Wave Payroll Review

Wave built its name on free accounting software, and payroll is one of the paid add-ons it sells to the owners who use it. The old reason to hesitate is gone: until April 2025 Wave only filed payroll taxes in 14 states, and owners everywhere else had to pay and file their own state taxes. Today the tax service covers all 50 states at one price.

Toolradar data: Wave is listed as an alternative to 36 other tools on its Toolradar profile (the software directory we run), joint 13th of the 284 accounting tools by that count, as of October 2026. Below we price Wave Payroll against Roll by ADP, Square Payroll, OnPay and QuickBooks Payroll at four team sizes, with every price read on the vendor's own pricing page in October 2026.

Wave Payroll is the payroll add-on to Wave, an accounting and invoicing app for small businesses in the US and Canada. It pays employees and independent contractors by direct deposit, calculates withholding, and generates W-2, W-3 and 1099-NEC forms at year end. Employees get a portal for pay stubs, W-2s and vacation balances, and they update their own banking and contact details.

The tax service is the core of the product. Wave transfers payroll tax payments and files the paperwork with your state tax agency and the IRS, with one exception it states plainly: 1099 filings are not part of the service. Wave also notes that in rare cases a tax payment cannot be transferred automatically, so the owner still needs to read the notices Wave sends.

The accounting side has a free Starter plan and a Pro plan at $19 a month or $190 a year. Payroll is sold on top of either, which is why the bill for a Wave customer is usually just the payroll fee.

The 30-day trial starts on the day you approve your first payroll, not the day you sign up, and Wave's terms say no card is needed until you activate. Fees are waived through the trial even if you activate early. If the 30 days run out before you activate, access shrinks to the billing page and scheduled fund transfers are cancelled, so set a reminder if you run a real payroll during the trial.

After that, billing is monthly and not prorated. On the first day of each month Wave charges that month's base fee plus the per-person fees for the previous month, counting active employees and the contractors you paid. A month with fewer people paid lowers next month's bill, and you can switch payroll off under Settings, then Billing, then Deactivate.

Day to day, you enter hours or salaries, approve the run and Wave debits your verified US bank account by ACH to fund direct deposits and tax payments. Payroll entries post to your Wave books automatically, which is the time saving that makes Wave Payroll make sense for an existing Wave user.

Wave publishes one US payroll price, a base fee plus per-person fees (the table below has both), with no setup fee and a 30-day trial, as checked on Wave's payroll page on 28 October 2026. Those prices apply to customers who signed up after 2 April 2025; Wave says customers who joined earlier are notified of any change to their plan, so an older account should check its billing page.

Before April 2025, the price depended on the state. A March 2025 copy of Wave's payroll page lists today's base fee in 14 tax service states and a $20 base in the other 36, where Wave did not pay or file state taxes. Wave now files in every state, so a new customer in one of those 36 states pays twice the old base and gets the filing in return.

Our cost model, employees only, monthly list prices after trials and promotions: 10 employees cost $100 a month on Wave, $89 on Roll by ADP ($39 plus $5 each), $95 on Square Payroll (Square on Toolradar) ($35 base, same per-person fee as Wave), $109 on OnPay (OnPay on Toolradar) ($49 base, same per-worker fee) and $120 on QuickBooks Workforce Payroll (QuickBooks on Toolradar) ($50 plus $7). The table below runs the same arithmetic for 1, 5 and 25 people. For Patriot, check the current price on Patriot's site; our Patriot Payroll review covers its plans.

Wave is never the cheapest at these sizes, and the gap grows with headcount, because Roll charges $1 less per employee and Square has a lower base. At 25 employees Wave costs $26 a month more than Roll. Its price case is the pairing with free accounting: a 10-person team pays $1,200 a year for Wave Payroll on the free Starter plan, against $1,836 for QuickBooks' Workforce Payroll plus Simple Start bundle at $88 plus $6.50 per employee (our arithmetic from list prices, before QuickBooks' three-month half-price offer).

Buy Wave Payroll if your books already live in Wave and you have up to about 25 employees. The automatic journal entries, the free accounting plan and one login are worth more than the $5 to $11 a month a 10-person team would save elsewhere. It also suits a contractor-heavy business that wants employees and 1099 workers paid in the same run.

Skip it if price is the deciding factor: Roll by ADP and Square Payroll both cost less at every team size we priced, and our cheapest payroll software page ranks the low end. Skip it too if you want benefits or HR tools in the same app, since Wave's payroll page lists neither. Our small business payroll ranking and payroll cost guide show where those layers cost more.