Payroll software for S corps (2026): the Owner-Employee Test

Skip payroll for yourself as a working S corp owner and the IRS says you will be liable for the taxes you did not withhold, “including yourself if you are a corporate officer”, and possibly for a trust fund recovery penalty. That line is on its Paying yourself page. Payroll software for an S corp is mostly ordinary payroll software with one extra job: paying the owner as a W-2 employee on a fixed salary, and reporting the owner’s health premium the way the IRS wants it on the W-2.

We read twelve payroll tools on 30 August 2026, from the five that rank for this search to the two big quote-only vendors and one back-office bundle, and asked each the same five questions. Six publish a payroll-only price for one employee, from $36 to $55 a month. A seventh, QuickBooks, prices payroll only inside an accounting bundle; Deel lists $29 per employee but publishes no minimum and sends every plan to a demo, so it stays out of that range. Six document a pay item for the 2% shareholder health premium in a help-centre article. Patriot is the only one of those six whose article names every box the premium lands in: box 1, box 14 and box 16. QuickBooks names box 14, for Desktop only, and ADP names box 1 and box 14 in a support PDF rather than a product article.

The first page of results is not going to tell you this. On 29 August 2026 it was four payroll vendors, a thread on r/smallbusiness titled “Payroll for 1 - S Corp - do I need software?”, a YouTube video, and two “best of” lists, one of them published by a payroll company. No independent tester, and no page that prices what a one-person S corp buys: one employee, twelve months, forms included.

We run our own payroll on Gusto and rate it 8/10 in our review; we have not run an S corp owner’s payroll, or a 2% shareholder health item, through Gusto or any other tool here. Every price and feature below is quoted from the vendors’ own pages and help centres or, where we say so, from their dated archive copies, support PDFs and community answers. Every tax rule comes from an IRS page with its revision date, linked in the Sources at the end, because a page about payroll for a corporation you own is not a place for paraphrase. There are no scores except Gusto’s, no screenshots of an S corp payroll we ran, and no affiliate links on this page. Three vendor sites, OnPay, Patriot and Intuit, would not serve our network that day; their figures come from their help centres and from dated archive copies of their pricing pages, and we say which each time. Nothing here is tax advice: the IRS quotes say what is reportable and where, never how much your salary should be.

The Owner-Employee Test: five questions for any payroll tool

The IRS is unusually plain about the first premise. Its page on S corporation employees, shareholders and corporate officers, reviewed 4 July 2026, says the definition of an employee for FICA, FUTA and withholding “includes corporate officers”, and that “the fact that an officer is also a shareholder does not change this requirement”. Courts, the same page says, “have consistently held S corporation officers/shareholders who provide more than minor services to their corporation and receive, or are entitled to receive, compensation are subject to federal employment taxes”. Its compensation page, reviewed 3 March 2026, sets the order: reasonable compensation “before non-wage distributions may be made”. So an owner who works in the business is an employee, the salary comes before distributions, and the tool has to handle both the salary and what rides on it. The Paying yourself page writes the one exception: an officer “who performs no services or only minor services and who neither receives nor is entitled to receive any pay”. Ask these five things, in this order, and stop where the answer is no.

Question	What the IRS pages say	What to look for on the vendor’s pages
1. Will it pay the owner as a W-2 employee on a fixed schedule?	Payments to an officer “must be treated as wages to the extent the amounts are reasonable compensation” (Form 1120-S instructions, reviewed 30 April 2026)	A plan that names owner-only payroll, and an auto-run for a salaried employee so the schedule holds
2. Does it file everything, and in how many states?	Form 941 quarterly by default; Form 944 annually only “if the IRS notified you in writing” and your annual liability is $1,000 or less; Form 940 at 6.0% on the first $7,000 of wages, less a credit of up to 5.4% for state unemployment tax paid; W-2 and W-3	Federal and state returns included in the base price, with the number of states and the fee for a second one written down
3. Does it document the 2% shareholder health item?	Premiums for a more-than-2% shareholder are “reportable as wages on the shareholder-employee’s Form W-2”, included in box 1 but not boxes 3 and 5 when paid under a plan for employees, with an information item in box 14 (box 14a on 2026 forms)	A help-centre article with a named pay item or benefit, ideally naming the boxes
4. What does one employee cost for a year?	Nothing to say	Base plus one seat, times twelve, plus the fees that only show at year end
5. What will it not do?	”Reasonable compensation” has nine listed factors and no formula	Owner’s draws, a second state, contractors, and any promise about the salary amount

The test does not score the salary calculators several vendors advertise, because the IRS lists factors and no method. Nor does it touch what your state does with an officer’s wages: the Form 940 instructions warn that “in certain states, wages paid to corporate officers” are excluded from state unemployment tax, which can raise your federal rate to the full 6.0%. That is a question for your state’s page, not a payroll vendor’s. If a public-works contract is in your future, the certified payroll tools we read are a separate purchase from everything below. And if the entity paying you is a 501(c)(3) rather than an S corp, the hard question moves from the owner’s W-2 to the grant the salary is charged against: payroll software read against restricted funds is the shortlist for that case.

At a glance: twelve tools against the test, read 30 August 2026

Prices are list prices for one employee in one state, before promotions. “Documented” means we found a help-centre article or product page that names the item; “not stated” means we did not find it on the pages we read that day, not that the feature is absent. The six counted at the top of this page are the help-centre articles: Gusto, Patriot, OnPay, SurePayroll, Wave and QuickBooks. When the company is one person, the last column carries the most weight: a filing calendar that runs without a click is the clearest case of HR automation removing work rather than relocating it.

Tool	One employee, per month and per year	Federal and state filing	2% shareholder health item	Owner-only plan or page	Runs payroll automatically
Gusto Solo or Simple	$55 · $660	Yes; Simple covers one state, Plus ($80 + $12) covers several	Documented; boxes not named	Yes, Solo plan	Yes, AutoPilot
Patriot Full Service	$42 · $504 (archive copies)	Yes, 50 states; $12/mo per extra state	Documented; box 1, box 14 “SEHI”, box 16 named	Not stated	Yes
OnPay	$55 · $660; first month free	Yes, all 50 states, no multi-state fee	Documented (updated 10 December 2025); boxes not named	Yes, S corp page; single-member price unpublished	Not stated
SurePayroll Full Service	$36 · $432, plus $50 + $5 per form at year end	Yes; one state, $9.99/mo for more	Documented (December 2023); boxes not named	Yes, S corp page; limit of five active officers (December 2023)	Yes
Square Payroll	$41 · $492	Yes, all 50 states and DC; 941 or 944, 940, W-2/W-3	Partial: a 2023 community answer from Square staff, entered once a year	Not stated	Yes
Wave Payroll	$46 · $552; 30-day trial	Yes, all 50 states; 1099-NEC generated, not filed	Documented as a named benefit (updated 15 June 2026); boxes not named	Not stated	Not stated
QuickBooks Workforce	$95 · $1,140 (payroll + accounting bundle, 26 August reading)	Yes; some local taxes on higher tiers	Documented; a solo owner with no employee plan is sent to Desktop	Page, not a plan	Yes, salaried on direct deposit
ADP RUN	Quote-only; article says $127.95 per quarter officer-only	”Federal, state and local”	Support PDF, not a help-centre article: box 1, box 14 “S-CORP”	Yes, “Payroll for one employee” page	Yes, RUN & DONE
Paychex Flex	Quote-only	Claimed	Partial: named on a year-end checklist only	Yes, page without a price	Not stated
Collective S Corp Tier	$349 · $4,188, or $3,560 billed yearly	Yes, through Gusto	Entered in Gusto as a benefit by Collective’s team	Yes, the whole product	No: “Run Payroll - W/O Autopilot”
Deel Payroll	$29 · $348 if it takes one employee; minimum not stated	Yes, all 50 states	Not found	Not stated; every card ends in “Book a demo”	Not stated
Rippling	Quote-only	Not stated	Not found	Not stated	Not stated

The cheap end of the price column is real, but a low monthly price buys little if the health premium only reaches the W-2 through a support ticket in December. Our dated pricing index tracks the general payroll tools as they move; SurePayroll and Collective are not on it yet.

Do you need software at all? The Reddit question, answered from the forms

The thread that outranks most of the vendors asks whether a one-person S corp needs payroll software. The requirement is the filings and the deposits behind them; the software is one way to get them done, and the cheapest full-service tools here start at $36 a month. For one salaried owner in one state, Form 941 is due four times a year, on the last day of the month after each quarter (per the March 2026 instructions). Form 940 is due once: 2 February 2026 for 2025, or 10 February if every deposit was on time. Then come a W-2 and W-3 in January, your state’s withholding and unemployment returns, and the deposits behind all of them. Form 944 replaces the four 941s only for employers whose annual liability is $1,000 or less, and only if the IRS has told you in writing to file it. The instructions say “if the IRS didn’t notify you to file Form 944, don’t file Form 944”.

That is the list a $36-to-$55 tool takes off your desk. No IRS page we read requires a payroll provider. What the pages require is the withholding, the deposits and the returns, and the liability quoted at the top of this page follows when they are missing. If the budget is zero, the free payroll tools we compared are built around that trade: no filing done for you, or filing behind a paywall. For everyone else, the week-one questions in our payroll buying guide still apply, and a second state is the one that most often moves an S corp owner off the cheapest plan.

Gusto: the only owner-only plan with a published price

Gusto Solo is the one plan in this round-up built for a company with no W-2 employee except the owner. The page, read 30 August 2026, prices it at “$49/mo base + $6/mo per payroll recipient” and rounds that to “most owners pay $55/month”. It lists “S-corp payroll with automated tax withholdings & quarterly filings”, “quarterly 941 filing, all 50 states”, a guided Form 2553 election, W-2 and 1099 generation and a reasonable salary calculator. Gusto’s help centre describes Solo as “best for owner-only businesses with no W-2 employees besides the owner”, including “owners who are an S corp or thinking about it”, and confirms month-to-month billing with no contract. The regular Simple plan is the same $49 plus $6, covers one state, and adds AutoPilot payroll; Plus, at $80 plus $12, is where multi-state payroll starts.

On the 2% shareholder item, Gusto has a dedicated article, “Update 2% shareholder status for S-Corp employees in Gusto”. The company must be set up as a C corporation or LLC taxed as an S corp, the owner is marked with a “2% Shareholder” dropdown, and Gusto warns that the status “affects how we tax their health insurance premiums”. It does not name the W-2 boxes, and it carries no date. The same article sets the limit: “we do not support 2% shareholder owners who need both a taxable salary and a non-taxed owner’s draw”; the draws go outside Gusto. We run our own payroll on Gusto, which is where the 8/10 comes from, and the AutoPilot we tested is the one we scored in our automation round-up. We have not run a shareholder item through it, so that part is Gusto’s documentation, not our test. If Gusto is the plan and the price is the problem, the alternatives we priced start from published grids.

Patriot: the only help centre that names box 1, box 14 and box 16

Patriot’s site blocked our network on 30 August 2026, so what follows is read from archive copies of its pages dated 29 July, 2 August and 17 May 2026; confirm it on patriotsoftware.com before you buy. Full Service Payroll is listed at $37 a month plus $5 per worker paid. That covers federal, state and local filings and deposits, year-end filings at no extra fee, free direct deposit, unlimited payrolls and auto payroll. Basic Payroll, at $17 plus $4, files nothing and fails question 2. Patriot files “in all 50 states with our Full Service Payroll”, with “a $12 fee for each additional state”, so a two-state owner pays $54 a month, not $42.

Its article “How To Add S Corp Health Insurance Premiums To Payroll” is the one document in this round-up that reads like the IRS page. You create a company-level contribution and choose the taxability “S Corp Health Insurance”. The article then states what happens: “the ‘W-2 Box’ field will prefill to ‘Box 14 - Other’ with a label of ‘SEHI’”. The year-to-date amount “will be added to the total in Box 1 for federal taxable wages, Box 16 for state taxable wages (when applicable), and Box 14”. It also says Patriot “will NOT be collecting the income taxes associated with the S Corp Health Insurance Contribution”. That is a withholding conversation to have with your accountant before December, not after. The 2026 W-2 instructions have split box 14 into 14a and 14b; the vendor articles, Patriot’s included, still say box 14. There is no S corp landing page and no owner-only plan. The archive copy also showed a promotion, 30 days free and 50% off for six months, marked as ending 31 August 2026.

OnPay: every state included, and a single-member price it will not print

OnPay’s site returned errors from our network on 30 August 2026; its help centre did not. The help article “OnPay Pricing”, updated 1 May 2025, gives “$49 base fee plus $6 per person”, with “tax filings and payments in all 50 states” in the base fee. It promises that “we never charge for extras like tax filings and payments in multiple states, off-cycle runs, or run cancellations”. The per-person fee applies once a month to anyone paid at least once in the billing period. Year-end forms are free to self-print or $10 each by mail, and the article notes that SaaS subscriptions carry sales tax in many states. An archive copy of the pricing page dated 15 July 2026 shows the same $49 plus $6 per worker, “get one month free”, state new-hire reporting included, and an HR add-on at $15 plus $2 per worker.

OnPay’s S corp page, read from an archive copy dated 16 April 2026, is written for one person: “S Corp payroll for solopreneurs”, with filings “whether you run payroll monthly, quarterly, or annually” and blank filings included. It also carries a line the other vendors do not have: “we even offer special pricing for single-member organizations, if you’re only paying yourself a couple of times a year. Talk to us to learn more.” The price is not published, so it does not appear in our table. The health item is documented in “Adding 2% shareholder benefits to W-2s”, updated 10 December 2025, with pay types for shareholder insurance, HSA and auto. The taxable amount “must be processed as a pay run on or before December 31 of the same tax year”, and adding it after the new year takes a support ticket. Boxes are not named. Whether payroll can run itself is not stated on the pages we could read.

SurePayroll: the lowest monthly price, with two fees to add back

SurePayroll’s Full Service plan is $29 a month plus $7 per employee on 30 August 2026, so $36 for one owner, with taxes “filed & deposited”, automatic scheduling, unlimited runs and two-day direct deposit. Two lines lower on the same page change the year: “first state included, multi-state payroll for $9.99/month”, and “year-end W-2 and 1099-NEC forms are billed annually - not monthly - at a $50 base fee plus $5 per form”. One owner, one state, one W-2 is $432 plus $55, or $487 a year, which is still the lowest full-service figure in this round-up. The No Tax Filing plan at $20 plus $4 leaves every deposit and return to you and fails question 2.

The S corp page is the plainest of the twelve about the premise: “even if you’re the only employee, you must run on a consistent schedule”, and “salary must come first”. Two help-centre articles carry the S corp specifics, both dated December 2023. One sets up an “S-Corp 2% Owner” earning entered under other compensation on the payroll screen, boxes not named. The other explains that SurePayroll limits the S corp product to “five active employees (officers)” because, it says, most S corporations have one officer. A 2023 date is old enough that you should ask whether both still apply before you sign. The August 2026 promotion, six free months spread over the first year, ran for sign-ups between 1 and 31 August 2026 per the disclaimer page; if you are reading this later, assume it is gone.

Square Payroll: all 50 states and DC at $41, and a once-a-year health entry

Square Payroll is $35 a month plus $6 per person paid, $41 for one owner, with no contract, auto payroll included and multi-state payroll included, read 30 August 2026. Its help centre lists the forms it files (“Form 941” quarterly; “Form 940, Form 944” annually; W-2 and W-3) and says it “supports payroll tax calculations and filings across all 50 states and the District of Columbia”; new-hire reports go in on request. Square’s weak point is question 3. We found no help-centre article on the 2% shareholder premium. The only Square answer is a community thread where Square staff wrote in 2023 that the company “collects S-Corp health insurance premiums at the end of the year” through a year-end checklist. The same post adds them to “Box 1 (Wages), Box 14 (Other), and Box 16” and not to boxes 3 and 5. A moderator in a January 2026 thread declined to give “guidance on tax treatment or payroll setup for owners”. So the mechanism exists, once a year, in December, and it is documented by a forum post, not a product page.

Wave Payroll: the 2% benefit is a named pay item, with a 30-day trial

Wave Payroll is $40 a month plus $6 per active employee, $46 for one owner, with a 30-day trial and a note that these prices apply to customers who signed up after 2 April 2025. It files “in all 50 US states” and lists 940, 941 or 944, W-2 and W-3, and it handles new-hire reporting automatically once tax payments are active. Its automatic tax service excludes 1099 filings: the same page says it generates the 1099-NEC, and filing it is on you, a gap if you also pay a contractor. Its benefits article, updated 15 June 2026, names “shareholder medical premiums, also known as the 2% Shareholder Health Insurance Benefit” as a pay item, and adds that a 2% shareholder cannot receive Section 125 or HSA deductions. The boxes are shown inside the app when you add the benefit, which we could not read without an account. Whether Wave runs payroll without a click each period is not stated on its pages.

QuickBooks Workforce: the built-in item, and the solo owner it sends to Desktop

Intuit’s site would not open from our network on 30 August 2026, so the prices are our 26 August reading, the one on our payroll and accounting round-up. Payroll is sold inside accounting bundles: “Workforce Payroll + Simple Start” at $88 a month plus $7 per employee, $95 for one owner, then $135 plus $7 and $228 plus $13 at list. An archive copy of the same page dated 17 July 2026 showed $88 plus $6.50, $125 plus $6.50 and $203 plus $10. So the per-employee fee and two of the three bases rose between mid-July and mid-August, and the 90%-off promotion we saw on 26 August was marked as ending 27 August. Stand-alone payroll plans exist; their list prices were not shown on any of the three readings.

The S corp help article, “Set up an S-corp medical payroll item for your corporate officers”, is thorough and carries the catch of this whole round-up. If the shareholder is on “the same plan as all other employees”, the item is withholding-only and exempt from Social Security, Medicare and FUTA, and Online Payroll supports it under the pay type “S-Corp Owners Health Insurance”. If the shareholder has “a different plan or you don’t offer a plan to employees at all, the plan is fully taxable. This plan type is only supported in QuickBooks Desktop Payroll.” A one-person S corp with no other employee has, on the article’s own wording, no plan offered to employees. That is the second case, and the article says Online does not support it. Whether Intuit reads its sentence that way for a solo owner is a question to put to them. The Desktop instructions name box 14. Ask Intuit which product you are being sold before you take the S corp page’s “reasonable compensation” pitch at face value.

ADP RUN and Paychex Flex: quote-only, with one price in an article

Neither publishes a price. RUN Powered by ADP shows four packages behind “Get pricing” on its 1-to-49-employee page. It also showed a promotion of three free months for companies that started processing by 24 September 2026 and stayed three months, applied to months four to six; that window has since closed. What ADP does publish is a page titled “Payroll for one employee”, “whether you’re an S corporation or another type of one-person business”. An article updated 5 January 2026 says ADP “offers a full-service, officer-only S corp payroll solution that starts at $127.95 per quarter ($500 for one-time annual payrolls)”. That is an article’s claim about a product the pricing pages do not show; at four quarters it would be $511.80 a year, and the number belongs to ADP, not to us. ADP’s earnings reference PDF documents an “S-Corp 2% Medical Plan” earning reported “on the employee’s W-2 as federal wages (but not FICA)”, in box 1 and box 14 with the code S-CORP. It adds separate earnings for an HSA and for Pennsylvania, and the PDF is not labelled for RUN specifically.

Paychex Flex lists four packages behind “Request Pricing”, a “Payroll For One Employee” page with no price, and an S corp article last updated 7 November 2024 that describes automatic calculation, payment and filing. The only Paychex document that names the 2% shareholder premium is its 2025 year-end checklist, as an item to verify before 31 December. If a named rep is what you want, both are built for it; if quote-only is the dealbreaker, the Paychex alternatives we priced start from grids.

Collective: payroll inside a back-office bundle, at five to six times the price

Collective is a solopreneur back office that includes payroll, “powered by Gusto and synced to your books”. Its plans page on 30 August 2026 shows an S Corp Tier at $349 a month, or “$296/month billed yearly at $3,560” (the page’s own figure; twelve times $296 is $3,552). The tier covers the Form 2553 election, the annual 1120-S, employer registration, “support with reasonable salary” and “member and contractor payroll”, with $15 per additional employee and $5 per contractor in months they are paid. Its help centre says you click “Run Payroll” each period, without autopilot. Health premiums are added “to your Gusto account as a benefit” by Collective’s onboarding accountant, with COBRA premiums excluded. So the mechanism is Gusto’s, with someone else driving. Price it the way we price stacks in the Year-One Bill: $3,560 to $4,188 a year against $660 for Gusto alone buys the tax return and the accountant, not better payroll.

Deel and Rippling: built for teams, quote-gated for one

Deel’s pricing page on 30 August 2026 lists “Deel Payroll” at $29 per employee per month, US PEO from $125, and contractors at $49. Its US payroll page promises filings “for all 50 states” with W-2, W-4 and new-hire forms. Every card ends in “Book a demo”, no minimum headcount is published, and its help centre returned nothing on 2% shareholders. We tested Deel and rate it 8/10 for global hiring and contractors. Nothing on its pages says it wants a one-person domestic S corp, and until a quote says otherwise, $348 a year is an “if”. Our Gusto vs Deel comparison is where the two meet for a team that is growing, and the EOR and PEO distinction explains what the $125 PEO card buys. Rippling publishes no price at all and no S corp documentation we could find; the Rippling alternatives we priced all print a grid.

The 2% shareholder health premium: what the IRS says, and who names the boxes

The IRS writes “greater than 2-percent”; the vendors shorten it to “2% shareholder”. The IRS page on S corporation compensation and medical insurance, reviewed 3 March 2026, states that premiums paid for a more-than-2% shareholder-employee “are deductible by the S corporation and reportable as wages on the shareholder-employee’s Form W-2, subject to income tax withholding”. Paid under a plan for all or a class of employees, they “are not subject to Social Security, or Medicare (FICA), or Unemployment (FUTA) taxes”. So the amount “is included in the shareholder-employee’s Box 1 (Wages) of Form W-2 … but is not included in Boxes 3 and 5”. The Form 1120-S instructions add the reporting line the vendors reproduce: “report amounts paid for health insurance coverage for a more-than-2% shareholder … as an information item in box 14 of that shareholder’s Form W-2”. The 2026 W-2 instructions have since split that box: “box 14 has been split into box 14a and box 14b”, with the old “Other” content in 14a.

Notice 2008-1 settles when the plan counts as the corporation’s: when the S corporation pays the premium, or when the shareholder pays it and the company reimburses it in the same year. Either way, the premium “must” be reported as wages on that year’s W-2. The reporting is what the owner’s own return hangs on: the same IRS page says a 2-percent shareholder-employee “is eligible for an above-the-line deduction” for the premiums “if the medical care coverage was established by the S corporation”. Two vendor lines belong next to that: Gusto’s article says shareholders who own more than 2% “cannot participate in pre-tax section 125 benefit deductions”, and Wave’s says a 2% shareholder “cannot receive Section 125 or HSA contribution deductions”.

The same IRS page carries a caution for anyone planning to reimburse an individual policy. For tax years after 2013, it says, the Affordable Care Act “imposes penalties on an S corporation that offers a health plan failing to comply with certain market reform provisions”. Those “may include plans under which the S corporation reimburses employees for the cost of individual health insurance premiums”, and the potential excise tax is “$100 per day, per employee, per violation”. The page then adds, in its section on Notice 2015-17, that “until such guidance is issued” the tax “will not be asserted for any failure to satisfy the market reforms by a 2-percent shareholder-employee healthcare arrangement”. Which side of that line your arrangement sits on is a question for your accountant before you set up a reimbursement.

Against that standard: Patriot’s article names box 1, box 14 and box 16; ADP’s reference PDF names box 1 and box 14; QuickBooks names box 14 for Desktop and sends a plan-less solo owner there. Gusto, OnPay, SurePayroll and Wave document the item without naming boxes; Square documents it in a 2023 forum post, Paychex on a checklist, and Deel and Rippling not at all. Whichever you choose, the working deadline is the vendor’s: OnPay wants the pay run “on or before December 31” and says a later addition goes through a support ticket, and Square collects the figure in December.

What one employee costs for a year

List prices, one state, one W-2, no promotion, computed from the figures above; the promotions are real but dated, and every one of them expires.

Tool	Monthly	Year, list	Add back before you compare
SurePayroll Full Service	$36	$432	$55 for the year-end forms ($487); $9.99/mo for a second state
Square Payroll	$41	$492	Nothing published; health premium entered once a year
Patriot Full Service	$42	$504	$12/mo per additional state (archive copies)
Wave Payroll	$46	$552	1099-NEC filing not included
Gusto Solo or Simple	$55	$660	Multi-state means Plus at $80 + $12 ($92, $1,104)
OnPay	$55	$660	First month free, so $605 in year one; single-member price unpublished
QuickBooks Workforce + Simple Start	$95	$1,140	Accounting included; payroll-only plans unpriced
ADP RUN, officer-only (article claim)	$127.95 per quarter	$511.80	A quote decides; the pricing pages show nothing
Collective S Corp Tier	$349, or $296 billed yearly	$4,188, or $3,560 as Collective displays it	Tax return and accountant included

At list, the payroll-only tools with a published price run from $432 to $660 a year, a $228 spread, which is why the documentation column should decide before the price column does. Two billing details matter for an owner who pays themselves quarterly or once a year. OnPay’s help centre charges its per-person fee only for someone paid in the billing period, and Square lists “free seasonal inactivity”; the base fees run every month regardless. If you keep a plain definition of what payroll software does in mind (deposits, returns and forms), the tools above cover that part within the limits noted in each section; what separates them is the owner-specific paperwork and what they charge for a second state.

Run the test on the trial, not the brochure

Where a tool lets you set up an account without a sales call, four questions on day one settle most of it. Add yourself as an employee with a monthly salary and look for the auto-run switch. Find the 2% shareholder item, or the benefit, and read what the app says about boxes; if it says nothing, ask support in writing and keep the answer. Add your state and, if you have one, a second state, and read the price change. Then open the tax settings and confirm the tool will file 941 quarterly unless you have an IRS notice for 944 in hand. We have not run this test on any tool here; how we test the tools we do score is on our methods page.

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Sources. IRS pages, links re-checked 11 September 2026, with the review date each page carried that day: S corporation compensation and medical insurance issues (reviewed 3 March 2026); S corporation employees, shareholders and corporate officers (reviewed 4 July 2026); Paying yourself (reviewed 8 May 2026); Notice 2008-1; instructions for Form 1120-S (2025), Form 940 (2025), Form 941 (03/2026), Form 944 (2025) and Forms W-2 and W-3 (2026). Vendor pages, help centres, archive copies, support PDFs and community threads were read on 30 August 2026 unless another date is given beside the figure. Search results captured 29 August 2026.