Real Estate Payroll: 12 Providers Compared
Real estate payroll compared: 12 providers priced for a 20-agent brokerage, the 1099 rule that governs agent pay, and where a contractor-only plan wins.
I build HR software for small businesses, and the first thing I would tell a broker-owner shopping for payroll is to price it out for their own office. This page compares twelve real estate payroll providers and prices every published rate that covers agents against two realistic brokerage configurations. It starts where the decision actually starts: with the federal rule that determines whether your agents belong on payroll at all.
Almost every page you will find on this topic is published by a payroll vendor, and they all make the same omission. They list per-employee rates and describe the complications of paying agents, but none of them prices the actual shape of a brokerage: twenty commission-only agents, three salaried staff, and pay that lands whenever a deal closes rather than on the fifteenth and the thirtieth.
That shape matters more than any feature comparison, because most payroll providers charge the same per-person fee whether the person is a W-2 employee or a 1099 contractor. For an office where nearly everyone is a contractor, that means paying employee-grade rates for people you do not withhold tax for. Three providers here sell a separate contractor-only plan, and at twenty agents the cheapest of them costs $25 a month.
What makes real estate payroll different
Four things set it apart, and only one of them is unique to the industry. The rest are ordinary payroll problems that arrive together in an unusual combination.
The practical consequence is that a brokerage needs a system that treats contractors as first-class rather than as an afterthought. Many payroll products were designed around W-2 employment and bolted contractor payments on, which shows up in the pricing more than in the features.
| Complication | What it means in practice | What software can do about it |
|---|---|---|
| Split workforce | Agents on 1099, staff on W-2, sometimes hourly maintenance too | Run both in one system with correct year-end forms |
| Commission splits | Brokerage and agent share a percentage that varies by tier or cap | Record the payment; the split math usually lives elsewhere |
| Irregular timing | Commission is paid at closing, not on a fixed cycle | Unlimited off-cycle pay runs at no extra charge |
| Multi-state exposure | A remote W-2 coordinator triggers registration; agents bring state 1099 rules | Handle registration and filing, sometimes for a fee |
| Year-end volume | A 1099-NEC for every agent paid $2,000 or more (payments from 2026 on) | Generate and file, though several charge extra |
| Classification risk | Getting an agent wrong creates back tax and penalty exposure | Nothing; this is a legal and contractual question |
The rule that decides everything
Before comparing providers, settle how your agents are classified, because that determines what you are buying. Licensed real estate agents fall into a narrow federal category that does not apply to most workers.
The Internal Revenue Service treats direct sellers, licensed real estate agents, and certain companion sitters as statutory nonemployees, meaning they are treated as self-employed for all federal tax purposes, including income and employment taxes.
For agents, two conditions have to hold. Substantially all payment for their services must be directly related to sales or other output rather than to the number of hours worked, and the services must be performed under a written contract providing that they will not be treated as employees for federal tax purposes.
Administrative staff are a separate question with an ordinary answer. Transaction coordinators, office managers, marketing staff, and receptionists are almost always W-2 employees, because their pay is tied to time rather than output and the brokerage directs how the work is done. Property management adds hourly maintenance and leasing staff who are unambiguously employees and who bring overtime and time-tracking obligations with them.
| Role | Usual classification | Year-end form | What the brokerage owes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Licensed sales agent on commission | Statutory nonemployee | 1099-NEC at $2,000 or more (from 2026) | Accurate payment records and the form |
| Transaction coordinator | W-2 employee | W-2 | Withholding, employer FICA, unemployment |
| Office manager or marketing staff | W-2 employee | W-2 | Withholding, employer FICA, unemployment |
| Hourly maintenance staff | W-2 employee | W-2 | Withholding plus overtime and time records |
| Agent paid a salary or hourly rate | Likely W-2 employee | W-2 | Output test fails, so the exemption does not apply |
| Unlicensed assistant to an agent | Depends who pays and directs them | Varies | Determine before the first payment, not after |
12 payroll providers at a glance
Two columns in this table matter more here than anywhere else: whether the provider publishes a rate at all, and whether it has a genuine contractor-only product.
| Provider | Pricing | Entry rate | Publishes a rate | Contractor-only plan | Files 1099-NEC | What matters for a brokerage |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Square Payroll | Published | $35 plus $6 a person | Contractor-only plan with no base fee | |||
| Patriot | Published | $17 plus $4 a worker | Cheapest published entry point | |||
| OnPay | Published | $49 plus $6 | One plan, multi-state included | |||
| Gusto | Published | $49 plus $6 | Contractor plan carries a base fee | |||
| QuickBooks Workforce | Published | $50 plus $7 | Contractor plan at $25 for 20 agents | |||
| Rippling | Published start | $40 plus $8 a user | Automation across HR and IT | |||
| Justworks | Published | $50 plus $8 payroll | Pooled benefits through a PEO tier | |||
| Fingercheck | Published | $79 plus $10 | Built around hourly and field staff | |||
| ADP RUN | Quote | Not published | Multi-state depth and service options | |||
| Paychex | Quote | Not published | Service layer and an in-house agency | |||
| SurePayroll | Published | $29 plus $7 | Small and household payroll focus | |||
| Paycor | Published | $99 plus $5 | Mid-market suite; quotes above 50 |
How we evaluated these providers
Every provider here will run payroll and file year-end forms. The tests are about how they price the specific workforce shape a brokerage has, and what they charge for the things a brokerage actually needs.
Providers that publish a rate
Four providers you can price without a sales call. For a small brokerage, the correct answer is usually one of these, or QuickBooks Contractor Payments for an office with no W-2 staff.
Contractor-only pricing is the finding of this comparison, and Square's version is the only one here with no base fee. A twenty-agent office with no W-2 staff pays $120 a month, against $155 on the Gusto contractor plan. QuickBooks Contractor Payments covers the same twenty agents for a flat $25.
Square charges its per-person fee only for people actually paid in a given month, so a brokerage whose agents close nothing in February pays less in February. That suits commission income better than a flat headcount charge, and in a month when fewer than five agents are paid, Square is the cheapest option on this page.
The contractor-only plan does exactly one thing. It does not run W-2 payroll or file employment taxes, so the moment you hire a transaction coordinator you move to the full-service plan and the base fee returns. The wider product is also built around Square's point-of-sale ecosystem, so a brokerage with no other connection to it gets less of the integration benefit than a restaurant would.
Value is the entire proposition and it holds up. At $152 a month for a twenty-agent office with three staff on the Full Service tier, it undercuts every comparable product here while still filing taxes and 1099s, and the Basic tier at $109 goes lower still for a brokerage whose accountant already handles the tax deposits. Support is free and US-based by phone, email, or chat on both tiers.
The trade is depth. There is no contractor-only product, so agents are charged at the same per-worker rate as employees, and the HR capability around payroll is thinner than on the platforms. On the Basic tier you are responsible for depositing and filing payroll taxes yourself, which is a real obligation rather than a formality, and getting it wrong is more expensive than the tier difference.
Single-plan pricing is the reason to look at it, because everything that other providers gate behind tiers is included here at one rate. That includes multi-state payroll, which a brokerage needs once a remote transaction coordinator or any other W-2 staff member works in a second state and triggers registration there. Having it in the base price rather than as an upgrade removes a common surprise.
There is no contractor-only option and no cheaper tier, so a small office pays the same $49 base as a larger one and agents are charged at the employee rate. Standard direct deposit runs on a four-business-day window unless you qualify for a faster one, which is worth checking against how quickly your agents expect commission after a closing.
Breadth is the argument. For a brokerage with several W-2 staff, having payroll, benefits administration, and onboarding on one record removes coordination work, and every tier has a published price. The contractor-only plan means an agent-only office is not forced onto full employee pricing.
That contractor plan carries a $35 monthly base fee where the Square plan charges none, so twenty agents cost $155 here against $120 on Square and $25 on QuickBooks Contractor Payments. Multi-state payroll requires the Plus tier at $80 plus $12, so a brokerage with staff in two states pays substantially more than the headline figure suggests. The Simple base fee also went from $40 to $49 during 2025.
Platform and accounting routes
Four providers where payroll arrives attached to something else, whether that is your ledger, your HR system, pooled benefits, or a time clock.
Commission accounting is where brokerage bookkeeping gets messy, with gross commission received, brokerage share, agent share, and franchise fees all needing to land in the right accounts. Running payroll inside the same ledger means agent payments post automatically instead of being re-entered as journal entries from a separate system, which removes a monthly reconciliation an office manager currently does by hand.
QuickBooks Workforce, formerly QuickBooks Payroll, matters to an agent-only office because of its contractor product. Contractor Payments covers twenty agents for $25 a month with unlimited 1099 e-filing, the lowest figure on this page at that size. The first W-2 hire moves the office to Workforce Payroll at $50 plus $7 a person, and on either plan, payroll here is a module of an accounting company rather than its main business.
Event-driven automation is the reason to consider it, and property management is where it pays off. Onboarding a leasing agent or a maintenance technician means accounts, devices, systems access, and payroll all needing to be set up, and having one action drive all of them removes a coordination burden that a small back office feels every time somebody joins or leaves.
The pricing page itself is a quote form, so the figure you pay comes from a sales conversation and depends on which modules you take. For a twenty-agent brokerage with three staff and no device fleet, the automation is solving problems that do not exist, and the $8 a user its small-business page starts payroll at is already above most entry-tier per-person rates here, before any module is added.
The benefits problem is genuine for brokerages. Three or four W-2 administrative staff is too small a group to get decent group health rates on its own, and the co-employment route pools them into a much larger population. For a brokerage trying to retain a good transaction coordinator against a competitor offering benefits, that access is the point rather than the payroll.
Bought purely for payroll, it is the most expensive published option we could model here, at $234 a month for twenty agents and three staff against $109 at the bottom of the range. Its per-person charge applies to contractors too.
The PEO (professional employer organization) tiers are a different order of cost again and are priced against staff you actually employ, which for an agent-heavy brokerage is a small number carrying a large rate.
Hourly field staff are the use case and it is a real one for property management rather than for a sales brokerage. Maintenance technicians moving between buildings need mobile clock-in with location, and having those hours flow into payroll without rekeying eliminates the reconciliation step where wage errors and overtime miscalculations originate.
Fingercheck publishes its rates, but they are per employee and do not say how 1099 agents are billed, so a brokerage office needs a quote to compare it. The combined time-and-payroll positioning also means you are buying two things whether or not you need both. For a sales brokerage where nobody clocks in, the entire differentiator is irrelevant and the cheaper published providers do the same payroll job.
Long-established providers
Four long-established providers, two of which will not tell you the price without a conversation. ADP RUN and Paychex quote every package, while SurePayroll and Paycor publish small-business rates. All four are capable, but only SurePayroll lets you price a twenty-agent office in advance.
Scale is the argument and for a multi-state brokerage group it is a decent one. Registration, filing, and compliance across a dozen states are genuinely hard to manage in-house, and this is a provider that has done it for decades with a service layer available for employers who want a person to call rather than a help center.
Nothing is published, so budgeting starts with a sales conversation and the price depends on the package and add-ons you agree on. For a single-state office of twenty agents and three staff, the depth is overhead and the published alternatives above do the same job at a price you can verify before signing.
The service layer is what you are buying. For an owner-operator with no HR function, having a named contact who handles a state registration question or a garnishment order is worth more than a lower monthly rate, and having retirement plan administration and an insurance agency in the same relationship removes vendor coordination that a small office does badly.
Nothing is published, and the packages gate features in ways that take a call to price. The premium support tier with a payroll specialist sits only on Complete, the top package, which is awkward for a provider whose main advantage is support. Onboarding and garnishment services are add-ons on Basic.
Simplicity is the point and the product does not pretend otherwise. For an office with an owner, an assistant, and a few agents, a straightforward payroll run with automated tax filing and year-end forms is the entire requirement, and the plan includes unlimited payroll runs and new hire reporting.
SurePayroll publishes its rate, at $190 a month for twenty agents and three staff, but the year-end form charge lands separately every January. The product is oriented toward the smallest employers and household payroll, so a growing brokerage will outgrow it, and there is no contractor-only plan for an agent-heavy office.
The case for it is consolidation rather than payroll specifically. A property management company with several hundred employees across maintenance, leasing, and administration has recruiting, scheduling, and benefits problems that a payroll product does not touch, and buying them together from one vendor is a defensible choice at that size.
At brokerage scale the full suite is the wrong shape. The small-business bundles are priced per employee without saying how 1099 agents are billed, and the suite assumes an HR function to operate it. A twenty-agent office would be buying an organizational structure it does not have.
Dwight SchruteSales3 people
Darryl PhilbinWarehouse1 person
Kelly KapoorCustomer Service1 personWhat it costs at a 20-agent brokerage
At published rates, twenty agents and three staff cost $109 to $234 a month, and the same twenty agents with no W-2 staff can cost as little as $25. The table prices both configurations, because the second one is where this category behaves unlike any other and where most comparison pages stop short.
| Provider | Pricing basis | 20 agents plus 3 staff | 20 agents, no W-2 staff | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Patriot Basic | $17 plus $4 a worker | $109 | $97 | You file the payroll taxes yourself |
| Patriot Full Service | $37 plus $5 a worker | $152 | $137 | Tax filing and 1099 e-filing included |
| Square Payroll | $35 plus $6 a person | $173 | $120 | Contractor-only plan drops the base fee entirely |
| OnPay | $49 plus $6 | $187 | $169 | Single plan, multi-state and 1099s included |
| Gusto Simple | $49 plus $6 | $187 | $155 | Contractor plan is $35 base plus $6 a person |
| SurePayroll | $29 plus $7 a worker | $190 | $169 | Year-end forms billed at $50 plus $5 each |
| QuickBooks Workforce | $50 plus $7 a person | $211 | $25 | Contractor Payments: $25 for up to 20 |
| Justworks Payroll | $50 plus $8 a person | $234 | $210 | PEO tiers priced separately and much higher |
| Fingercheck 360 | $79 plus $10 an employee | Not published | Not published | Billing for 1099 agents not stated |
| Paycor Basic | $99 plus $5 an employee | Not published | Not published | Billing for 1099 agents not stated |
| Rippling | $40 plus $8 a user | Quote | Quote | Small-business page start; agent billing is quoted |
| Paychex | Quote only | Quote | Quote | No package shows a price |
| ADP RUN | Quote only | Quote | Quote | Nothing published at any tier |
Look at the two columns together. Moving from a mixed office to an agent-only one removes three W-2 employees, and for most providers the bill barely moves, because the per-person charge does not care about classification.
The bill falls meaningfully only where a genuine contractor-only product exists: the Square plan drops the base fee entirely, and QuickBooks Contractor Payments covers all twenty agents for a flat $25. For a brokerage that has been paying employee-grade rates on twenty contractors, that is a saving of several hundred dollars to more than $2,000 a year for no change in what the software does.
Which route fits your brokerage
The right answer depends far more on your workforce shape and state footprint than on your headcount.
| Your situation | Where to look | What to avoid | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agents only, no W-2 staff | A contractor-only plan | Full-service payroll | You are paying a base fee for withholding you do not do |
| Agents plus a few salaried staff | Published-rate full service | Quote-only providers | The job is standard and the prices are knowable |
| Agents working in two or more states | A provider including multi-state | Tiers charging per state | One W-2 hire in a second state changes the arithmetic |
| Property management with maintenance crews | Payroll with time tracking | Sales-office payroll | Hourly staff bring overtime and time records |
| Bookkeeper already files your taxes | A self-filing entry tier | Full-service you duplicate | You are paying twice for the same filing |
| Want benefits for a small staff group | A pooled or PEO route | Standalone payroll | Four employees cannot get good group rates alone |
The first row is the one worth acting on immediately, because a large number of brokerages sit in it without realizing the pricing implication. If nobody at your office receives a W-2, you are almost certainly on a product designed for employers who withhold tax, paying for a capability you never use.
Whatever route you take, the input is the same: correct classification, a signed written agreement with every agent, and accurate payment records by person and by year. That data lives in contractor onboarding and your files rather than in the payroll system, and a provider will file exactly what you give it.
How to choose a payroll provider for a brokerage
Five questions, in this order. The first one determines which half of this page applies to you.
If you are switching providers, time the move for the start of a calendar quarter, and ideally the start of a year. Mid-year transitions require carrying year-to-date figures across, and that is where wage and tax reporting errors originate.
Ask the new provider directly whether they migrate prior wage data for you. Several of the published-rate providers do it as part of free setup, and it is the part of switching that consumes the most time.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is real estate payroll?
Real estate payroll is the way a brokerage or property management firm pays a split workforce: licensed agents paid commission as contractors and receiving Form 1099-NEC, administrative staff on W-2 with withholding, and often hourly maintenance staff as well. The complexity comes from running contractors and employees through one system on pay cycles tied to closings rather than to a calendar.
Are real estate agents 1099 or W-2?
Usually 1099. Federal law treats licensed real estate agents as statutory nonemployees, self-employed for all federal tax purposes, provided substantially all pay is tied to output rather than hours and there is a written contract stating they will not be treated as an employee for federal tax purposes. If either condition fails, ordinary classification tests apply instead.
How much does payroll software cost for a brokerage?
For 20 agents and 3 staff, roughly $110 to $235 a month at published rates. The surprise is what happens with no W-2 staff: most providers charge the same per-person fee regardless of classification, so an agent-only office pays nearly the same, unless the provider has a contractor-only plan. On those plans, twenty agents cost a flat $25 with QuickBooks and $120 with Square.
Do brokerages have to run agent commissions through payroll?
Not in the withholding sense. Commission paid to a correctly classified contractor agent is not wages, so no income tax or FICA is withheld and there is no employer match.
What the brokerage does owe is accurate records and a Form 1099-NEC for each agent paid $2,000 or more, the threshold the IRS instructions for Form 1099-NEC set for payments made from January 1, 2026 (it was $600 before). Many brokerages still route payments through payroll software so the year-end filing is handled.
What happens if a brokerage misclassifies an agent?
The exposure compounds. Unintentional misclassification is assessed under section 3509 of the Internal Revenue Code at 1.5 percent of wages for unwithheld income tax and 20 percent of the employee FICA (3 and 40 percent where no 1099s were filed), plus the full employer match and per-form penalties for missing W-2s.
Intentional disregard loses those reduced rates and carries potential criminal exposure. State agencies often pursue the same facts separately for unemployment and workers compensation.
Does a brokerage need multi-state payroll?
Yes, once you have W-2 staff working in more than one state. Contractor agents alone do not need it, though a second state can add its own 1099 rules.
Payroll tax registration is generally required in each state where you have employees, and rules differ on withholding, unemployment insurance, and final pay. Some providers include multi-state payroll in one rate while others charge per state, so confirm before signing.
When are 1099-NEC forms due for real estate agents?
January 31 to both the recipient and the Internal Revenue Service, earlier than several other information returns. According to IRS Topic 801, electronic filing is required once you file 10 or more information returns in aggregate across all types, counting 1099s and W-2s together, so a brokerage with 20 agents will be filing electronically regardless of preference.
Should a brokerage use payroll software or an accountant?
Most use both. Software handles the mechanics of withholding, payment records, and year-end forms for tens to a few hundred dollars a month. An accountant handles what software cannot: classification decisions, entity structure, commission accounting, and whatever your state has changed recently. Buying one does not remove the need for the other.
Make HR the easy part of running your business
Onboarding, e-signatures, training and core HR in one place. Up and running in 5 minutes.
- 7-day free trial
- No credit card required
- Cancel anytime