Gusto review (2026): pricing, features and who it's for

What five people cost, and what the next tier adds

Simple is $49 a month plus $6 per employee. Five people cost $79 a month, or $948 a year. Ten people cost $109. Plus is $80 plus $12 each, so those same five jump to $140 a month. Premium is $180 plus $22, which lands at $290 for five people and is built for shops that want HR advice on call. Contractor Only sits off to one side at $35 a month plus $6 per contractor, with the 1099s filed for you.

The per-person fee counts only people you paid that month. For seasonal trades that matters more than it looks. Drop from five to three over the winter and the winter bills drop with the crew. No feature on the page saves a landscaper more money in January.

There is no free trial in the usual sense. Setup costs nothing and billing starts when you run your first payroll, so you can build the account, load your people and look around before any money moves. Everything is month to month with no annual contract. Gusto also runs promos that waive the base fee for the first few months, so do your math on the regular rate. The promo ends and the crew does not. Getting started is the part owners rate highest. One owner who compared it against a bigger payroll company put it this way: "I've had pretty good experiences with gusto, i would say 7/10 stars overall. I tried switching to paychex and just to get going I had to have like 5 virtual meetings and calls, then calls and meetings for onboarding, blah blah."

Support is where the owner reports come apart

Phone, chat and email support run on weekdays. Priority support, which comes with a named rep, is a paid add-on at about $30 a month plus $3 per employee, and it is included on Premium at $180. So the fastest help is a thing you buy, not a thing you get.

That structure shows up in what owners say. Bookkeepers who run payroll for their clients, and who never let anything odd happen, tend to be happy. The complaints come from people with a problem that needs a human with authority. One bookkeeper described the calls in blunt terms: "I loathe every time I have to call them. Their customer support reps are masters of giving you the run-around because they don't have power to do anything to fix the garbage app."

Just as many owners report calls that went fine, so weigh it this way. If you pay a handful of people in one state and nothing strange happens, support quality barely touches you. If your payroll has moving parts, budget for Premium or budget for the aggravation.

One state on Simple, and what crossing a line costs

Simple covers one state. That is the line trade shops trip over first. Send one truck over a state border and put a person on payroll there, and full multi-state payroll starts at Plus.

Do the arithmetic before you sign up. Five people on Simple is $79 a month. The same five on Plus is $140. Crossing a state line costs you $61 a month, or $732 a year, before anyone files a single form. That is not a reason to avoid the work, but it belongs in the bid.

Time tracking follows the same pattern. It is built into Plus and Premium. On Simple you add it for about $6 per person a month, which is $30 for five people. That add-on closes about half the gap to Plus on its own, so a shop that wants hours and multi-state should price Plus properly rather than bolting parts onto Simple.

One more thing to plan around: standard direct deposit takes 2 to 4 days. Next-day speed costs extra or needs a higher plan. Fund the payroll account early in the week, not the night before.

If a payment bounces, the rules change

Vendor pages do not cover what happens after a payment fails. Owner accounts do, and this is the part of Gusto we would want a trade owner to know before signing up. A returned payment can move you onto prepaid or wired payroll, and getting back to normal takes phone calls.

One owner with years of clean history described the fallout from a small return: "I had a very similar issue when $200 was returned. I've processed over 3mil with them and they moved me to needing to make my deposit 5 days in advance. Took me 3 calls but I successfully got them to put me back to a normal schedule."

Read that as a cash flow rule rather than a knock on the software. Keep a separate bank account for payroll. Move the money in a few days before each run. A single returned payment of a couple of hundred dollars can change how you are allowed to pay your crew. That can run for weeks, in the middle of your busiest season.

Getting hours in, and keeping your books clean

Most field service software does not run payroll. It tracks the job, then hands you hours. Gusto takes those hours from outside apps, and for a lot of shops that connection is worth more than any payroll feature. One HVAC owner described the setup he landed on after fighting manual entry: "We use Gusto for payroll and Gusto has an integration with Timeero which has very great time tracking, Geo-Fencing, and Mileage tracking features. Timesheets sync directly with Gusto and I don't need double entry but the problem is now I cannot merge both FieldPulse and Timeero."

That is the honest shape of it. Hours move without retyping, and your crew ends up with two apps on their phone. Check whether the job software you already run can push hours out at all. If it cannot, someone in your office is retyping every week, and that hour count costs more than the payroll bill.

The other end is your accounting file, and careful bookkeepers give the same warning over and over. The sync into QuickBooks Online needs every pay type and deduction mapped to an account, and new items keep appearing. One bookkeeper who likes the product still keeps it away from the books: "Gusto is the best of the employee count is less than 50. Very cost effective. Just don't connect it with QBO, I do the payroll entries manually and that works perfectly." If you have a bookkeeper, ask them how they want it wired before you switch anything on.

Who we would put on it, and who should skip

A one to two truck shop paying three to eight people in one state is the clearest fit. Start on Simple at $49 plus $6 a head, run it for a quarter, and only move to Plus when a second state or crew time tracking forces it. Owners at that size describe it the way this one does: "I'm loving Gusto. Oregon payroll with 3-4 employees over the last year and I can't say enough good things about being able to set it and forget it (for the most part)."

Premium at $180 plus $22 is a different kind of buy. At five people that is $290 a month, or $3,480 a year, and what you get is HR help and priority support. Most trade shops under ten people do not need it. Buy it if you have already had the kind of employee problem that made you want a lawyer.

Three shops should pick something else. If you pay 1099 crews only, look at Contractor Only at $35 plus $6 first and do not let a salesperson move you up. If you are already deep inside QuickBooks Online, the second login is a daily tax you will pay forever, and QuickBooks Payroll costs us nothing to recommend over Gusto here. And if you want a named person who answers the phone about a filing, price Premium in from day one. The cheap plans do not include that, and you will find out on a bad Friday.

What owners actually say