BambooHR Pricing and Bamboo HR Cost per Employee for Core, Pro and Elite

BambooHR costs $250, $425 or $650 a month flat for companies with 25 or fewer employees, on Core, Pro and Elite. Above 25 employees it costs from $10.25, $17.50 or $25 per employee a month, with volume discounts applied automatically. You can pay month to month or sign a longer term.

One detail trips people up. The plan cards at the top of the pricing page show $10 and $17, while the FAQ on the same page says $10.25 and $17.50. The FAQ is the more precise statement and the one to expect on a quote. Elite reads $25 in both places.

Credit card and ACH are accepted for monthly billing, and wire transfer or check for customers who pay a year up front. Registered nonprofits get an extra 15% off, which takes Core for a small nonprofit to $212.50 a month.

Only above 25 employees. Up to 25, BambooHR charges a flat monthly rate whatever your exact headcount, so a 10-person company pays $25 a head on Core, about 2.4 times the $10.25 headline rate. The flat fee is a minimum, not a discount.

Two things follow from that table. First, the flat fee only approaches the per-employee rate at the very top of the band, so a company of 8 or 12 pays far more per person than the per-employee figure suggests. Second, the switch at 26 employees is small or zero. At the starting rates, 26 employees on Core cost $266.50 a month, $16.50 more than the flat fee, Pro costs $455, $30 more, and Elite costs $650, exactly the same as 25 people on the flat Elite rate.

If you are at 22 people and about to hire four more, the bill barely moves. If you are at 6 and wondering whether BambooHR is affordable, the honest comparison is $250 a month against what you would pay for a lighter tool, not $10.25 times six.

At the published starting rates, 100 employees cost $12,300 a year on Core, $21,000 on Pro and $30,000 on Elite, before volume discounts and before any payroll or benefits add-on. BambooHR does not publish its discount schedule, so read these as the ceiling for the HR plan alone.

The gap between plans grows with headcount. At 100 employees, moving from Core to Pro adds $8,700 a year and Pro to Elite another $9,000. That is the number to hold against what you would actually use: performance reviews and the employee community on Pro, compensation planning with Mercer salary benchmarks on Elite.

Because the discount is applied automatically, ask for the quote at the headcount you expect in twelve months as well as today. BambooHR says the discount adjusts as your team size changes, so a growing company should see its per-employee rate fall without renegotiating.

Core is the HR database with reporting, workflows, time off, benefits tracking, onboarding and an applicant tracking system for 5 open jobs. Pro adds performance management, an employee community, recognition and rewards and 25 open jobs. Elite adds compensation planning, custom dashboards, HR benchmarks, premium services and 50 open jobs.

Every plan includes employee records, standard and custom reports, workflows and approvals, offer letter and email templates, new hire packets, onboarding checklists, e-signatures and time-off management. The compliance training on Pro and Elite is supplied through EasyLlama and covers harassment prevention, cybersecurity and workplace safety, which matters if you employ people in states that mandate harassment training.

For remote teams, Elite's levels and bands feature is worth a look. Several states require a salary range on every job posting, and our pay transparency laws by state checker shows which ones apply to a remote role. A defined band per level makes those ranges consistent instead of improvised per listing.

Payroll, Benefits Administration, Time & Attendance and Global Employment are sold on top of every plan, and BambooHR publishes no price for any of them. You get a 15% discount when you combine Payroll and Benefits Administration with any plan.

• Payroll covers direct deposit, flexible pay schedules and federal and state tax filing, for US employees only.
• Benefits Administration handles open enrollment, life events, election approval and carrier connections, also US employees only.
• Time & Attendance adds shift scheduling, meal and rest breaks, overtime calculation, project tracking and iPad time kiosks.
• Global Employment, powered by Remote, adds employer of record service, contractor management and a global cost calculator for people outside the US.

There is also a payroll promotion on the page right now. Eligible customers who buy qualifying BambooHR Payroll between 1 August and 31 December 2026 and commit to at least 12 months pay $0 in Payroll subscription fees through 31 December 2026. Implementation, multi-state filing and additional payroll fees are excluded and charged at standard rates, and the offer has conditions: with the Elite plan it applies to a new purchase or an upgrade made at the same time, and customers who have already been billed for Payroll or Elite are not eligible.

The multi-state exclusion is the line remote employers should read twice. A team spread across six states means withholding and registration in six states, and that filing is charged at the standard rate even during the promotion. Our guide to state tax withholding for remote employees explains what each new state adds to the payroll workload.

For a company filling fewer than five roles at a time, yes. Core's ATS holds 5 open jobs, Pro 25 and Elite 50, posts to Indeed, ZipRecruiter and your social networks, and handles candidate records, email templates, offer letters and e-signatures.

That cap is the biggest difference from a dedicated applicant tracking system: Breezy HR Startup has unlimited active positions and Workable describes unlimited active jobs subject to fair use. Measured against the cap, Core is the expensive way to buy hiring capacity. At 25 employees the flat Core fee works out to $50 a month per open job slot, Pro to $17 and Elite to $13. A company that regularly has six or seven openings will either upgrade to Pro, an extra $175 a month at the flat rate, or run a separate applicant tracking system for the overflow, which defeats the point of having one system.

The other limit is reach. Posting to Indeed and ZipRecruiter from BambooHR is the free organic listing; sponsored reach is bought from each board separately. Our pages on Indeed job posting cost and ZipRecruiter pricing show what that spend looks like. For fully-remote roles in particular, a general board sends a lot of applicants who wanted hybrid or local work, and every one of them still lands in your BambooHR pipeline to be screened.

For hiring alone, BambooHR Core at $250 a month is more than JazzHR Hero at $110 or Breezy Startup at $157 billed yearly, and a little less than Workable Standard at $299 billed yearly. The difference is that BambooHR's price also buys the HR system behind the hire.

The decision usually comes down to whether you already have an HR system. If employee records, time off and onboarding live in spreadsheets today, BambooHR Core replaces those and includes enough applicant tracking for a small company. If you already run payroll and records somewhere else and only need to hire, a dedicated ATS is cheaper and does more of the hiring job. We compare those in detail on JazzHR pricing, Breezy HR pricing, Workable pricing and Zoho Recruit pricing.

BambooHR is worth its price for a US company of roughly 20 to 300 employees that wants records, time off, onboarding, performance and hiring in one system and has no HR software yet. Below about 10 employees, the $250 flat minimum makes it an expensive choice per head.

The signals that point to BambooHR: you are past the point where one person can track time off by email, you are onboarding several people a quarter, and you want managers to run their own reviews. The signals against it: you hire more than five roles at once on a tight budget, you need deep sourcing tools, or most of your workforce is outside the US, where Payroll and Benefits Administration do not apply.

Use the free trial before you take a quote. BambooHR offers one with no credit card required, and it is the quickest way to see whether the Core feature set covers what you do today or whether you will be on Pro within a year, which changes the multi-year cost more than any discount will.

Post the role where remote candidates look and move the applicants you want into BambooHR. A listing on our board costs $199 a month for one live remote role, or $99 a month billed yearly.

Every application arrives by email and in your employer dashboard with the resume and links, ready to add to BambooHR as a candidate record, and every listing shows the salary range, which the states with pay transparency laws require. Because readers here only want fully-remote work, you skip the screening of people who wanted an office or hybrid role, which also keeps a Core plan's five job slots moving. Teams filling more than one remote role a month can compare our plans or start from hiring remote employees, and our cost per hire calculator puts the software and the listing in the same number.