BambooHR: payroll software platform

BambooHR publishes a full rate card, which in HR software is rare enough to be a reason to look at it first. Checked 16 October 2026: Core is $10.25, Pro $17.50 and Elite $25 per employee per month above 25 employees, with flat monthly rates below that. Payroll is an add-on with no published price, so the rate card is not the bill.

Rajat GuptaEditorial LeadReviewed 16 October 2026Pricing checked 16 October 2026 against the BambooHR plans and pricing page

BambooHR in brief

BambooHR publishes a full rate card, which in HR software is rare enough to be a reason to look at it first.

Price: $10.25 USD per employee/month (Core), or $250 USD per month flat at 25 employees or fewer · Per employee per month above 25 employees; flat monthly rate at 25 or fewer
Best for: Small and mid-sized companies making HR records the system of record
Watch out for: You give up payroll price transparency at exactly the point it matters.

The short answer

Buy BambooHR if your problem is HR records rather than payroll mechanics: employee data scattered across spreadsheets, time-off tracked in a shared calendar, hiring run from an inbox, and nobody able to answer a headcount question without a morning's work. You can price it yourself before talking to anyone, which is unusual here, and the free trial means you can load real data before committing.

Skip it if payroll is the thing you need solved, because payroll is an add-on with no published price and is marked US employees only, so the figure you can read is not the figure you will pay. Skip it if your workforce is largely hourly and shift-based, since time and attendance is also a separate unpriced module. And skip it if you recruit at volume, because job openings are capped at 5 on Core and 25 on Pro.

Where BambooHR fits

BambooHR is an HR system of record first, and almost everything about the packaging confirms it. Core carries employee records, a custom report builder, workflows and approvals, dashboards, applicant tracking, onboarding, time-off management with unlimited custom policies, benefits tracking and employee satisfaction measurement. Payroll, benefits administration and time and attendance are not in any plan: they are add-on solutions quoted separately. So the product you are buying for $10.25 per employee per month is the people-data layer, and the payroll conversation is a second purchase with a second price.

The tier boundaries are unusually honest about who each plan is for. Pro adds the employee-facing layer: 360 degree review cycles, 1:1s, an internal community hub, recognition and rewards redeemable for gift cards and donations, and 15 compliance training courses. Elite adds the analytical layer: compensation planning, salary benchmarking against Mercer data, levels and bands, custom dashboards, HR benchmarks for turnover, age, gender and wellbeing, and 300 or more training courses. If you cannot name which of those three jobs you are trying to do, you are not ready to pick a tier.

Watch the capacity limits, because they move buyers up a tier for reasons that have nothing to do with the features they wanted. Applicant tracking allows 5 job openings on Core, 25 on Pro and 50 on Elite, and compliance training runs 1 course, 15 courses, then 300 or more. A twelve-person company hiring for four roles at once is fine on Core; a sixty-person company running fifteen simultaneous searches is pushed to Pro by job slots alone, and will be paying the Pro rate for performance management it may not use for a year. Say so during the quote rather than after.

Where it earns its place with a finance team is reporting and the data model underneath it. One employee record feeds the custom report builder, the dashboards and, on Elite, the HR benchmarks and compensation planning worksheets. BambooHR lists more than 150 integration partners, and its own FAQ states that customer data is hosted in the United States, Canada or Ireland depending on the customer, encrypted in transit with sensitive fields encrypted at rest, under an annual third-party SOC II audit with annual penetration testing, SAML support and a zero trust model. For a controller who has to answer an auditor about access to employee data, those are the specifics worth quoting.

The limits are geographic and operational rather than functional. Payroll and benefits administration are marked US employees only, and global employment is handled through a partnership with Remote covering contractor management and employer of record rather than by BambooHR itself. Support is stated to be entirely in-house rather than outsourced, which is a real differentiator in a category where it often is not, and BambooHR says it serves customers in over 150 countries while the paid payroll layer stops at the US border. If you employ people in three countries, you are buying the HR layer here and the employment layer somewhere else.

BambooHR pricing

BambooHR publishes per-employee list prices, and the structure changes at 25 employees. Checked on 16 October 2026, its pricing FAQ gives $10.25 USD per employee per month for Core, $17.50 USD for Pro and $25 USD for Elite above 25 employees, and flat monthly rates of $250 USD, $425 USD and $650 USD for companies at 25 employees or fewer. Terms are month-to-month or an extended term, your choice. Two things stop that being the whole story: the plan cards round the per-employee figures, and payroll, benefits administration and time and attendance carry no published price at all.

What BambooHR publishes

Core: $10.25 USD per employee/month (Per employee per month above 25 employees, or $250 USD per month flat at 25 or fewer. Month-to-month or extended term.)Employee records, custom report builder, workflows and approvals, dashboards. Applicant tracking with 5 job openings, offer letter templates, onboarding. Time-off management with unlimited custom policies, benefits tracking. Employee satisfaction with eNPS, wellbeing, total rewards. Compliance Intelligence powered by VirgilHR plus 1 training course. AI assistant for HR data questions, and on-demand pay for employees.
Pro: $17.50 USD per employee/month (Per employee per month above 25 employees, or $425 USD per month flat at 25 or fewer.)Everything in Core, plus 360 degree review cycles, 1:1s and instant performance reporting, an employee community hub for announcements and interest groups, recognition and rewards with points redeemable for gift cards and charitable donations, 25 job openings, 15 compliance training courses, and an AI assistant that answers from your policies, handbooks and benefits.
Elite: $25 USD per employee/month (Per employee per month above 25 employees, or $650 USD per month flat at 25 or fewer.)Everything in Pro, plus compensation planning, salary benchmarking with Mercer data, levels and bands. Custom dashboards and advanced visualisation. HR benchmarks for turnover, age, gender, eNPS and wellbeing. 50 job openings, 300 or more training courses. Premium services: 2 hours of data integrity work and 2 new administrator training sessions per year, dedicated support, plus an additional 30 days of implementation for Elite features.

Prices as published on the BambooHR pricing page and checked on 16 October 2026. The plan cards near the top of that page show rounded figures of $10 USD and $17 USD per employee per month, while the FAQ lower down gives $10.25 USD and $17.50 USD. The FAQ figures are recorded here as the precise ones. The difference is cents per employee and it is still worth settling on the order form, because at a few hundred employees it is a real monthly sum and you do not want to discover which version the contract used after signature. Both the cards and the volume note carry an asterisk: these are list prices before any automatic discount.

Three things move your actual bill, and only the first is on the rate card.

Which side of 25 employees you sit on. Above 25, you pay per employee per month. At 25 or fewer, the same plans are billed as a flat monthly rate of $250 USD, $425 USD or $650 USD. A team hovering around that line should price both shapes and ask what happens to the bill the month it crosses, in both directions. A 20-person company on Core is paying a flat rate that works out dearer per head than a 60-person company on the same plan.
The volume discount, which is real and unpublished. BambooHR states that volume discounts are applied automatically by headcount and increase as the team grows, with no need to request or negotiate them, but it publishes no table. So the list figures are a ceiling rather than a price for any company of size. Ask for the discounted rate at your current headcount and at your twelve-month plan, in writing, and ask at which headcounts the curve steps.
Whether you need the add-ons, because that is where the published price stops being the bill. Payroll, Benefits Administration, Time and Attendance and Global Employment powered by Remote are all add-on solutions and BambooHR publishes no price for any of them. Payroll and Benefits Administration are marked US employees only. A buyer who assumed payroll was inside the per-employee figure will see a second line on the quote, and it is the line nobody has a published benchmark for.

What costs extra

Payroll: direct deposit, flexible pay schedules, federal and state tax filing and a specialised support team. US employees only. No price is published.
Benefits Administration: self-guided configuration, open enrolment, life events and new hires, election review, carrier connections. US employees only. No price is published.
Time and Attendance: shift scheduling, meal and rest breaks, project tracking and billable hours, automatic overtime calculations, iPad time kiosk and time clocks. No price is published.
Global Employment powered by Remote: global cost calculator, contractor management and employer of record. No price is published, and this is a partner product rather than BambooHR's own.
Discounts work the other way and are worth asking for by name: BambooHR states a 15% discount when Payroll and Benefits Administration are combined with any plan, currently for US-based employees only, and an additional 15% off for registered nonprofit organisations.

Implementation and commercial terms

The rows below are what the pricing page and its FAQ confirm as of 16 October 2026. Where a row says none published, that is an absence to ask about rather than a reassurance.

Published price: Yes, for Core, Pro and Elite, in both per-employee and flat-rate forms.
Billing basis: Per employee per month above 25 employees; flat monthly rate at 25 or fewer.
Contract terms: Month-to-month or an extended term, stated as the buyer's choice.
Payment methods: Credit card and ACH for monthly payers; wire transfer and cheque for annual upfront.
Implementation fee: None published. Elite adds an additional 30 days of implementation for Elite features, and payroll onboarding is run by a dedicated payroll project manager who runs the first payroll.
Free trial: Yes. Start Free Trial appears on both the homepage and the pricing page, but neither states the length or what is included.
Add-on pricing: None published for Payroll, Benefits Administration, Time and Attendance or Global Employment.

Budget this as two numbers. The first you can calculate today: your headcount times $10.25, $17.50 or $25, or the flat rate if you are at 25 or fewer, then discounted by a volume curve you have to ask for. The second is the add-on stack, and it is unpublished, so get Payroll, Benefits Administration and Time and Attendance quoted as separate lines and ask for the 15% bundle discount in writing rather than hoping it is applied. Then sanity-check the payroll line against a vendor that publishes one: OnPay publishes a base fee, a per-worker fee and every add-on price, which gives you the only real benchmark for the part of BambooHR's quote you cannot look up.

Source: the BambooHR plans and pricing page, checked 16 October 2026. Confirm current prices with the vendor before you budget.

What BambooHR gives up

You give up payroll price transparency at exactly the point it matters. The HR plans are published to the cent; payroll, benefits administration and time and attendance are not published at all. That inverts the usual advantage: the part you can verify is the part you were less worried about, and the part that carries tax filing, pay runs and carrier connections arrives as a quote. Get those three priced before you sign the HR plan, because the bundle discount is easier to win while the HR line is still unsigned.

You give up non-US payroll entirely. Payroll and Benefits Administration are marked US employees only, and global employment is delivered through a partnership with Remote rather than by BambooHR. So a company employing people in three countries uses BambooHR as the record system and buys employment and payroll elsewhere, with the integration risk that implies. That can be a perfectly good architecture. It is not the single-platform story the pricing page implies, and it means two renewals rather than one.

You give up depth on hourly workforces. Time and attendance is an add-on, so shift scheduling, meal and rest breaks, overtime calculation and time clocks all sit outside the plan you priced. If most of your people clock in, the product you are evaluating is not the product you will run, and vendors built around scheduling and pay rules will do that job with less assembly. Price the add-on and the alternative before you decide this is cheaper.

You give up recruiting capacity unless you pay for it. Applicant tracking is capped at 5 job openings on Core, 25 on Pro and 50 on Elite. Hiring at volume therefore pushes you up a tier for a counter rather than a capability, and you will be paying for performance management, recognition and, on Elite, compensation planning as the price of job slots. It is a fair trade if you want those things anyway and an annoying one if you do not, so count your concurrent openings honestly before choosing.

You give up the certainty that the number you read is the number you pay, in both directions. The plan cards and the FAQ disagree by cents, volume discounts are automatic but unpublished, and the nonprofit and bundle discounts are stated as percentages rather than as rates. None of that is dishonest, and all of it means the list price is an opening position. Ask for your actual rate at your actual headcount and treat the published figures as the ceiling they are described as being.

How BambooHR compares

The split in this group is not features, it is how much you can verify before a sales call. BambooHR publishes per-employee list prices. OnPay publishes a full base-plus-per-worker rate card including add-ons. Rippling publishes one starting figure and quotes everything else. Paycor publishes nothing, and Gusto's site could not be accessed on this check. Every price below comes from that vendor's own pricing page, checked on 16 October 2026, and anything unpublished or unreadable is recorded as such rather than estimated.

Tool	Best for	Price	Where it breaks
BambooHR	HR records, time off, hiring and performance as the system of record, with published prices	$10.25, $17.50 or $25 per employee/month	Payroll, benefits administration and time tracking are unpriced add-ons, and payroll is US only
OnPay	Payroll first, with HR and time tracking added at published add-on prices	$49 base plus $6 per worker per month	US only, and the HR layer is lighter than a dedicated HRIS
Rippling	Teams wanting HR, payroll and device management from one vendor	From $8 per employee/month plus a base fee	Only the starting figure is published, so the real bill cannot be modelled
Paycor	US mid-market HR and payroll with a named sales and service relationship	Not published, quote only	The pricing page asks your company size and routes you to a quote
Gusto	Small US businesses buying payroll, benefits and tax filing as one subscription	Could not be accessed on 16 October 2026	The site returned HTTP 403 to every request, so nothing could be verified

What to test in a BambooHR trial

A free trial is offered, though neither the homepage nor the pricing page states its length or scope, so establish both on day one. Use the trial for the HR layer and the sales conversation for the add-ons, because the add-ons are where the unpublished money is.

Load real employee data, not sample records. Import a department with messy history: people who changed job title mid-year, took unpaid leave, moved between locations or came back as rehires. Then build the three reports your leadership actually asks for in the custom report builder and see whether they come out right without manual cleanup.
Test the tier boundary that applies to you. If recruiting volume is your reason to move up, count your concurrent openings against the 5, 25 and 50 job-opening caps. If compensation is the reason, ask to see compensation planning, levels and bands and the Mercer salary benchmarking on Elite, because that is the only tier that carries them and it is the biggest step on the rate card.
Make the payroll conversation explicit and separate. Ask for Payroll, Benefits Administration and Time and Attendance priced as individual lines, confirm the US-only limitation against your own headcount map, and ask for the 15% bundle discount for combining Payroll and Benefits Administration in writing. Ask how the payroll project manager engagement works and what the first pay run timeline looks like.
Pin the rate down. Ask whether your contract uses $10.25 and $17.50 or the rounded card figures, ask for your automatic volume discount at today's headcount and at next year's plan, and ask where the discount curve steps. If you are a registered nonprofit, ask for the additional 15% off by name.
Prove the controls to whoever audits you. Confirm where your data will be hosted among the United States, Canada and Ireland, ask for the annual third-party SOC II report, test SAML single sign-on against your identity provider, and work through role-based permissions on a sensitive field such as compensation. Then test an export of the full employee record set, so you know what leaving looks like before you commit.

Frequently asked questions about BambooHR

How much does BambooHR cost?

As of 16 October 2026 BambooHR publishes $10.25 USD per employee per month for Core, $17.50 USD for Pro and $25 USD for Elite, for companies above 25 employees. At 25 employees or fewer the same plans are billed as flat monthly rates of $250 USD, $425 USD and $650 USD.

Is payroll included in the BambooHR price?

No. Payroll is an add-on solution alongside Benefits Administration, Time and Attendance and Global Employment, and BambooHR publishes no price for any of them. Payroll and Benefits Administration are marked US employees only, so budget a second line on top of the per-employee figure.

What does BambooHR do?

It is an HR system of record: employee data, custom reporting, workflows and approvals, applicant tracking, onboarding, time-off management and benefits tracking, with performance management and compensation planning in higher tiers. Payroll, benefits administration and time and attendance are separate paid modules rather than parts of the plan.

Why do the BambooHR plan cards and its FAQ show different prices?

The plan cards round the figures to $10 USD and $17 USD per employee per month, while the FAQ lower on the same page gives $10.25 USD and $17.50 USD. The FAQ figures are the precise ones. It is cents per employee, and still worth settling on the order form before signature.

Does BambooHR offer discounts?

Yes, three kinds. Volume discounts are applied automatically by headcount and increase as the team grows, though no table is published. Registered nonprofits get an additional 15% off. Combining Payroll and Benefits Administration with any plan earns a 15% discount, currently for US-based employees only.

What is the difference between Core, Pro and Elite?

Core is the records layer: data, reporting, hiring, time off. Pro adds the employee layer: performance reviews, 1:1s, a community hub, recognition and rewards, and 15 training courses. Elite adds analysis: compensation planning, Mercer salary benchmarking, custom dashboards, HR benchmarks and 300 or more courses.

Does BambooHR have a free trial?

Yes. Start Free Trial buttons appear on both the homepage and the pricing page, but neither states the trial length or what it includes, so establish both on day one. Use it to load messy real employee history rather than sample records, since that is what exposes reporting gaps.

Is BambooHR a PEO?

No. BambooHR states it is an HR software product rather than an outsourcing provider: it does not supply HR staff or become a co-employer. That means you keep your own employment relationship and your own benefit carriers, and the comparison with a professional employer organization is a different kind of purchase.

Does BambooHR work for employees outside the United States?

The HR platform does, and BambooHR says it serves customers in over 150 countries. The paid payroll layer does not: Payroll and Benefits Administration are marked US employees only, and global employment runs through a partnership with Remote covering contractor management and employer of record.

Where is BambooHR data held and how is access controlled?

BambooHR states customer data is hosted in the United States, Canada or Ireland depending on the customer, encrypted in transit with sensitive fields encrypted at rest. It cites an annual third-party SOC II audit, annual penetration testing, SAML support, a web application firewall and a zero trust model.