Employment Hero pricing: a guide for mid-market leaders

Employment Hero pricing works on a per-employee, per-month subscription across tiered plans (historically named Standard, Premium and Platinum), with separate HR and payroll products and a combined bundle. Exact figures are quoted for your headcount and change over time, so treat any number you find online as a starting point and confirm directly with Employment Hero.

Last reviewed July 2026. We do not publish Employment Hero's price list here, because we are a different vendor and their figures are theirs to quote. What follows is how their model is structured, what actually drives your total cost with any HR platform, and how our own pricing works for comparison.

How Employment Hero pricing is structured

Employment Hero uses the standard model for modern HR software: per employee, per month (PEPM), so costs scale with headcount. Three things determine where you land:

• Which product you need. HR and payroll are separate products, with a combined bundle for teams that want both. For many Australian businesses the appeal is the integrated payroll and employment compliance features, which cut manual admin.
• Which tier you choose. Lower tiers cover administrative basics such as digital onboarding and leave management. Features like OKRs, 360-degree feedback and advanced reporting have historically sat in the higher tiers, so teams buying for performance and culture usually find themselves at the top of the range.
• How you pay. Vendors in this category commonly discount for annual billing and larger headcounts, so there is usually room to negotiate.

None of this is unusual, and that is worth saying plainly. Employment Hero prices the way most credible platforms in this market price, including us.

The costs that never appear on the pricing page

Whichever vendor you choose, the subscription is only part of the total cost of ownership. Budget for these before you compare quotes:

• Implementation and data migration. Cleaning your employee data and moving it across takes real time, and it is almost always underestimated.
• Training and change management. Managers need to learn the system, and staff need reasons to use it. A platform your people ignore returns nothing, whatever it cost.
• Integrations. Connecting accounting, recruitment or rostering tools can carry costs of its own.
• Unused features. Feature creep is the quiet budget killer. Paying for a top tier because two features matter, while the other twenty sit idle, is common and avoidable.

Questions to ask any HR software vendor about total cost

Take this list into every vendor conversation, ours included:

• What is the all-up first-year cost for my exact headcount, including implementation and support?
• Which features on this tier will my team realistically use in the first six months?
• What do implementation and data migration cost, and who does the work?
• What discounts apply for annual billing or my headcount band?
• What happens to the price at renewal, and what happens to my data if I leave?
• Can my line managers and employees trial the interface before we commit?

That last one matters more than it looks. Your power users decide adoption, and adoption decides whether you see any return at all.

Measuring the return, not just the cost

ROI on HR technology comes from time savings, risk reduction and retention, and the three are not equal. Time savings are easiest to measure: hours saved on onboarding and leave admin, multiplied by hourly rates. Risk reduction matters in the Australian regulatory environment, where automated compliance and award interpretation can prevent expensive back-pay problems. Retention is where the real money is. Replacing a mid-level employee can cost up to 150 per cent of their annual salary, so a platform that helps you keep your best people for even six months longer has effectively paid for itself.

The catch is that admin platforms mostly deliver the first two. Retention gains come from knowing who fits before you hire, understanding what drives engagement in your teams and acting before people quietly disengage. That is a different capability from payroll automation, and it is the gap in most HR tech budgets: everything spent on process risk, nothing on people insight risk.

How Compono pricing works

Since you are comparing pricing models, here is ours, stated the same way. Compono is priced per employee and sized by your headcount, and the platform is modular: Hire, Engage and Develop can be taken together or separately, so you pay for the capability you need rather than a bundle you half use. We quote for your actual organisation rather than publishing a one-size price, for the same reason most platforms in this market do: headcount and module mix change the number.

The difference is what the spend buys. Compono is a workforce intelligence platform, not a payroll system. Compono Engage shows you what is driving behaviour and engagement across your teams rather than handing you a survey score, and Hire matches candidates to your culture before you commit. Plenty of our customers run Compono alongside an admin platform, and that pairing is often the honest answer: one system for the process, one for the people. Compono is rated 4.8/5 on Capterra.

Frequently asked questions

How does Employment Hero pricing usually work?

Employment Hero, like most modern HR platforms, charges a per-employee, per-month subscription across tiered plans, with HR and payroll available separately or combined. Exact pricing is quoted for your headcount and changes over time, so confirm current figures with the vendor directly.

What hidden costs should I budget for with any HR platform?

Beyond the subscription, budget for implementation support, data cleaning and migration, training time and any integrations with your accounting or recruitment tools. Adoption effort is the most commonly underestimated cost.

How is Compono priced?

Compono is priced per employee, sized by headcount, and modular: Hire, Engage and Develop can be purchased together or separately. Quotes are based on your organisation's size and module mix.

Is Compono an alternative to Employment Hero?

They do different jobs. Employment Hero is an admin and payroll platform; Compono is a workforce intelligence platform for hiring, engagement and development. Some organisations use one, some pair the two so both process risk and people insight risk are covered.