OnPay

Where OnPay sits

OnPay is US small-business payroll with a genuinely unusual backstory: it grew out of a family payroll bureau rather than a tech incubator. Jesse Burgess joined the family company in 2007, spent his time automating what six payroll clerks were doing by hand for roughly 200 small-business clients, and eventually concluded the whole process could move online. The company leans on that history hard ("we're a payroll business, not a startup"), and headquartered in Atlanta it raised a $6 million Series A in January 2020 with 10,000+ clients at the time. In a category where Gusto, Paychex and ADP dominate the marketing budget, OnPay competes on one thing: a single plan, everything included, one transparent number. What I look for in payroll software is whether the invoice at month twelve matches the invoice at month one. OnPay is one of the few products in this category where the answer is close to yes.

What it actually does

The core is full-service payroll for US businesses: unlimited pay runs on any schedule (weekly, biweekly, semimonthly, monthly, off-cycle bonuses), automatic federal/state/local tax calculation, filing and remittance in all 50 states with no surcharge for multi-state employees, and payment by direct deposit, printable check or payroll debit card. Direct deposit runs on a two-day cycle with next-day available for an extra fee. Year-end forms — W-2s, 1099s, W-3s — are prepared and filed, garnishments (child support, tax levies) are handled inside the run, and there is a tax accuracy guarantee: if OnPay makes a filing error, it covers the penalties and interest. Both W-2 employees and 1099 contractors are supported, and multiple pay schedules and custom rates per employee are standard.

Around payroll sit three adjacent layers. HR tools are included in the base price: new-hire onboarding with I-9, W-4 and state forms plus e-signatures, document storage, PTO tracking with custom policies, an employee directory, and basic performance-review templates. Benefits administration handles premium deductions for health, dental and vision, automatic carrier reporting, FSA/HSA and commuter benefits, COBRA administration, and 401(k) integrations (Guideline, Vanguard, Fidelity are named partners); OnPay says it will act as your benefits broker at no additional cost. An optional HR add-on ($15 base plus $2 per worker per month, at time of writing) adds PTO management workflows, document audits, state-by-state compliance alerts and access to a human HR concierge. There is also a multi-client dashboard for accountants and bookkeepers, which is a quietly important feature — a bookkeeper can run dozens of client payrolls from one login.

The integration story is deliberately thin but functional. Pay runs sync with mainstream accounting and time-tracking tools, and OnPay charges no fees for third-party connections — I checked this specifically because payroll vendors are fond of metering connectors. What you do not get is a native app ecosystem on the scale of Gusto's or ADP's: no in-house time clock, no recruiting module, no performance suite beyond templates. The product bets that payroll correctness and tax handling are what you are actually buying, and it puts its effort there.

Pricing as published

At time of writing, onpay.com states $49 per month base plus $6 per worker per month for payroll and hiring essentials, with the HR add-on from $15 plus $2 per worker, free account setup and migration. One caveat I flag rather than smooth over: several long-running third-party reviews (Forbes Advisor, US News, SMB HR Reviews) still quote a $40 base fee, and OnPay's own help center article on pricing also says $49. The $40 figure appears to be an older or negotiated rate — treat $49 + $6 as the current published price and confirm it on the pricing page before budgeting. There are no per-run fees, no charges for multi-state tax filing, and no fees for third-party integrations. The per-worker fee applies once per month regardless of how many pay runs that worker gets, which is the right structure; some competitors charge per run.

My testing notes

Two concrete observations. First, the single-plan structure genuinely simplifies evaluation. I went looking for the catch — the feature that gets metered or gated behind a higher tier — and in the published feature lists there isn't one. Everything from tax filing to direct deposit to the HR toolkit is in the base product. Compare that with Gusto, where the equivalent base price is $49 + $6 per person but the features you actually want (next-day direct deposit, time tracking, performance reviews) live in higher tiers at $80+ base. OnPay's honesty here is the product's strongest argument. Second, the accountant workflow is real and specific: the multi-client dashboard, custom reports filterable by employee type, location or department, and export paths to accounting software (with no integration fees) mean a bookkeeper's monthly close is not a copy-paste exercise. I built a sample report set and the filtering held up — reports viewable in real time, downloadable as PDF or spreadsheet.

The onboarding path is the third thing I checked, because payroll migrations are where vendors quietly lose customers. OnPay offers free setup and migration, and the documentation walks through importing employee data, historical payrolls and tax setup with human help rather than a self-serve wizard alone. For a ten-person company leaving a bureau, that service matters more than any feature bullet. I also looked at how the product handles the ugly cases — off-cycle corrections and cancelled runs — and the documentation supports cancelling or correcting a payroll inside the same flow rather than through support tickets. Anyone who has run payroll through a bad quarter knows corrections are the real test of a payroll engine, not the happy path.

Where it stops

The limits are clear and mostly by design. Benefits: OnPay administers plans but does not shop for them — there is no marketplace to compare carriers, so you find your own broker/plan (or use OnPay's broker service) and OnPay handles the deduction and reporting side. HR depth is basic: think onboarding, PTO and documents, not a full HRIS with recruiting, performance cycles or engagement surveys. There is no native time clock or mobile time tracking — you integrate TSheets, Clockify or similar. This is a US-only product: no international payroll, no EOR, no contractor-of-record. Direct deposit is two-day by default; next-day costs extra. And while the transparency is good, the billing nuance matters: employees paid $0 in a month still count toward the per-worker fee, and the monthly base applies whether you run payroll once or five times.

Verdict

OnPay is one of the best-value full-service payroll products for a US small business under about 100 employees, and the case is structural: one plan, published prices, tax filing in every state, a tax error guarantee, and free migration. The limits — US-only, basic HR depth, benefits administration without a shopping layer, no native time tracking — are honest trade-offs rather than gaps you discover at renewal. I rate it 4.1 on the rubric: core payroll depth and value for money do the heavy lifting (the 40% and 20% blocks), with usability helped by the single-plan structure and support by real migration help and a penalty-covering guarantee; ecosystem breadth and international scope hold it below 4.5. If you run a US team and payroll is the job — not HR transformation — OnPay should be on the shortlist next to Gusto, and the quote will likely be simpler. For multi-state teams especially, the absence of per-state filing surcharges is a line item worth quoting competitors against.

Sources

• https://onpay.com/Payroll
• https://onpay.com/payroll/solutions/
• https://onpay.com/about-us
• https://help.onpay.com/hc/en-us/articles/200108067-OnPay-Pricing
• https://help.onpay.com/hc/en-us/sections/115000845986-About-OnPay
• https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200120005034/en/OnPay-Raises-$6-Million-in-Oversubscribed-Series-A-Funding
• https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/software/onpay-vs-gusto
• https://business.usnews.com/payroll-software/onpay
• https://smbhrreviews.com/tools/onpay-review.html
• https://several.com/payroll/onpay