Justworks Pricing in 2026What PEO Basic, Plus, and Payroll actually cost you
Justworks prints its prices on a public page. In the PEO market that is close to a stunt, and it is the single best reason to take the company seriously. But a published rate is not the same as a predictable bill. Here is what each plan costs at four company sizes, every add-on price, and the four billing rules that decide whether the number you budgeted is the number you pay.
Justworks plans and list prices
Payroll and HR tools, no PEO
+ $50/mo base fee
Co-employment, no benefits admin
No base fee
Co-employment with full benefits
No base fee
Full-time hires outside the US
Add-on to Basic or Plus
Rates published on the Justworks pricing page as of August 2026. Justworks was also running a three-months-free promotion on the Payroll plan at the time of writing.
Why published PEO pricing is rare enough to matter
Go toRippling's pricing pageright now. There are no prices on it. There is a form asking for your work email, company name, and headcount band, and a promise that someone will send you a custom quote. TriNet does the same thing. So does most of the industry. That opacity is the default, and it exists because quote-gating lets a salesperson price you on what they think you will pay rather than what the service costs to deliver.
Justworks does the opposite. Four numbers, on one page, available to anyone. $8 for Payroll plus a $50 monthly base fee, $79 for PEO Basic, $124 for PEO Plus, $599 for international EOR. You can build a budget before you talk to a human. That alone is worth something, and it is the same reason we keep writing upDeelandHiBobrather than taking a vendor's word for its own affordability.
Some context on whether those numbers are good. TheNational Association of Professional Employer Organizationsputs the industry average administrative fee near $1,395 per employee per year, roughly $116 a month. PEO Basic works out to $948 a year per person. PEO Plus lands at $1,488. So Basic sits well under the industry average and Plus sits modestly above it, which is about right given that Plus carries the full benefits administration layer.
One thing to settle before we go further: a PEO is a co-employment arrangement, not software. Justworks becomes the employer of record for tax and insurance purposes, which is why the price per head is ten times a payroll tool. TheIRS certified professional employer organization programexplains what that shift in liability actually means. If you have not decided whether you want co-employment at all, read our breakdown ofhow an ATS differs from an HRISfirst, because a lot of teams shopping for a PEO are really shopping for a system of record.
The real math
What Justworks costs at 10, 25, 50, and 100 people
Per-employee pricing sounds small until you multiply it. Here is the same company at four sizes, on each plan, with no add-ons attached.
| Headcount | Payroll | PEO Basic | PEO Plus | Plus, per year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 employees | $130/mo | $790/mo | $1,240/mo | $14,880 |
| 25 employees | $250/mo | $1,975/mo | $3,100/mo | $37,200 |
| 50 employees | $450/mo | $3,950/mo | $6,200/mo | $74,400 |
| 100 employees | $850/mo | $7,900/mo | $12,400/mo | $148,800 |
Base rates only, full-time W-2 employees, no add-ons. Payroll figures include the $50 monthly base fee.
The number that should stop you is $148,800. That is what a hundred-person company pays Justworks annually for PEO Plus, before a single add-on. For that money you are getting workers' comp access, employment practices liability insurance, 401(k) administration, benefits administration, and someone else carrying a meaningful chunk of your employment tax liability. Whether it is worth it depends entirely on what those pieces would cost you separately.
My honest read: the PEO math works best between roughly 10 and 60 employees. Below ten, you are paying real money for compliance infrastructure a good bookkeeper and a broker can cover. Above sixty or so, you have enough scale to negotiate your own health plan and hire an actual HR person, and $148,800 a year buys a very good one with budget left over. The middle is where you are too big to wing it and too small to staff it.
The comparison against payroll-only tools is less flattering to Justworks than it first looks. At 25 employees, Justworks Payroll costs $250 a month.Gusto Simpleis $199 for the same headcount, and Gusto Plus is $380. So Justworks undercuts Gusto Plus on sticker. Then you add Justworks Time Tracking at $8 per employee, which takes you to $450, and Gusto Plus bundles time tracking at $380. The cheaper option flips based on one add-on. OurGusto and Rippling comparisonwalks through the rest of that field.
Add-on pricing
Every Justworks add-on and what it costs
Credit where it is due: Justworks publishes these too, with real numbers next to each one. Most vendors bury add-on pricing in a quote. Price the ones you need before you compare Justworks to anything else, because the base rate is rarely the final rate.
Time Tracking
$8 per employee/mo
Sold as an add-on on all three plans. The plan cards say access to time tracking, not included time tracking, and that word does real work on the invoice.
Dedicated HR Consulting
$30 per employee/mo
A named HR partner rather than the pooled support desk. Available on Basic and Plus. At 40 people that is $1,200 a month on top of your plan rate.
US-based contractors
$8 per contractor/mo
You are only billed in months you actually process a payment to that contractor. One of the fairer terms in the whole PEO market.
International contractors
$39 per paid contractor/mo
Charged per active paid contractor, plus exchange rate costs that Justworks builds into the displayed rate on each transaction.
ICHRA reimbursements
$25 per enrolled employee/mo
Runs through Thatch as an integrated partner. An alternative to group health, available on Payroll, Basic, and Plus.
Payroll plan health insurance
$8 per eligible employee/mo
Adds medical, dental, vision, and COBRA admin to the Payroll plan. This is how you get benefits without paying the $79 PEO entry price.
Two of these deserve a closer look. Dedicated HR Consulting at $30 per employee per month is the most expensive add-on relative to what it replaces. On a 40-person team that is $14,400 a year for a named HR advisor. A part-time HR consultant on retainer often costs less, and you get someone who knows your business rather than a partner assigned to a book of accounts.
The one I like is the Payroll plan health insurance add-on at $8 per benefits-eligible employee per month. It gets you medical, dental, vision, and COBRA administration onto the cheap plan. A 25-person company running Payroll plus that add-on pays $450 a month, versus $3,100 for PEO Plus. You lose co-employment, workers' comp access, and EPLI in that trade, so it is not free. But it is the strongest argument in the lineup for skipping the PEO entirely.
The EOR product at $599 per employee per month is priced roughly where the market sits, and it is only sold as an add-on to PEO Basic or Plus rather than standalone. If global hiring is the main thing you need, compare against the specialists first. Our roundup ofDeel alternativesand the practical guide tohiring international employeescover that market properly.
Billing rules
Four rules that change your bill
These are all documented in Justworks' own pricing FAQ. None of them are hidden. They are just easy to skim past when you are looking at the headline rate, and each one moves real money.
Part-timers cost $79 either way
Anyone expected to work 29 hours a week or fewer is billed at $79 on both PEO Basic and PEO Plus, and part-time employees are not benefits-eligible on either plan. So a Plus customer pays $79 a month for a person who cannot use the benefits that justify the Plus rate. A restaurant or retail operation with 15 part-timers is spending $14,220 a year on staff who get none of the medical, dental, or vision administration.
Active status, not hours worked
PEO customers are billed for every employee with active status on the platform. Justworks spells out that this includes people on a leave of absence and seasonal employees who are not currently working but have not been terminated. If your headcount swings by season, your bill does not swing with it unless you actually offboard people.
Two different billing dates
PEO invoices land on the 5th of each month, or the next business day if the 5th falls on a weekend or holiday. Justworks Payroll bills on the 15th of the following month. Teams running both products, or migrating between them, get two separate charges on two separate cycles.
No implementation fee
Justworks charges nothing to onboard, which is genuinely unusual. Most PEOs and mid-market HR platforms quote a one-time setup or data migration fee that lands somewhere between one and three months of subscription cost. Getting that to zero is worth real money in year one.
The part-time rule is the one that catches people. Think about a coffee chain with 12 full-time managers and 18 part-time baristas on PEO Plus. The full-timers cost $1,488 a month. The part-timers cost $1,422 a month and receive none of the medical, dental, or vision administration that the Plus tier exists to provide. Nearly half the bill buys nothing the cheaper tier would not also buy.
If that describes your workforce, run the numbers on PEO Basic and a separate benefits path for the salaried staff. Sectors with heavy part-time rosters get hit hardest here, which is worth reading alongside our guides tohiring software for restaurantsandhiring temporary workers. TheBLS employment situation reporttracks part-time employment levels if you want to sanity-check how normal your ratio is.
The hiring gap
Justworks does not hire anyone for you
Look at the Justworks feature table and find the row labeled applicant tracking system integrations. On the Payroll plan it is a dash. On PEO Basic and PEO Plus it is a checkmark. That row is doing a lot of quiet work, because what it tells you is that Justworks has no applicant tracking system of its own at any price. It connects to one. On the cheapest plan it will not even do that.
This is the correct product decision, to be clear. Justworks is a payroll, benefits, and compliance company, and it does not pretend otherwise. But it means your $124 per employee per month buys everything that happens after someone signs an offer letter and nothing that happens before. Job posts, candidate screening, interview scheduling, scorecards, and offer approvals all live somewhere else, on a separate bill.
Budget for that gap explicitly rather than discovering it in month two. A 50-person company on PEO Plus is already at $74,400 a year. Adding a hiring platform is not a rounding error on top, especially if the ATS you pick also charges per employee or per recruiter seat. Our breakdown ofwhat an applicant tracking system actually costsand the guide toATS integrationswill tell you what to expect and what connects cleanly to a PEO.
The teams that get this right treat the two purchases as one budget line. You are buying the full employee lifecycle, and it happens to be split across two vendors. Price it that way, and readSHRM's HR technology researchon how small employers evaluate total cost of ownership before you sign either contract.
Fit analysis
When Justworks is worth the money
Justworks earns its rate when
- You have 10 to 60 mostly full-time W-2 employees in the US
- You want group health coverage but are too small to negotiate a plan yourself
- Nobody on your team owns HR compliance and you would rather not hire for it
- You are hiring across several states and payroll tax registration is becoming a job
- You value a published rate you can model over a negotiated one you cannot
Justworks gets expensive when
- Most of your roster is part-time, since those people cost $79 and get no benefits
- Headcount swings seasonally and you leave people in active status between seasons
- You already have a broker relationship and a health plan you are happy with
- You are past roughly 60 employees and could staff HR directly for less
- Your real bottleneck is hiring, which Justworks does not touch at any tier
The two-employee minimum on PEO deserves a mention here because it is genuinely low. Many PEOs will not talk to you under five or ten heads. A three-person startup that wants real health benefits on day one can buy PEO Plus for $372 a month, and that is a legitimately hard thing to replicate any other way at that size.
What I would push back on is the reflex to buy PEO Plus because it is the popular tier. The gap between Basic and Plus is $45 per employee per month, which is $27,000 a year at 50 people, and all of it is benefits administration. If you have a broker you trust, Basic plus that broker is often the cheaper and better arrangement. Ask for both quotes.
Buyer checklist
Questions to ask before you sign
Published pricing removes the biggest question, so use the sales call for the ones that are still open.
Which of my part-time employees fall under the 29-hour threshold, and what does that do to my monthly total?
How do I offboard seasonal staff so they stop counting as active on the platform?
What are the actual health plan premiums for my census on PEO Plus, separate from the $124 admin fee?
Which carriers are available in my states, and do my current doctors take them?
If I outgrow the PEO, what does moving to Justworks Payroll cost and how long does it take?
What is the notice period to leave, and who owns my payroll history if I do?
Which applicant tracking systems integrate, and what breaks if I use one that does not?
Question three is the one people forget. The $124 is the administrative fee. Health insurance premiums for your employees sit on top of it, they vary by census and state, and they are usually the larger number by a wide margin. Get the full quote, not the platform fee.
Your PEO handles payroll. Who handles hiring?
Prepzo prices on hiring activity instead of headcount, with unlimited users on every plan, AI resume screening, and AI interviews built in. It sits alongside whatever payroll or PEO you already run.
Try Prepzo freeFrequently Asked Questions
How much does Justworks cost per employee in 2026?
Justworks publishes four rates. The Payroll plan is $8 per employee per month plus a $50 monthly base fee. PEO Basic is $79 per employee per month with no base fee. PEO Plus is $124 per employee per month with no base fee. International Employer of Record is $599 per employee per month. Those are list prices on the public pricing page, not quote-gated estimates, which puts Justworks in a small minority of PEOs.
What is the minimum number of employees for Justworks?
Justworks PEO requires at least two full-time or part-time W-2 employees. The Justworks Payroll plan has no minimum, so a solo founder or a company paying only contractors can use it. That two-employee floor is low by PEO standards, where minimums of five or ten are common.
What is the difference between Justworks PEO Basic and PEO Plus?
Basic at $79 covers payroll, compliance, workers' comp access, EPLI, 401(k), and 24/7 support. Plus at $124 adds the health benefits layer: medical, dental, and vision administration, HSA and FSA accounts, COBRA, mental health resources, fertility benefits through Kindbody, and One Medical where available. The $45 gap is almost entirely benefits administration. If you already have group health through a broker you like, Basic is the honest choice.
Does Justworks charge for contractors?
Yes, but only when you pay them. US-based contractors and vendors cost $8 per contractor per month, and Justworks bills only in months you actually process a payment. International contractors cost $39 per active paid contractor per month plus exchange rate costs, which are shown on each transaction. The pay-only-when-used rule on US contractors is a better term than most competitors offer.
Is Justworks cheaper than Gusto?
On payroll alone, it depends on the tier. At 25 employees, Justworks Payroll costs $250 a month against $199 for Gusto Simple and $380 for Gusto Plus. Add Justworks Time Tracking at $8 per employee and the Justworks bill becomes $450, above Gusto Plus, which bundles time tracking. Comparing Justworks PEO against Gusto is not a fair fight at all: $79 or $124 buys co-employment, workers' comp access, and EPLI that Gusto's payroll plans do not include.
Does Justworks include an applicant tracking system?
No. Justworks has no built-in ATS at any price. Its own feature table lists applicant tracking system integrations as available on PEO Basic and PEO Plus and unavailable on the Payroll plan. So hiring runs through a separate tool that you buy and pay for on top of your per-employee rate, and on the cheapest plan you cannot even connect one.
Resources & Further Reading
Related Guides
- Deel Pricing in 2026
The other published-rate player in global employment
- Gusto vs Rippling
Where the payroll-only options land against each other
- Applicant Tracking System Cost in 2026
Budget the hiring side your PEO does not cover
- Hiring Software for Small Business
What to run next to a PEO at 10 to 60 people
External Sources
- Justworks Official Pricing Page
Published plan rates, add-ons, and the billing FAQ
- IRS: Certified Professional Employer Organization
What co-employment does to your tax liability
- NAPEO: PEO Industry Research
Industry average admin fees and adoption data
- BLS: Employment Situation Report
Full-time and part-time employment levels
