How much does it cost to use an Employer of Record for a UK company? If you’re running a small or medium sized business in the UK, this guide will help you work out whether you can afford to hire through an EOR instead of setting up a payroll yourself.
We include typical pricing from some of the main EOR providers with pricing in Pounds-Sterling, with employer National Insurance, pension, and the rest of the UK paperwork costed in alongside the headline fee.
What you’re actually paying for
The invoice from any UK EOR has three elements on it. The first is the service fee, which is the number providers quote on their pricing page. The second is the pass-through cost, employer NI, the 3% auto-enrolment pension minimum, the Apprenticeship Levy if your pay bill is above £3 million. The third is anything optional you’ve added: private medical, an enhanced pension contribution, equipment budget.
The pass-through costs aren’t EOR margin. You’d be paying HMRC and the pension regulator those amounts whether you ran payroll yourself or not. Worth saying because some EOR sales teams quote you a total bill and the higher number can look like price gouging when it isn’t.
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What the leading EOR providers actually charge
In May 2026, the headline monthly fees for the providers most UK buyers shortlist look like this.
Deel and Pebl (the rebranded Velocity Global) sit at the bottom of the range at $599 per employee per month, which works out at roughly £470 a month, or £5,640 a year. Pebl has been running a promotional rate as low as $399 a month for new sign-ups in 2025-26, about £313 a month, and it’s worth asking about explicitly during sales calls because they don’t always lead with it.
Remote and Oyster both sit at around $699 per employee per month, about £545 a month, or £6,540 a year. Oyster includes consultative support in that base fee that the others charge separately, which matters if you don’t have an internal HR person to handle policy questions.
Pebl is the odd one out on pricing model. As well as the flat per-employee fee, it’ll quote a percentage-of-salary deal, typically 8-15% of gross. For lower-paid roles that maths comes out cheaper than the flat rate; once you’re hiring above about £50,000 a year the flat fee usually wins. Ask for both quotes and compare them yourself.
Currency markets being what they are, expect the GBP figures to wobble by 5-10% across the year. Ask for a fixed-GBP quote if your cash flow can’t absorb FX swings.
A worked example: hiring a £50,000 marketer
The cleanest way to see what an EOR really costs is to price out a specific hire. For our example, we’re hiring a senior marketing manager, based in London, £50,000 gross salary, standard auto-enrolment pension.
The gross salary is £50,000. Employer NI at 15% above the £5,000 secondary threshold comes to £6,750. The 3% employer pension contribution on qualifying earnings is roughly £1,250. Total statutory employment cost before the EOR fee: about £58,000.
Add Deel’s annual service fee of £5,640 and your total is £63,640 a year. Pebl at its standard rate lands at exactly the same number; on Pebl’s percentage-of-salary model at 10% of gross, you’d pay £5,000 in service fees, taking the total to £63,000. The promotional $399 tier, if you can negotiate onto it, gets you down to around £61,750 all-in. Switch to Remote or Oyster and you’re at around £64,540.
This means that the EOR fee is roughly 8-10% of what it actually costs to employ someone on £50,000. The other 90% is the salary you’d be paying anyway, plus the NI and pension you’d have to pay regardless of how the employment was structured.
What to watch out for in EOR fees
Three things to ask about explicitly before signing anything.
The first is the deposit. A surprising number of EORs hold one to three months of salary as a security deposit, refundable on contract exit. For a £50,000 hire that’s up to £12,500 of working capital sitting with a third party. Some providers waive it, some don’t, but nobody volunteers the conversation.
The second is the FX margin. If you pay the EOR in pounds and the employee is paid in another currency, the conversion happens somewhere, and the margin over the mid-market rate is real money. A 2% spread on a £50,000 salary is £1,000 a year, which roughly doubles your effective fee. Always ask for the markup explicitly.
The third is the exit fee. A handful of contracts charge for offboarding the employee or for transferring them to a UK entity when you eventually set one up. Read the termination clauses before you sign.
Pricing of doing it yourself or using an EOR
Rough rule of thumb that holds up across most providers: an EOR is cheaper than setting up a UK subsidiary and running your own payroll up to about fifteen employees in the country. Past that, the maths flips. The fixed costs of incorporation, annual accounts and a payroll bureau start to come out lower than fifteen times £6,000-odd in EOR fees.
If you’re building a UK team of three or four people, EOR is almost always the right call. If you’re planning to scale past twenty, model out the entity option in parallel from the start.
Cost comparisons
If cost is the only consideration, it’s a close-run thing between Deel and Pebl. Both sit at $599 a month at headline rate; Pebl’s promotional tier and its percentage-of-salary deal can undercut Deel for the right hire, but you have to ask for the right quote. The £900 a year you save versus Remote or Oyster adds up quickly across a small team.
If you don’t have an HR person and you’d rather have someone you can call about a policy question without it generating a separate invoice, Oyster is the better deal at the same price as Remote. Remote sits between Deel and Oyster on price and between the two on support intensity, and the IP-protection argument (Remote owns all its local entities) genuinely matters for some clients.
Pebl’s strength is at the more complex end of the payroll: M&A scenarios where you’ve inherited employees in places you’ve never operated, complex immigration cases, employees who need help with visa sponsorship as well as payroll. If your UK hire is a straightforward PAYE setup with a UK passport, Deel is probably enough. If anything about the situation is unusual, Pebl’s quote is worth pulling.
If you’re still deciding whether an EOR is the right vehicle at all, look at our practical guide to Employer of Record services which walks through that decision before you start collecting quotes.
