How we calculate and rank EOR costs

What we calculate

For every salary, country and provider combination, we work out the total monthly employer outlay in the same order every time:

1. Annual cash to the employee. The annual base salary you enter, plus any additional payments the law requires on top of it.
2. The base contributions are charged on. The base salary, plus only those required additional payments that the law actually charges employer contributions on. Some statutory payments are real cash to the employee but sit outside that base.
3. Employer contributions and required employer funds. Calculated on that base at the rates in force in the country, in the local currency.
4. The provider's own charges. The published monthly fee, plus any published one-off fee spread evenly over the expected length of the engagement.
5. A monthly figure. Everything above is added together for a year and divided by twelve.

Totals are stated before any provider currency-conversion cost. Only one provider we track publishes a conversion percentage, so there is no comparable figure across providers to add. We show each provider's own conversion disclosure beside its result instead of estimating a number for the others.

You enter an annualised base salary. Payment frequency never increases compensation: a 13- or 14-period payroll cycle is a payment schedule, not extra pay. Where a country mandates additional payments on top of base salary (for example Portugal's holiday and Christmas allowances, Brazil's 13º salário, Mexico's 15-day aguinaldo, Indonesia's THR), each payment is modelled as an explicit rule with its legal source. Each rule also records whether employer social-security contributions are charged on it: some statutory payments are real cash to the employee but sit outside the contribution base, so contributions are calculated on that base rather than on all annual cash. Payments that depend on a collective agreement or the individual contract (Italy's quattordicesima, Belgium's year-end premium, a Swiss 13th month) are shown as conditional and are excluded from the estimate. Employee-side burden is settled in local currency, so no cross-currency spread is added twice.

Data sources

• Statutory employer contributions: each country's tax authority and social-security agency (SSA, HMRC, DRV, URSSAF, INPS, ATO, CPF Board, SGK, EPFO, SSS, IMSS, ANAF, ONSS, NAV, ČSSZ, KWSP, SSO, BPJS, VSI, Segurança Social, virk.dk, Skatteverket, Nenkin.go.jp), plus the OECD Taxing Wages dataset and PwC / KPMG country tax summaries as cross-checks.
• Platform monthly fees: each provider's public pricing page, captured on the date shown on the provider's pricing route.
• FX rates: mid-market rates. Currency-conversion cost is not comparably published across the providers we track: most publish a method without a percentage, one publishes a flat percentage above the interbank rate, and one confirms a fee exists without stating its size. We therefore apply no estimated conversion cost to anyone. Provider totals and rankings are stated before any provider-specific FX cost, and we show each provider's stated conversion method, rate timing and published percentage where there is one, rather than inventing a figure for the rest. Always confirm the applied conversion terms in writing.
• Country deep-dives: statutory contributions, mandatory benefits, and termination rules sourced from local labour codes; dates of last review are shown on each country page.

How rankings work

Eligibility comes first. Before any cost or ranking is calculated, we remove providers whose coverage of the selected country is not sufficiently verified against our published evidence rules. Every ordering and recommendation below is drawn only from the remaining set.

Lowest verified cost is arithmetic. Provider cards are ordered by lowest verified total monthly cost for the salary and country you enter: statutory employer cost plus the provider's published fees. The badge labelled "Lowest verified cost" marks that provider for the current inputs and updates on every change. Because currency-conversion cost is not comparably published across providers, currency-conversion costs are excluded from the comparison rather than estimated. It means the lowest verified cost among the providers that are eligible to be priced for that country on the evidence we hold. It does not mean the provider is the cheapest option in the market, that every charge you will ever see is included, or that charges we could not verify are zero.

Top Match is a recommendation heuristic, not a price result. It is produced by a separate scoring model and is not necessarily the lowest-cost provider. The factors it uses are: whether the country is audit-sensitive and whether the provider runs its own entity there; regional specialisation (APAC and LATAM markets); the salary level, which shifts weight between flat-fee suitability at low salaries and entity ownership at high salaries; the provider's monthly platform fee; contract lock-in longer than month-to-month; and any offboarding fee. Where two providers score the same, the lower monthly fee wins. Top Match never reads a currency-conversion figure. Lowest verified cost and Top Match may be the same provider or different providers; neither is wrong when they differ.

What Top Match is not. It is a fixed set of rules applied to the provider facts we currently model. It is not chosen by AI, it is not personalised advice, and it is not a comprehensive assessment of a provider's service, legal standing, contract quality or fit for your particular business. It cannot weigh facts we do not hold. Treat it as one comparison signal to start from, not as a decision, and check the provider's own terms before you commit.

Providers cannot pay to improve their position. Commercial status is not read by the ranking, eligibility, calculation or recommendation code at all. See our Commercial Disclosure page.

Published prices and country prices

A price a provider publishes on its website is not automatically the price it charges in every country. A provider may advertise "starting at $399" without that amount being the fee in the jurisdiction you are pricing. We therefore separate two things: what a provider publishes, and what the evidence supports as the fee for a specific country.

A provider fee is used in country cost ranking only where the evidence supports it for that jurisdiction: an amount published for the named country, a published price tier with an explicit country list, or a fixed price the provider states applies everywhere. Provider-level starting at and from amounts, prices tied to a named plan, prices tied to an annual or other billing commitment, and prices available only on quotation are shown as information and are not used as the country fee, a total, a Lowest verified cost input or a Top Match input.

Our own working estimates are not provider-published prices. Where we hold only an internal estimate, the provider reads as not publicly disclosed, and that provider is not ranked on a price it never published.

A provider can therefore be fully listed and available for a country while still not being eligible for precise cost ranking there. Availability and price readiness are separate questions, and we do not fill the gap with a guess.

Missing information is never treated as zero

A published zero is a fact: if a provider states there is no setup fee, we show no setup fee. Silence is not a fact. Where a provider does not publish a setup fee, an offboarding fee, a minimum headcount, a minimum contract term, a notice period or a deposit, we show that it is not published. We never convert an unpublished figure into free, none, no minimum, no deposit or 0%, and a provider never gains a better position by disclosing less.

Disclosure is not a ranking bonus

Beside each provider result we show the fee, one-time charges, minimums, contract terms, deposit and currency-conversion disclosures we hold, together with what is not published. That panel exists so you can see the evidence behind a number. It carries no score and no weighting: more disclosure does not make a provider better, and publishing less does not make one worse. Where a provider publishes a currency-conversion percentage, the number is shown for information only and is not added to any total, because the same figure is not available for the other providers.

What we DO model

• Statutory employer social security and payroll levies, with brackets/caps where applicable.
• Statutory additional pay as explicit, sourced rules (Portugal holiday + Christmas allowance, Brazil 13º salário, Mexico 15-day aguinaldo, Argentina SAC, Philippines 13th-month pay, Indonesia THR, Belgium double holiday pay, Italy tredicesima). Spain's pagas extraordinarias are instalments of the same annual salary, so they are not added twice.
• Statutory employer funds: amounts an employer must deposit into a fund or set aside by law that are neither employee salary nor part of the payroll contribution base. Colombia's cesantías (one month of base salary a year, deposited into a cesantías fund), Italy's TFR (annual remuneration ÷ 13.5, less the 0.50% Fondo di garanzia contribution the employer may deduct, so a net 6.91% of annual cash) and Brazil's FGTS (8% of remuneration deposited monthly into the worker's linked Caixa account) are modelled this way. They are shown on their own line and annualised over 12 months. Brazil's FGTS was already inside the old 35.8% blended employer rate: Phase 5F.4 moved it onto its own line (27.8% + 8%), so the fully loaded Brazil cost is unchanged and nothing is counted twice. The UK's automatic-enrolment workplace pension is modelled the same way: the statutory employer minimum of 3%, charged only on qualifying earnings between £6,240 and £50,270 a year, so the amount stops growing once pay passes the upper limit. It assumes an eligible jobholder who stays enrolled; employees who opt out cost less, and many employers pay above the minimum. Ireland's My Future Fund auto-enrolment works the same way but with a ceiling rather than a band: the 1.5% employer contribution that started on 1 January 2026 is charged on gross pay up to €80,000, so it tops out at €1,200 a year, and the statutory rate is dated: it steps up to 3% in 2029, 4.5% in 2032 and 6% in 2035, and we apply whichever rate belongs to the date being priced. The matching employee contribution and the State top-up are not employer costs and are never added here. Poland's PPK follows the same pattern with neither a band nor a ceiling: the statutory 1.5% employer contribution is charged on the whole pension and disability contribution base, including the part above the annual ZUS cap, and we model the legal minimum only, not the optional employer top-up. In general, some statutory employer funds are earnings-capped or banded, some carry rates that are fixed by law to future dates, and some only apply to employees who meet participation tests; where a scheme depends on participation we state the assumption we model rather than implying it applies to everyone.
• Conditional collective-agreement or contractual payments are flagged, not silently costed.
• Platform monthly fee, one-time setup and offboarding fees (amortised over 24 months by default).
• Refundable security deposit expressed in months of total monthly cost.
• Conversion of USD-denominated platform fees at the mid-market rate. No provider currency-conversion cost is added to any total, including for the one provider that publishes a percentage.
• US state unemployment insurance where the state publishes a single applicable rate for the scenario modelled.

What we don't model

• Volume discounts negotiated with individual providers.
• Discretionary bonuses (Japan semi-annual bonuses, UK/US variable pay).
• Accrual-based severance and termination penalties (Brazil FGTS 40+10%, UAE end-of-service gratuity, Turkey kıdem tazminatı, Chile 1-month-per-year severance), flagged in the country deep-dive but not in the monthly cost.
• Employee-side income tax (we only model the employer-side cost).
• Equity, private medical benefits, and one-off relocation expenses.
• Country-specific risk-class variables (Switzerland BVG age band, Colombia ARL by activity, South Africa COIDA risk class): we use a mid-range default and flag the range on the country page.
• US state unemployment insurance where the applicable rate is employer-specific or experience-rated rather than a single published figure, and workers' compensation premiums, which are risk-class- and carrier-specific in every state.

Transaction taxes and ancillary costs

Every figure on this site is an employment cost: what it costs to employ someone through a provider. It is not an invoice total. Two further layers sit outside it.

Transaction tax on the provider's invoice. VAT, GST or sales tax charged on a provider's fees, and any withholding tax on cross-border payments, are a customer-side matter. They depend on where your own business is established, on your tax status and registration, and on how your provider invoices you, not on the employee’s country. Employing in Germany does not create a German VAT charge for a Singapore buyer. There is no universal extra government tax created by using an EOR. Each jurisdiction applies its ordinary rules for services bought from abroad. In the UK, Ireland, Germany, France and the Netherlands a business customer normally self-accounts under the reverse charge when the supplier is established abroad; Canada self-assesses, with Quebec adding its own provincial layer; Australia and Singapore apply a reverse charge that generally does not bite where the purchase is fully creditable. The United States has no national rule at all: treatment is state-by-state. For a fully taxable business the tax is usually recoverable, so the invoice cash effect and the true economic cost differ. Because no rate here has been verified to the standard we apply to production numbers, we state the treatment and apply no figure.

Conditional and contingent costs. One-off government or compliance charges (work permits, visa fees, registrations) apply only to the hires that trigger them, so they are never spread across a team. Termination and severance liabilities are contingent: they crystallise on an event that may not happen, and folding them into a monthly figure would overstate the running cost. Both are disclosed where relevant and reported separately from the recurring total.

The recurring monthly and annual totals include gross salary, statutory additional pay, employer contributions, statutory employer funds and the provider's published fees. They exclude transaction taxes, withholding, immigration and one-off compliance charges, termination liabilities, and currency-conversion costs.

Does using an EOR create additional VAT or GST?

No. There is no universal extra government tax created merely by employing someone through an employer of record. What can arise is ordinary transaction tax on the provider's own service invoice, and that depends on where your business is established, your tax status and which provider entity issues the invoice.

Are transaction taxes included in EOR Lens estimates?

No. The recurring figures cover salary, statutory additional pay, employer taxes and contributions, statutory employer funds and verified provider charges. Customer-side VAT, GST, reverse-charge accounting and withholding are shown as treatment, not added as an amount, because no rate has been verified as production data.

Why can VAT or GST be recoverable?

Where a fully taxable registered business accounts for tax on a cross-border service, it normally deducts the same amount as input tax in the same return. The invoice cash effect and the economic cost are therefore different things. A partly exempt business recovers less and can bear a real cost.

Why doesn't EOR Lens add US sales tax nationally?

The United States has no federal VAT or GST. Whether an employer-of-record or staffing service is taxable is decided state by state and depends on how the service is classified and on the provider's own tax position. A national percentage would be invented, and unknown is not the same as zero, so none is applied.

Can withholding tax add to the cost?

Only where local rules require tax to be withheld from a cross-border service payment and the provider's contract makes the customer bear it. Where a provider publishes such a clause, EOR Lens shows the clause and its scope. It never estimates an amount, and the absence of a published clause is not evidence that no clause exists.

Update cadence

Platform fees and provider FX disclosures are reviewed monthly. Country statutory rates are reviewed quarterly and whenever a country publishes a budget or tax-table change. Each country page shows its individual last-reviewed date.

How to read these figures

EOR Lens is a planning and comparison tool. Calculations are based on the information provided, the statutory rules and evidence available to EOR Lens, and any assumptions shown with the result. Some statutory amounts can be calculated exactly for the stated inputs, while others may require additional employer, employee, location or provider information. Actual payroll, employment, benefits, tax, insurance, foreign-exchange, EOR service and other costs may therefore differ from the figures shown. Provider pricing and commercial terms may also change or be negotiated. EOR Lens does not provide payroll, tax, legal or accounting advice, and displayed figures are not a guaranteed quote or final invoice.

Provider pricing is shown exactly as each provider publishes it, including starting-at prices, ranges and quote-only pricing. Published pricing may change or be negotiated.

Corrections policy

If you spot an outdated rate, a missing statutory contribution, or a provider fee that has changed, email admin@eorlens.com with a primary source. Corrections are applied within five business days and the country page's last-reviewed date is bumped. Material corrections are noted at the bottom of the affected page.