What PEOs publish, and what the silence costs you.

The published rate cards

Three tables, and the shape of the market falls out of them. Payroll software is priced in public almost everywhere. PEO co-employment is priced by three providers and quoted by four. Global employment has converged on one list price, which is its own story.

Named, and deliberately unpriced

These are the providers a buyer in this market will be quoted by. They are listed so the tables above cannot be mistaken for the whole market, and they carry no figure because none is published. Inventing a plausible-looking number for a quote-only provider is the fastest way to make a pricing page useless.

• Insperity. Publishes no PEO rate. Proposals are built from census, states, industry risk class, and plan selections. Insperity, pricing
• TriNet. Publishes no PEO rate. Every published page routes to a custom quote. TriNet, pricing
• ADP TotalSource. Publishes no PEO rate. TotalSource pricing is quoted per client. ADP TotalSource
• Paychex PEO. Publishes no PEO rate. Paychex publishes payroll-only pricing, not the PEO arrangement. Paychex, PEO
• Rippling. Publishes a starting platform rate and quotes the full PEO and benefits stack, so the published number is not a comparable all-in rate. Rippling, pricing

The finding is the size of the list

Count the PEO rows again. Three. Now count the national PEOs a broker would name first: Insperity, TriNet, ADP TotalSource, Paychex. That is four providers with no published PEO rate between them, and it is not an oversight. A published rate is a ceiling. The moment it sits on a pricing page, every prospect negotiates down from it, and in a category where the administrative fee is a small slice of total employer cost, the fee is the wrong thing to compete on. Those four compete on benefits and workers’ compensation, where the numbers are not comparable at all.

So the published population is not a sample of the PEO market. It is a sample of the entrants with something to prove. Justworks publishes because a transparent rate is how a challenger gets considered at all. Deel and Remote publish because they came out of global employment, a category where publishing the rate was the norm long before it reached US PEO work.

That gives you a rule that cuts against the obvious read. If you shortlist only the providers with a published rate, you are shortlisting the newer entrants and quietly excluding the incumbents, and you are doing it for a reason that has nothing to do with fit. The published rate is evidence of a posture. It is not evidence of value.

What the fee sits on top of

Here is the arithmetic that makes the fee conversation smaller than it looks, at 25 employees, using only figures verified on this page:

The PEO premium at this headcount runs from $21,312 to $35,112 a year against the cheapest published payroll-only path. Now put that next to the $13,800 a year that separates the cheapest published PEO from the most expensive one. Choosing the cheapest published PEO saves about $13,800 a year. Choosing a PEO at all costs $21,312 a year before you count a single benefit. The model decision is the expensive one. The vendor decision is the cheap one, and it is the one most buyers spend their time on.

Then remember what none of those numbers include. Employer FICA is 6.2% Social Security up to the $184,500 wage base plus 1.4500000000000002% Medicare on everything, so at the BLS median annual wage for all workers, $50,980, the employer tax on one employee is about $3,900 a year. Across 25 employees that is roughly $97,500 a year. It exists in every model on this page, and no provider’s rate card covers it. Benefits premiums, workers’ compensation at your industry class, and state unemployment insurance at your experience rating sit alongside it, and none of those three can be read off any published price list anywhere.

The fee is the visible line. It is not the decisive one.

The comparison trap this index exists to prevent

Putting a published per-employee fee next to a quote-only proposal and reading the gap as savings. It is the most common mistake in this category and the tables above make it easy to commit.

A quote-only proposal is not the same product as a published rate card. Published rates are administrative fees. A proposal from an incumbent typically folds benefits administration, sometimes a workers’ compensation program, and a service model into one blended number. Compare the two directly and you will conclude either that the incumbent is expensive or that the challenger is cheap, and both conclusions are artifacts of what each provider chose to show you.

Use this index the opposite way from a ranking. Take the published rate as the floor of what an administrative fee looks like in this category, then put the same four questions to every provider on your list. What exactly is inside the fee. What is quoted separately. What the benefits and workers’ compensation rates are under their program. What the exit costs. The published number starts that conversation. It cannot replace it.

How this index is built, and when it expires

Every figure was read off the provider’s own pricing page on October 18, 2026 and recorded the way the provider states it. Where a provider leads with a promotional price, the promotion is recorded in the row and the undiscounted rate is what the table carries, which is why the QuickBooks row shows $88 rather than the three-month offer on the page. Nothing here is estimated, inferred from a proposal, or carried forward from an earlier check.

This is a list price index, not a quote index. It cannot tell you what any provider will charge your company, and it does not try. It excludes the three cost lines that usually decide the outcome: benefits premiums, workers’ compensation, and state unemployment insurance. It also cannot tell you which providers negotiated below these published rates for a company shaped like yours, because those agreements are private.

Figures are re-verified on a rolling basis and the page is refreshed at least every 45 days. If you are reading this more than 45 days after October 18, 2026, treat the numbers as a starting point rather than a current price and check the provider’s page. Corrections go to editorial@hrpair.com with the page URL and a primary source.

How to cite this index

The index is free to reuse. The machine-readable copy lives at /pricing-index.json and carries every row, source, and verification date in the same form as the tables above.

HRPair, PEO and Payroll Pricing Index, verified October 18, 2026, https://hrpair.com/peo-pricing-index

Keep the verification date attached. A pricing figure without its date is worse than no figure at all, because the reader has no way to tell whether it is current.

Put the rate cards on your own page

If you write about this category, or you advise employers and keep a resource page, the index is available as an embed. It renders the published rate cards with each provider’s source and the verification date, and it refreshes itself from the JSON endpoint, so you are never publishing a stale number you did not notice going stale.

<div class="hrpair-pricing-index" data-groups="peo,payroll"></div>
<script src="https://hrpair.com/embed/pricing-index.js" async></script>

data-groups takes any combination of payroll, peo, and global. Leave the attribute off and the PEO table is what renders. The widget sets no cookies, sends nothing about your readers anywhere, and reads the data from /pricing-index.json, which is served with cross-origin reads allowed precisely so this works from any domain.

One consideration, stated plainly: keep the credit line and its link. That link is the entire price of the data, and the widget is built so the row-level sources travel with the numbers. If you need a different layout, take the JSON and build it yourself. The reuse terms are the same either way.

Sources

All provider rates re-verified October 18, 2026. Index reviewed by Maya Chen, SPHR · Editorial Director. Report a correction to editorial@hrpair.com with the page URL and a primary source.

Keep reading

• PEO cost calculator, which models these same published rates at your own headcount and average salary instead of at the 25 employees used above.
• PEO cost, explained, the fee structures, the cost lines the fee excludes, and the comparison model to run with your own census.
• PEO cost, why the administrative fee is the visible part of a much larger comparison.
• PEO vs. payroll service, the structural difference between buying administration and buying co-employment.
• The PEO evaluation scorecard, twelve questions that expose the differences a rate card hides.
• Free HR tools, and the standards every figure on them has to meet.

Frequently asked questions