Gusto review

Gusto prices payroll in three tiers, Simple, Plus and Premium, starting at $49 a month plus $6 a month per person, with full-service tax filing and a no-markup benefits brokerage built into every level. It rates 4.2 out of 5 here. G2 and Capterra both score it 4.6 out of 5, but Trustpilot tells a different story at 2.3 out of 5 from 2,589 reviews, driven by missed-payroll and multi-state-compliance complaints that the flattering numbers elsewhere don’t capture.

What Gusto is for

Gusto suits a small business that wants payroll, tax filing and employee benefits handled in one self-serve signup, no sales call required on any of its three tiers. Simple covers unlimited payroll runs, direct deposit and federal, state and local tax filing. Plus adds contractor invoice upload, workforce cost reports and unlimited custom earning types. Premium adds unlimited custom admin roles plus same-day and instant pay. HR features, employee handbooks and HR advisory, are gated to Plus and Premium.

Pricing across the three tiers

These numbers don’t render as plain dollar text on Gusto’s own live pricing page in a direct fetch, since the page is interactive. We’re reporting them as well-corroborated by five independent third-party sources plus a Gusto support-center article confirming no price change, not as a verbatim quote pulled off a vendor page, and it’s worth knowing that distinction before you quote the numbers yourself.

What changed on October 1, 2026

Gusto’s Contractor Only plan, $35 base plus $6 per contractor, closed to new signups on that date, confirmed verbatim on Gusto’s own Help Center. Existing customers who already had it keep the same price going forward. A business that only pays 1099 contractors and signs up today pays the full Simple-plan rate instead, $49 base plus $6 per contractor, the same math OnPay charges from day one with no separate contractor discount at all.

What’s extra beyond the base price

Health insurance and 401(k) brokerage carry no admin markup beyond the premiums themselves, confirmed on Gusto’s own Help Center. A few other charges do sit outside the headline price: state tax registration costs $199 per state agency one-time, or an $85-a-month compliance add-on on Simple and Plus; time tracking costs $6 a month per person; and a flat $200-a-year fee covers HSA, FSA and commuter-benefit administration specifically. None of these show up in the $49-$180 headline, so a business running multi-state payroll with benefits enrolled should expect a higher real bill than the base-plus-per-person math suggests.

What users say in reviews

G2 rates Gusto 4.6 out of 5 from more than 7,600 reviews, and Capterra matches that 4.6. Trustpilot’s 2.3-out-of-5 score from 2,589 reviews sits far below both, and the one-star reviews cluster around three themes: missed or late payroll runs (“had to hand-write checks for my staff”), compliance failures tied to employees moving between states, and support that reviewers describe as promising follow-through it doesn’t deliver. That gap between platforms isn’t unique to Gusto; it shows up across most of the payroll tools in this category (see Best Payroll and HR Software for the side-by-side comparison), but the size of the gap here, 2.3 points, is the widest of the group.

Who should skip it

Gusto is a weak fit for a business that only pays contractors and wants the cheapest possible on-ramp; since the Contractor Only plan closed, OnPay now offers the simpler single-rate alternative at the same $49-plus-$6 math. It’s also not the strongest choice for a team planning to grow past payroll into IT and device management; Rippling covers that ground, though its 12-month contract is a real tradeoff to weigh first. Anyone already running QuickBooks Online for accounting should compare QuickBooks Payroll before choosing either. Given the Trustpilot complaint pattern around multi-state compliance, a business with employees in more than one state should ask Gusto directly how it handles a mid-year relocation before signing up.