Analysing the 5 Best Employer of Record (EOR) Services for UK Businesses 

EOR services are increasingly being used to hire international talent, test new markets, and transition contractors after IR35 enforcement.

Data suggests that the strategy is highly popular for small and medium-sized businesses, with around 60% of EOR clients in the UK taking the form of SMBs.

The appeal is clear for smaller businesses, with the appeal of EOR services meaning that compliance can be simplified at scale, while the operational oversight required to facilitate ambitious scaling strategies could also be outsourced to providers to protect against growing pains.

What is an Employer of Record?

An Employer of Record serves as the legal employer for statutory compliance; this means that it picks up the slack of issuing compliant contracts that are in line with relevant local legislation and running payroll operations.

The EOR also covers factors like mandatory benefits, while your business is free to uphold your company culture, performance goals, and carry out typical management duties.

They are third-party employment services that are focused on lowering your compliance risk while speeding up international hiring by acting as the legal employer wherever necessary.

Legally, the EOR is the employer of these remote workers and assumes obligations like drafting compliant contracts, processing payroll and taxes, and managing statutory compliance. Likewise, it’s your duty to direct work, set compensation, and oversee the output of the staff.

For a better understanding of what responsibilities are undertaken by an Employer of Record, let’s explore its key areas of operation:

• Global Payroll: It’s the role of the EOR to calculate pay, withholdings, and remit taxes, issuing payslips per local standards in the local currency of the employee.
• Statutory Benefits: The EOR will also handle enrolment and the ongoing management of pensions, health insurance, and other relevant domestic benefits that the worker is obliged to receive.
• Employment Contracts: This refers to the drafting, maintenance, and applicable updates to contracts aligned with local labour codes and collective agreements.
• Compliance: Critically, the EOR will cover right-to-work checks, leave obligations, reporting, and offboarding in a way that remains wholly compliant with regulations.

Although the full suite of responsibilities carried out by Employer of Record services can vary, all reputable EORs should cover the employment lifecycle, from onboarding through to offboarding, in a way that ensures compliance every step of the way.

Top 5 EOR Services in the UK

Because different EOR service providers can provide different areas of focus and results that can be better tailored to your business needs, it’s certainly worth exploring the market for the firms that fit the bill.

With this in mind, let’s take a deeper look at the five best EOR providers to consider in the United Kingdom today:

1. RemotePeople

Founded in 2018, RemotePeople has grown its EOR services to operate throughout more than 150 countries around the world, connecting employers with the talent they need and streamlining the experience for more operational efficiency and less noise.

Holding a 4.7/5 rating throughout hundreds of G2 reviews, the EOR provider is a popular resource that’s celebrated for its ease of use and intelligent automation through the rollout of AI tools.

Main Features

The feature that makes RemotePeople stand out from the crowd is its built-in international talent sourcing capabilities, which are powered by AI tools that can generate job descriptions and support screening efforts.

RemotePeople is savvy with its deployment of AI, and the provider uses plain-language automated tools to manage its global HR, expenses, time-off, and compliance for greater convenience and better responsiveness.

When it comes to global payroll, the platform consolidates multi-currency compensation and tax filings into one single platform that supports more than 150 different currencies.

Critically, RemotePeople can also support your business if you decide that you want to transition from using EOR services into setting up your own local legal entity.

Pricing

Listed in US dollars, RemotePeople features a two-tier pricing structure that begins at $199 (£148) per month, per employee, or $399 (£297) if you plan to use EOR services to onboard more than five workers.

Both plans offer access to RemotePeople’s network of talent pools spanning more than 150 countries, providing a significant boost to your hiring strategy if you’re looking to bridge skill gaps in particular.

1. Deel

Deel is a comprehensive global HR and payroll platform that assists companies in managing their hiring processes, payroll, and managing remote employees throughout more than 150 countries.

While Deel is primarily an Employer of Record that acts as the legal employer for international workers, it also processes multi-currency payments, generates invoices, and manages all aspects of the onboarding process.

The platform is popular for its convenience and suite of smart integrations that have helped to streamline the onboarding of international talent in a fully compliant way.

Main Features

Deel is a premium EOR service provider, and as a result, offers a suite of intelligent tools and integrations that help to make international onboarding far easier.

The platform offers a consolidated dashboard for ease of use, and also features an AI interface that’s trained on global labour regulations to better manage international compliance and payroll queries instantly.

The EOR is also known for its smart integrations and has the ability to synchronise with more than 20 major HRIS, accounting, and finance systems like QuickBooks, NetSuite, and BambooHR for a more convenient experience for the businesses it serves.

Deel is an efficient platform because of its automation features, and one of its brightest advantages is its ability to automatically generate contracts that are vetted by local legal experts to ensure full compliance with tax and regional labour laws.

Pricing

Deel offers a flat pricing policy which begins at $599 (£445) per month as a management fee. The cost to the employer for the employees onboarded is estimated at 18.80% of the worker’s contract.

As a rough estimate, this would mean that if you used Deel to onboard an employee on £30,000 per year, the total cost payable per month would be £915 at the time of writing.

While this is a little more of an outlay compared to its peers, using Deel provides access to the provider’s in-house team of more than 250 experts, who will pick up the slack of managing local laws, tax systems, and payroll as a whole.

1. Oyster HR

In terms of convenience, Oyster HR is a market leader, with the ability to manage remote team members and contractors in over 120 countries without the need for clients to establish a local legal entity overseas.

Founded in 2020, the EOR has amassed a widespread customer base among startups and scale-ups thanks to the provider’s beginner-friendly features and the opportunity to avoid the higher costs associated with rival Employer of Record services.

Main Features

Oyster HR shines with its 48-hour compliant onboarding process, which works alongside automated workflows that adhere strictly to the relevant local employment laws.

The platform’s strength in automation has also paved the way for localised agreement generation, where automated platforms have the ability to create jurisdiction-ready contract templates and employment agreements that protect intellectual property (IP).

Oyster HR also streamlines the hiring and onboarding processes throughout a wide range of international talent pools spanning over 120 countries.

Pricing

Oyster HR’s pricing structure starts at $699 (£520) per employee per month, which covers employee compliance, payroll, and end-to-end support via local experts worldwide.

Users can also benefit from automated expense insights, as well as time off and various reports linked to onboarding and offboarding processes.

Dedicated specialists are also on-hand to provide small businesses and startups with more support to ensure a frictionless experience with remote hires.

1. Rippling

Founded in 2016, Rippling has grown over the past decade to serve more than 20,000 businesses globally, ranging from high-growth startups to fully-fledged enterprises.

Rippling’s ease of use and unified dashboard have won plenty of plaudits online, and the platform’s 4.8/5 G2 rating places it among one of the best-loved global EOR services available to businesses of all shapes, sizes, and ambition levels.

Main Features

One of Rippling’s key strengths can be found in its suite of automation tools, and an integrated AI layer means that the platform can automatically flag compliance risks, surface real-time cross-departmental reporting, and automate a number of repetitive tasks for greater efficiency.

Rippling also features a workflow studio that allows administrators to create custom, code-free automations with custom triggers throughout a network of HR, IT, and finance apps.

The platform is about much more than EOR, and through Rippling, businesses can also access an HR Cloud that specialises in providing a unified HRIS, which serves as a single source of truth for employee records and history.

Rippling also handles administrative tasks like the distribution of corporate laptops and remote wiping during offboarding processes.

Pricing

Unlike many of the other providers we’ve covered in this list, Rippling features its own custom pricing model, which means getting exact figures for how much this EOR costs is trickier to pin down.

However, the service generally ranges from $499 to $599 (£370 to £445) per month and involves a base platform fee, employer charges, and setup fees that can range from $2,000.

1. G-P

The reach of G-P (Globalization Partners) is among the best available to UK businesses, with the ability to hire, manage, and pay international employees based in more than 180 countries without the need for setting up local legal entities.

The broad level of access for G-P has been a leading positive point for the EOR provider’s ratings, which reviewers have awarded a 4.4/5 on G2 for factors like coverage, strong compliance management, and high levels of support.

Main Features

One of the best features of G-P is its Global Compliance Engine (GCE), which automatically monitors and embeds real-time local labour laws, tax codes, and regulatory updates into employment workflows for clients.

The platform has also deployed its very own AI assistant, G-P Assist, which uses agentic tools to guide onboarding, flag any possible upcoming legislative changes, and provide fast workforce analytics and reporting insights.

G-P also supports an impressive range of more than 150 currencies while also managing bonuses, commissions, and tax deductions as part of its unified global payroll system. This helps to ensure accuracy and timely payments for all employees.

Pricing

G-P’s EOR services start at £549 ($599) per month per employee, but volume discounts are available to clients that plan to onboard more talent from overseas.

The provider’s pricing structure provides access to G-P’s AI compliance monitoring, as well as coverage in 180 countries worldwide.

The plan also offers custom APIs for better integrations with existing systems to support your EOR ambitions.

EOR Providers Compared

These top Employer of Record providers offer a diverse range of capabilities alongside their plans, so what are you actually getting for your money? Let’s take a deeper look at the value proposition for the UK’s strongest EOR services in the table below:

This table is accurate at the time of publication and provides a technical insight into key aspects of each EOR service, their cost, reach, and reputation.

Although these won’t be the only measures of quality you rely on, they can provide more insight into the type of service you can expect when hiring from overseas.

Which EOR Is Right for You?

There’s no right or wrong EOR to choose from this list, and all options provide benefits that can make them suitable candidates for different businesses based on certain strategic goals.

Before deciding, look at the type of skill gap that you’re looking to close and where to focus your attention. If nations with large talent pools aren’t covered, or their local currencies aren’t supported, it can be a strong means of narrowing down your options.

Getting your expansion strategy right means finding support with a strong EOR that can assist you in achieving your long-term goals. With the right research, you can secure your strategic growth with an Employer of Record that’s on-hand to help you every step of the way.