establish your state count first, then price. That order costs nothing and gets it right.

Related reading

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• Gusto vs ADP Payroll: The Ultimate Comparison for 2026
• Paycor vs Paylocity: Mid-Market Payroll and HR Compared
• How Much Does Justworks Payroll Cost for a 20-Person Startup?

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