Gusto Pricing in 2026What Simple, Plus, and Premium really cost once you add it all up
Gusto is one of the few payroll vendors that puts real numbers on a public page, which makes it refreshingly easy to price. It also makes the mistakes more avoidable. Here are the verified 2026 figures, the full add-on list, worked totals at four company sizes, and the one plan rule that catches almost every growing team.
Gusto plans, verified August 2026
No W-2 staff yet
$35/mo
+ $6 per person
$0/mo for first 6 months
One state, basic payroll
$49/mo
+ $6 per person
Single-state payroll only
Gusto's own best-value pick
$80/mo
+ $12 per person
Where most growing teams land
Full HR, no add-on stacking
$180/mo
+ $22 per person
Now published, not quote-only
Prices taken directly from Gusto's published pricing page on August 28, 2026. Unlike most payroll vendors, these are list prices rather than reported estimates.
The number most pricing articles still get wrong
Start with the correction. Gusto Premium is $180 per month plus $22 per person, published on the pricing page. For years Premium was quote-only, and a surprising number of comparison posts still tell you to book a call to find out. They are working from old screenshots. If you are budgeting off one of those articles, you are budgeting off 2024.
The rest of the structure is simple. Every plan is a flat monthly base fee plus a per-person fee. Simple is $49 plus $6. Plus is $80 plus $12, and Gusto labels it best value. Premium is $180 plus $22. There is also a Contractor Only plan at $35 plus $6 per person, with the base fee currently waived for six months, for businesses paying 1099 workers and no W-2 staff.
That two-part structure is why the same plan feels cheap to one company and expensive to another. The flat base gets spread across your headcount, so effective cost per employee falls as you grow. A 10-person team on Simple pays $10.90 a head. A 100-person team on Simple pays $6.49. Same plan, very different economics. TheBLS employer cost dataputs total benefit costs at roughly 30 percent of compensation, which is useful context: payroll software is a rounding error next to what it administers.
One framing before the numbers. Gusto is payroll and benefits with HR around the edges. It is not a hiring platform. If your actual bottleneck is recruiting rather than paying people, read our breakdown ofhow an ATS differs from an HRISand the widercost of an applicant tracking systemfirst. This piece stays on Gusto's bill.
Real totals
What Gusto costs at 10, 25, 50, and 100 employees
Base fee plus per-person fee, no add-ons. These are the numbers to put in a budget line before anyone starts negotiating.
Monthly bill by headcount, base plans only
| Team size | Simple | Plus | Premium | Per employee |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 employees | $109 | $200 | $400 | $10.90 / $20.00 / $40.00 |
| 25 employees | $199 | $380 | $730 | $7.96 / $15.20 / $29.20 |
| 50 employees | $349 | $680 | $1,280 | $6.98 / $13.60 / $25.60 |
| 100 employees | $649 | $1,280 | $2,380 | $6.49 / $12.80 / $23.80 |
Base fee plus per-person fee, before any add-on. The flat base is what makes small teams expensive per head and large teams cheap.
A few things jump out. Premium at 10 people costs $40 per employee per month, which is hard to justify for a team that small. The same plan at 100 people costs $23.80 a head and starts to look reasonable againstBambooHR's reported per-employee rates, especially since Gusto includes actual payroll processing and BambooHR charges payroll as an add-on.
Annualized, a 50-person company pays $4,188 on Simple, $8,160 on Plus, or $15,360 on Premium. My honest read is that the Plus row is the one that matters. It is where the vast majority of companies between 15 and 100 employees end up, and it is the row you should model against alternatives likeRipplingorJustworks.
The upgrade trigger
Simple is single-state, and that is the whole catch
Gusto's Simple plan handles payroll in one state. Not two. This is stated plainly on the pricing page, and it is still the thing that surprises people most, because nobody plans their first remote hire around a payroll tier.
Before: 25 people, all in one state
After: one remote hire in state two
One hire, and the payroll bill roughly doubles.
Run the math. A 25-person company on Simple pays $199 a month. Hire one engineer who lives across a state line and you need Plus, which is $80 base plus $12 for each of 26 people, so $392. The bill nearly doubles for a single hire. On top of that, Gusto charges separately for state tax registration, priced per state, because someone has to file the paperwork that makes you a legal employer there.
None of this is unfair. Multi-state payroll genuinely is harder, and theDepartment of Labor state law directorygives a sense of how much varies once you cross a border. The problem is purely one of planning. Teams budget Simple, hire remotely, then discover the tier change after the offer is signed.
My advice is blunt: if you intend to hire outside your home state within the next year, price Plus from day one and treat Simple as a temporary discount. Our guide toremote hiringcovers the compliance side, andhiring internationallyis a different problem again, since Gusto handles foreign contractors at $5 per payment but does not act as an employer of record for foreign staff.
Add-on pricing
Every Gusto add-on and what it costs
Credit where it is due: Gusto publishes all of these. Nothing here requires a sales call. But there are more than a dozen line items, and the per-person ones compound quietly.
Payroll speed and reach
Next-day pay
$15/mo + $3 per person
Same-day pay
$90 per payroll
Instant pay
$100 per payroll
Global contractor payments
$5 per payment to US bank accounts
State tax registration
Varies by state
HR and people tools
HR Resources
$50/mo + $5 per person
Priority Support
$30/mo + $3 per person
Performance
$3 per person
Time & Attendance Plus
$6 per person after trial
Benefits and money
Broker integration
$6 per eligible employee
Workers' compensation
From $14/mo
Gusto Money Plus
$19/mo
HSA
$2.50 per participant, no minimum
FSA, dependent care, commuter
$4 per participant, $20/mo minimum each
Tax-advantaged accounts service charge
$200 per year, covers all four types
A note on the ones people underestimate. The $20 monthly minimum on FSA, dependent care, and commuter accounts means a company with three FSA participants pays $20 rather than $12. The $200 annual service charge covers all four tax-advantaged account types at once, so it is cheap if you offer several and irritating if you offer one. HSA accounts have no minimum at $2.50 per participant, which is the better deal of the two. TheIRS Publication 969explains which accounts your plan design can actually support.
Health insurance itself carries no Gusto administration fee. You pay premiums only. The catch is that this applies when Gusto brokers the plan. Keep your existing broker and you pay $6 per eligible employee per month for the integration. At 50 eligible employees that is $300 a month, or $3,600 a year, to keep a relationship you already have.
The R&D tax credit add-on is the only one priced on outcome: 15 percent of credits identified, against a stated ceiling of $250,000 in annual payroll tax offsets. For a company with real engineering payroll this can pay for the whole platform several times over. Check theIRS research credit rulesbefore assuming you qualify.
The real decision
Plus with add-ons usually costs more than Premium
This is the calculation almost nobody runs, and it changes the answer. Take a 25-person company on Plus at $380 a month. Now add the two things mid-size teams reliably want. HR Resources is $50 plus $5 per person, so $175. Priority Support is $30 plus $3 per person, so $105. You are now at $660 a month.
For that $660 you still do not have performance management, custom reports, a dedicated service advisor, or included payroll migration. Premium at the same headcount is $730 and includes every one of them. Seventy dollars a month is the entire gap. Unless you are certain you want none of the Premium features, stacking add-ons on Plus is the worse buy.
The logic flips at small headcounts. At 10 people, Plus is $200 and Premium is $400. Doubling your payroll spend to get a service advisor you will speak to twice a year is not a good trade. The crossover sits somewhere around 20 employees, and it moves earlier if you were going to buy HR Resources anyway.
Gusto also notes that Premium customers get discounts and waived fees on R&D tax services and broker integration. That is not quantified publicly, so treat it as a reason to ask rather than a number to model. Ask the rep to put it in writing.
Scope
What Gusto's price does not buy you
Gusto lists an applicant tracking system among its offerings, and the hiring tools are real: job posts, offer letters, onboarding that flows into payroll. For a company hiring five or six people a year, that is genuinely enough, and paying for a second system would be waste.
It stops working when hiring becomes a volume problem. Gusto has no candidate scoring, no resume screening at scale, no structured interview scorecards, and no recruiting analytics that connect a source to a hire to retention. Those are the capabilities that separate a payroll vendor's hiring tab from a real hiring system, and the gap shows up fast once you are running more than a couple of open roles at once.
You are hiring more than 10 roles a year and pipelines overlap
Multiple interviewers need to score candidates against the same rubric
Applicant volume is high enough that manual resume review eats real hours
You need to report on source quality, funnel drop-off, and time to hire
Hiring managers need to work in the system directly rather than wait on HR
If two or more of those describe you, run Gusto for payroll and put a dedicated hiring tool next to it. Our roundups ofhiring software for small businessand thebest ATS for startupscover the options, and it is worth checking yourcost per hirefirst, since the number usually dwarfs any software line item.
Buyer checklist
Questions to settle before you pick a tier
Gusto's transparency means most of this you can answer yourself in ten minutes. Do it before you sign up rather than after your first out-of-state offer.
Will anyone we hire in the next 12 months live outside our current payroll state?
How much is state tax registration in the specific states we are considering?
Do we want HR Resources or Priority Support? If yes, compare Plus plus add-ons against Premium directly.
Are we keeping our existing health broker, and have we multiplied $6 by our eligible headcount?
How many people will actually enroll in FSA or commuter accounts, given the $20 monthly minimums?
Does our engineering payroll plausibly qualify for the R&D credit at 15 percent of what Gusto finds?
How many roles will we hire this year, and does Gusto's hiring tab genuinely cover that volume?
Gusto states there are no contracts, setup is free, and you can switch or cancel at any time. That takes most of the risk out of getting the tier wrong. It does not take the risk out of the add-on stack, which is where the bill quietly grows.
Verdict
Is Gusto worth the price?
Buy Gusto when
- You want published prices instead of a quote process
- Payroll and benefits are the job, hiring is occasional
- You have between 15 and 150 employees, where Plus economics work
- You value no contract and free setup over deep customization
Look elsewhere when
- You are under 10 people and the flat base fee dominates your bill
- You employ staff in other countries and need an employer of record
- Hiring volume is your real constraint rather than payroll
- You need deep custom workflows or an unusual approval structure
My view is that Gusto is priced honestly and roughly correctly for its target buyer. Plus at $80 plus $12 per person is a fair price for multi-state payroll with time tracking and next-day pay included. Premium is better value than its sticker suggests once you compare it against Plus with add-ons bolted on. The Contractor Only plan at a waived base for six months is close to free for a business that has not made its first hire.
The weak spot is the same one every payroll-first platform has. Gusto pays people well. It does not help you find them. For a fuller comparison, seeGusto vs RipplingandBambooHR vs Gusto, both of which look at the same trade-off from different angles.
Keep Gusto for payroll. Use a real ATS for hiring.
Prepzo handles the part payroll software cannot: AI resume screening, AI interviews, structured scorecards, and hiring analytics that tie source to outcome. Unlimited users on every plan.
Try Prepzo freeFrequently Asked Questions
How much does Gusto cost per month?
Gusto publishes four prices. Contractor Only is $35 per month plus $6 per person, currently discounted to a $0 base for the first six months. Simple is $49 per month plus $6 per person. Plus is $80 per month plus $12 per person. Premium is $180 per month plus $22 per person. A 25-person company on Plus pays $380 a month before add-ons.
Is Gusto Premium still quote-based?
No, and this is the biggest thing most comparison articles get wrong. Gusto used to hide Premium behind a sales call, and many third-party pricing roundups still say so. Premium is now listed publicly at $180 per month plus $22 per person. If a review tells you to request a quote for Premium, that review is out of date.
What is the cheapest Gusto plan?
Contractor Only, at $35 per month plus $6 per contractor, with the base fee waived for the first six months as of August 2026. It only works if you have no W-2 employees at all. The moment you hire your first employee you move to Simple at $49 plus $6 per person.
Does Gusto charge extra for multi-state payroll?
Yes, in two ways. Simple covers a single state only, so hiring in a second state pushes you to Plus. That takes a 25-person company from $199 to $392 a month once the new hire is counted. On top of the tier change, state tax registration is a separate add-on priced per state.
Is Gusto Plus or Premium better value?
Premium wins more often than people expect. At 25 employees, Plus costs $380. Add HR Resources at $175 and Priority Support at $105 and you are at $660, still without performance management, custom reports, or a dedicated advisor. Premium is $730 and includes all of it. That $70 gap is the best argument for Premium at mid-size headcounts.
Does Gusto have an applicant tracking system?
Gusto includes light hiring and onboarding tools, mostly job posts and offer letters that flow into payroll. It is fine for a company hiring a handful of people a year. If you run structured interviews, screen high candidate volume, or need real recruiting reporting, you will want a dedicated ATS alongside Gusto rather than instead of it.
Are there hidden fees with Gusto?
Not hidden, but easy to miss. Gusto publishes every add-on price, and there are more than a dozen. The ones that catch buyers are state tax registration, the $6 per eligible employee broker integration fee, the $20 monthly minimums on FSA and commuter accounts, and the $200 annual service charge for tax-advantaged accounts. Health insurance itself carries no Gusto administration fee.
Does Gusto require a contract?
No. Gusto states there are no contracts, free account setup, and you can switch or cancel at any time. You can also move between tiers mid-relationship, which matters because most companies start on Simple and get pushed to Plus by their first out-of-state hire.
Resources & Further Reading
Related Guides
- Gusto vs Rippling: Full Comparison
Flat pricing against modular per-module pricing
- BambooHR vs Gusto
HR system of record against payroll-first
- Applicant Tracking System Cost in 2026
What hiring software costs across vendors
- Best ATS for Small Business
Where to add hiring next to payroll
External Sources
- Gusto Official Pricing Page
Source for every figure in this article
- BLS: Employer Costs for Employee Compensation
What benefits actually cost as a share of pay
- IRS: Research Credit
Eligibility rules behind the R&D add-on
- DOL: State Labor Law Directory
What changes when you hire across a state line
