PEO Cost Calculator
This calculator turns a PEO quote into an annual number and shows what it leaves out. Enter your headcount, average wage and the administrative fee you were quoted; it does the arithmetic and lists the costs it cannot model for you.
What this tool does
It converts a quoted administrative fee into an annual cost, adds the statutory employer taxes it can compute from published rates, and then tells you plainly which large costs it has not included.
That last part is the point. Every PEO cost tool we looked at produces a single confident number. Almost none of them can produce a defensible one, because the three biggest variables — your workers' compensation class codes and experience modifier, your state unemployment rate, and your benefit plan design and enrolment — are not knowable from five form fields.
What it cannot tell you
- Whether a PEO is cheaper than your status quo. That comparison requires
your current carrier invoices, at a constant plan design and contribution split.
- Your workers' compensation premium. Class-code and experience driven.
- Your state unemployment cost. State-specific, and it depends on whose
experience rating applies under the arrangement.
- Your benefits cost. Plan design and enrolment rate dominate; a lower
headline number is frequently a thinner plan.
Why we ask for your quote
Every rate this model holds was verified against a published source on August 12, 2026: the Social Security wage base and Medicare rate from the SSA, FUTA from the IRS, SUI rates and the credit-reduction states from the Department of Labor, workers' compensation index rates from a state-bureau ranking, and the administrative fee range from ADP's published pricing analysis (NAPEO puts the industry average near $1,395 per employee per year). The cost components table shows the verification status of every rate the model holds.
Your quoted rate still beats a market range, which is why the calculator asks for it first. With no quote entered, it falls back to the sourced ranges — labelled as such in the output — a defensible benchmark, not your price.
Publishing a pricing tool built on invented numbers was never an option: it is precisely the credibility failure we point at elsewhere in this market, and it would be an odd thing to do on our own pricing page.
Getting a quote worth entering
Ask for the administrative fee stated separately from insurance and statutory pass-throughs, in writing. The seven questions on the cost page are designed to produce exactly that. A bundled PEPM number entered into this calculator will produce a confident, wrong answer — the tool cannot tell that your "fee" already contains someone's health premium.
Next
- What a PEO costs and how the fee is structured
- Fees that do not appear in the quote
- How we verify data
Embed the calculator
The calculator is free to embed on your own site — no brand, no charge, no third-party cookies, and the same privacy defaults as the tool itself. The embed page is excluded from search indexes and canonicalises to this one, so embedding it never competes with this URL.
<iframe src="https://peolet.com/cost/calculator/embed/" width="100%" height="520" title="PEO cost calculator" loading="lazy"></iframe>Frequently asked
How much does a PEO cost per employee?
The calculator does not invent a market rate — that is the point of the tool. It takes the administrative fee you were quoted, converts it to an annual figure for your headcount, and lists the costs it cannot model. What it can do reliably is expose whether two quotes are even comparable.
Why won't the calculator tell me if a PEO will save me money?
Because that requires your current carrier invoices at a constant plan design and contribution split — data the tool does not ask for and cannot verify. A single confident number from five form fields is the failure mode this tool exists to avoid.
What does the number include?
The administrative fee you entered and the statutory employer taxes it can compute from published rates. It explicitly excludes workers' compensation premium, state unemployment cost and benefits, and says so in the output.
Get matched with up to three PEOs
Answer six questions about your headcount, states and timeline. We shortlist providers that can actually serve you, and you choose which ones may contact you.
No obligation. You pick which providers get your details. We never sell your information to a data broker.