An employer of record (EOR) lets you hire someone in the UK without setting up a UK company. The advertised price looks simple: one monthly fee per employee. The real bill is not, because the platform fee is the smallest of three separate costs you take on.
- Platform fees start around $459 to $599 per employee per month - Multiplier’s entry EOR tier is $459 billed annually, Deel’s is $599, both published in US dollars
- The platform fee is not the main cost - employer National Insurance at 15% and pension contributions from 3% are yours to pay on top, whoever you hire through
- Some providers publish nothing at all - Pebl, formerly Velocity Global, quotes privately, so a like-for-like comparison needs three conversations rather than three price pages
- Every major provider prices in USD - you are paying a dollar fee for a British employee, so the fee moves when the exchange rate moves
- EOR wins on speed, not always on price - it beats entity setup for one or two hires, but the maths shifts as headcount grows
How much does an employer of record cost in the UK?
Published EOR platform fees sit between roughly $459 and $599 per employee per month. Multiplier’s Core tier is $459 on annual billing, rising to $499 if you pay monthly, and its Growth tier is $519 annually. Deel charges $599 per EOR employee per month, well above what the same company asks for its core HR platform and contractor products. Pebl, which was Velocity Global until its 2026 rebrand, does not publish a figure at all and quotes each client individually. Those numbers buy you the same broad thing: a legal employer in the UK, compliant contracts, payroll, statutory filings and benefits administration.
What those numbers do not buy is the employment itself. That is the part most pricing pages leave you to discover later.
The three costs you are actually signing up for
An EOR invoice has three layers, and only the first is the one advertised.
1. The platform fee
A flat monthly charge per employee, from about $459 to $599. This is the provider’s margin and the number they compete on. It is also, for a typical UK salary, the smallest line on the bill.
2. The employee’s gross salary
You fund the full salary. The EOR pays it out as the legal employer, but the money is yours. No provider absorbs any part of this.
3. UK statutory employer costs
This is the layer that surprises people. Employer National Insurance runs at 15% for the 2026-27 tax year, charged above a secondary threshold that starts at £96 a week for the standard category A. Workplace pension auto-enrolment adds a minimum 3% employer contribution on qualifying earnings between £6,240 and £50,270 a year. Both are legal obligations attached to employing someone in Britain. An EOR administers them and handles the real-time information filings HMRC requires each payday, but it does not pay them for you.
Treating the platform fee as the cost of the hire. On a £50,000 salary, employer NIC and the minimum pension contribution together add several thousand pounds a year that no EOR fee includes. Compare providers on the fee, but budget on all three layers.
A worked example: hiring one person on £50,000
Numbers make the three layers concrete. Take a single UK employee on a £50,000 salary, on the standard category A National Insurance letter, in the 2026-27 tax year.
Employer National Insurance is charged at 15% on earnings above the secondary threshold of £96 a week, which is roughly £5,000 a year. That gives about £6,750. The minimum workplace pension contribution is 3% of qualifying earnings, and qualifying earnings run from £6,240 to £50,270, so on a £50,000 salary the band is £43,760 and the employer share is about £1,313.
So before any provider takes a penny, employing that person costs roughly £58,060 a year: the £50,000 salary plus about £8,060 in statutory employer costs. The EOR platform fee sits on top of that figure, in dollars, and is the only part of the total you can shop around for. Put differently, the fee you spend most of your time comparing is a modest slice of the real annual cost of the hire.
These are minimums, illustrative, and specific to category A in the 2026-27 tax year. Pension scheme rules can require more than 3%, salary sacrifice arrangements change the NIC position, and NI thresholds vary by category letter. Treat it as the shape of the cost, not a quote.
UK EOR providers compared
| Provider | Entry EOR fee | Billing | Countries | Pricing transparency |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Multiplier | $459 per employee/mo | Annual ($499 monthly) | 150+ | Published |
| Deel | $599 per employee/mo | Month-to-month | 130+ | Published |
| Pebl (formerly Velocity Global) | Quote only | Flat per-employee fee | 185+ | On request |
Prices verified against each provider’s own pricing page in August 2026. Country counts are as published by the providers.
Why you are quoted in dollars for a British employee
Every major EOR publishes its platform fee in US dollars, including for UK hires. None of the three providers above lists a GBP equivalent. That means the fee element of your bill moves with the exchange rate even though the employee, the salary and the tax liability are entirely British. Over a year, that is real budget variance on a cost you might reasonably have assumed was fixed. It is worth asking any provider directly whether they will quote and invoice in sterling before you sign, because the answer is not always no.
EOR or your own UK entity?
The honest answer depends almost entirely on headcount and how long you plan to stay. Pebl argues that setting up a legal entity runs to five or six figures and takes several months, which is a fair description of the work involved, though it comes from a company that sells the alternative.
The shape of the decision is straightforward. For one or two hires, or for testing whether a UK market is worth committing to, an EOR is almost always cheaper and much faster, because you are renting employment infrastructure rather than building it.
As headcount rises, that logic weakens. A per-employee monthly fee that made sense for two people becomes a standing charge for ten, while an entity’s fixed costs stay fixed. Somewhere on that curve the two lines cross. Where exactly depends on your salaries, your provider’s fee and the accountancy support an entity would need, so it is a calculation to run on your own numbers rather than a rule of thumb to borrow. Our breakdown of UK HR software pricing covers what the underlying platform costs once you are no longer renting the employer relationship too. Running your own entity means running payroll in each country as well, which our guide to global payroll services prices separately.
What pushes the price up
- Paying monthly instead of annually. Multiplier charges $499 monthly against $459 on an annual commitment, a difference of $480 a year per employee.
- Higher tiers. Multiplier’s Growth tier at $519 adds integrations, custom reporting and API access. Useful at scale, unnecessary for a single hire.
- Implementation and compliance add-ons. Multiplier lists both as separate charges on top of the headline tier.
- Country. Multiplier notes that around 11% of the countries it supports carry adjusted pricing to reflect local wage and statutory conditions.
- Salary level. Because employer NIC and pension are percentages, your statutory costs scale with the salary while the platform fee does not.
Is an employer of record worth it?
For a company making its first UK hires, generally yes. You get a compliant employment relationship in days rather than months, you carry no entity, and you can leave the market without unwinding a company. The compliance risk of getting UK employment law wrong on your own is the thing an EOR genuinely removes, and misclassifying a worker as a contractor when they are functionally an employee is an expensive mistake to make twice.
Where it stops being obviously worth it is at scale, and on transparency. A quote-only provider may well come in below a published rate, but you cannot know that without asking, and you cannot benchmark it afterwards. If you are comparing seriously, get all three to quote on the same brief and insist the numbers separate platform fee from statutory cost, because that is the only way to see what you are actually being charged for. Companies weighing EOR against simply buying software and employing directly should start with our guide to the best HR software for UK businesses, and those comparing the two largest global players can read our Deel versus Remote breakdown.
Five questions to ask before you sign
- Will you quote and invoice in sterling? If the answer is no, you are carrying currency risk on the fee for the life of the contract.
- What is excluded from the headline fee? Ask specifically about implementation charges and compliance add-ons, which are listed separately rather than bundled.
- What happens at termination? UK notice periods and any severance are your cost. Ask how they are calculated and when they are invoiced.
- Is there a deposit or advance funding requirement? Many EORs hold a month of payroll up front, which is a cash flow question rather than a cost one.
- What does the fee do as I add people? Ask where the volume breaks sit, then check that against the entity maths at your expected headcount.
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