Remote Review

Remote charges $699 per employee per month to act as employer of record across 90+ countries, using its own legal entities in its main markets and vetted local partners elsewhere. It asks for no security deposit, which is the part your Finance team will notice first.

An employer of record, usually shortened to EOR, becomes the legal employer of your hire in a country where you have no company of your own. You direct the work. Remote holds the employment contract, runs local payroll and carries the compliance obligations.

In practice that means you can put someone on payroll in Berlin without registering a German entity, appointing a local accountant, or waiting three months to do it.

One correction before the rest of this review. We recorded a $599 annual rate for Remote in June 2026, and Remote’s pricing page no longer displays it. We have repriced this review at the $699 the page shows, and the cost section sets out what happened to the cheaper rate.

The pitch is a single platform for EOR, contractor management and payroll. It lands with People Ops teams tired of running Deel for contractors, Oyster for employees and a local provider in each market for compliance.

If that consolidation is what you are buying, our alternatives to Oyster and our Deel vs Oyster comparison both show where one platform genuinely replaces two.

Composite is a weighted index across these verified dimensions. See our methodology.

Who Remote.com Is Designed For

Remote fits Series A to C companies expanding abroad that want one vendor covering EOR, contractors and payroll.

We found no minimum employee count, no minimum contract length and no exclusivity clause. A small business making one overseas hire and a fast-growing engineering team therefore sit on the same platform, on the same terms.

It is less suited to companies with large contractor workforces or complex equity scenarios, where Remote’s depth falls behind providers that specialise in one of them.

How Setup and Management Work

EOR onboarding in owned-entity markets takes 5–7 business days from contract signature to first payroll. Partner-country hires run 10–15 days.

Both timelines assume you have employment contracts and right-to-work documentation ready on day one; for a non-national in the UK, the right-to-work assessment can add about three days. EOR hires get a dedicated onboarding specialist.

Two gates can stall a first hire whatever those timelines say, and neither appears on the pricing page.

The first is a Know Your Business check, or KYB. It is the anti-money-laundering review any provider must run on your company before it will move money on your behalf. Inviting your first worker triggers it, and onboarding is held until it clears.

The second is a reserve payment: a cash float Remote holds so it can still pay your employees in a month when you cannot pay Remote. Its pricing FAQ says it asks for one only in rare, higher-risk cases, and puts no figure on it.

Ask what yours would be before you sign. A young company with no filed accounts is the profile most likely to be asked, and it is a cash call nobody has put in the budget.

After that, one dashboard covers employees, contractors and payroll. Payroll runs monthly in most markets, and you set the schedule for contractor payments.

Employer of Record

Remote employs your staff through its own subsidiaries in its major markets, and through vetted local partners everywhere else. Which model applies to your country changes your onboarding time and who carries the liability, so ask before you shortlist.

We verified owned subsidiaries in the UK (Remote Technology Services Ltd, #12387671), Germany, France, Spain, and 15 other primary markets through local registry searches.

Global Payroll

Remote runs payroll in-house across 70+ countries with direct connections into local tax systems. Remote Payroll is formally recognised by HMRC, the UK tax authority, as a UK payroll provider.

For UK teams it can also reclaim up to 103% of Statutory Maternity Pay, which is the minimum maternity pay an employer is legally obliged to fund. Small employers get back more than they paid out, because that extra 3% is the government covering their National Insurance on it.

Contractor Management

Remote Pay handles contractor payments across 200+ countries, covering invoicing and payment processing in a range of currencies. It collects the US tax forms for you: a W-9 from contractors who are US taxpayers, a W-8BEN from everyone else.

It will also pay in USDC, a stablecoin pegged to the dollar, for contractors who want part of their pay in crypto and are willing to carry the risk that goes with it.

Contractor Management Plus, at $99 per contractor per month, adds cover against misclassification. Misclassification is a ruling that someone you have been paying as a contractor was legally your employee all along, and the bill is back taxes, unpaid contributions and usually penalties.

Remote publishes cover of up to $100,000 per contractor for penalties. A higher per-client ceiling has been quoted to us but is not on Remote’s public pricing page, so get your own cap in writing. That is one of very few places any provider puts a written cap on your downside.

It sits between the $29 self-serve tier and Contractor of Record at $325, where Remote engages the contractor itself and takes the relationship onto its own books. For a UK team facing an HMRC challenge over a contractor of several years, that cover is the reason to pay the premium.

The catch is that you cannot edit the contract on this tier. Remote’s agreement is used exactly as written, which your legal team may or may not wear.

HR and Workforce Management

Remote bundles a basic HRIS, meaning a human resources information system: the central record of who works for you, holding time tracking, expense claims and documents.

You pay nothing for it. There is no platform fee, no onboarding fee and no minimum company size, and you pay per seat only for the EOR, payroll or contractor products you switch on. Global Payroll carries a separate implementation fee, covered under cost below.

It is enough to run the employment products and no more. Time off is tracked with an approval workflow and there is no shift scheduling. Expenses are a receipt upload and an approval route, with little policy configuration.

If you were hoping to retire a dedicated HR system, this will not do it.

Benefits administration is the one to check by country. It runs through local partners in a selection of markets, and what a hire is actually offered changes with the market.

Mental health support reaches further than the rest of the benefits stack. Remote’s partnership with Modern Health gives EOR employees self-guided content, coaching and licensed therapists across dozens of countries.

Additional Services

Three services sit outside the core products, and each stops sooner than the pitch suggests.

Immigration support covers visa sponsorship and relocation through partners, in major destinations only, and takes 3 to 6 months. Equipment management provisions and recovers laptops in a selection of countries; most markets need someone on your side coordinating it by hand.

Equity compensation tracks grants and handles the paperwork. It connects to Carta, though somebody still has to synchronise the data by hand.

Two of them: the integrations and the reporting. The rest of Remote’s feature list is competent and unremarkable, and you will neither choose nor reject Remote because of it.

We compared each set against the specialists that do only that one thing, using published documentation and user reviews, which is the fair standard once a platform claims to cover everything you need.

Reporting and Analytics

The reports themselves are standard: headcount, costs, demographics. What is worth having is that they cover employees and contractors together, so a Finance team that used to reconcile several vendor statements reads one.

The forecasting stops at showing you the payroll obligations coming up. Tax optimisation and entity-setup modelling happen in a spreadsheet somewhere else.

Compliance reporting is automated for the routine filings, right-to-work verification among them. Anything a regulator or an auditor asks for in its own format, somebody on your team compiles.

Integrations and API Access

Remote publishes 40+ integrations. Fewer than 10 of them sync in both directions; the rest push basic employee data one way and stop there.

The finance connectors are where that matters. QuickBooks, Xero and NetSuite all connect, and all three receive a summary journal entry rather than the underlying transactions, so anyone who wants to see what a country actually cost still opens the invoice.

HR and hiring stack: native connectors reach the Zelt and GoCo HR systems, the Greenhouse applicant tracking system and Vanta for security compliance. The catalogue is still growing, and syncing paid time off from a third-party HR system can still need a workaround.

API access: the REST API, the standard way one system talks to another over the web, covers basic employee and contractor records. A ceiling of 100 requests a minute and a thin set of endpoints will frustrate anyone building something custom on top of it.

$699 per employee per month, and that single figure is the whole of what Remote publishes for EOR. There is no deposit and no EOR setup fee, which is where it genuinely differs from Deel.

What Remote does not publish is the margin it takes when it converts your money into your employee’s currency. That is the number to chase, and we come to it below.

The $599 annual rate we quoted in June 2026 is no longer on display. Re-checking on 2 August, Remote’s pricing page shows a single $699 and no annual billing option anywhere on it.

The $599 annual value is still carried in that page’s own data, with nothing on the page rendering it and no billing toggle to reach it. So the rate appears to survive inside Remote while a buyer reading the pricing page sees only the more expensive number.

Ask for the annual rate by name, and get any offer of it in writing. A discount you have to already know about before you can be offered it is worth one email.

Pricing at a glance

Every rate above was read from Remote’s published pricing page on 2 August 2026. Remote bundles its basic HR record-keeping with the paid products rather than charging for it separately.

What the headline price leaves out

Employer taxes and statutory contributions. Every country obliges an employer to pay social security, pension and insurance charges on top of salary. Remote passes these through at cost, typically 10 to 35 percent of gross pay.

France, Brazil, Italy and Belgium sit toward the top of that range. The UK and much of the Asia-Pacific region sit nearer the bottom.

The practical effect is that the seat fee is the small part of your bill. On a $5,000 monthly salary carrying 20 percent employer costs, your true cost is about $6,700, and the $699 is roughly a tenth of it.

Double the salary and the fee’s share of the bill halves. Model the salary and the local employer costs first, then add the seat fee. Doing it the other way round is how a first invoice ends up well above what you told Finance.

FX margin on the Remote FX Rate. If you fund in dollars and your employee is paid in euros, somebody converts that money, and the rate they use is almost never the one you see on Google.

Remote fixes a monthly rate per currency pair and does not publish its markup over the mid-market rate, which is the wholesale rate banks quote each other. Its own pricing FAQ offers only that the rate is “highly competitive”.

Industry norms put that spread at 1 to 3 percent. Take the example above: 50 people at $6,000 a month in salary and employer costs is $3.6 million a year converted into local currency, which puts the margin between $36,000 and $108,000.

None of it will ever arrive as a line item you can query. That is why the first question below asks for the markup on each currency pair you will actually use.

Global Payroll implementation fee. The $29 per employee per month buys the recurring service only. The one-time setup fee is quote-based and unpublished, and comparable providers charge $5,000 to $25,000 per entity.

Before you sign, ask Remote to confirm in writing:

01. The exact FX markup on the Remote FX Rate, for each currency pair you will actually use.

02. Whether any rate below the published $699 is available to you, what triggers it, and how long it is held.

03. The Global Payroll implementation fee per entity and the recurring delivery fee, itemised separately.

04. Your severance and notice-period exposure in each target country, and who pays it when a role ends.

05. Whether the 15 percent startup discount still exists at all, since Remote sets it out only in a support article last updated in February 2023 and not on the current pricing page, and what happens if you terminate inside the 12-month minimum term it carries.

06. Whether a reserve payment will be asked of you before your first hire onboards, and how much.

Remote’s document checks read as strict. Users report paperwork sent back for gaps they expected to be waved through, which costs days on a first hire and buys a smaller chance of a compliance problem later.

Setting up a contractor takes 24-48 hours. An employee takes the 5-7 business days in an owned entity, or 10-15 in a partner country, and those clocks start only once the KYB check clears and any reserve payment is settled, both covered in how Remote works above.

Platform Usability

The main dashboard lists every worker whatever their type, with filters for employment status, country and department. Approving time off, reviewing expenses and running a standard report take few clicks, and an employee and a contractor are approved the same way, so whoever does this job does not have to remember two systems.

The mobile app covers employee self-service only. A manager cannot approve a request or open a report on a phone, so anyone signing things off is doing it at a desk.

Customer Support

Support is where the price stops being the interesting number. A German social insurance query that a first-line agent cannot answer is the test, and reaching someone who can takes days on the standard tier.

Which tier you land on is decided by headcount, not by need, so it is worth reading our note on EOR support tiers before you assume the answer.

Standard support: A 24/7 RemoteAI chatbot answers instant questions and can hand off to a live agent, but human email and chat responses still run 24-48 hours. First-line agents handle basic queries but escalate anything complex.

Priority support: included once you pass 50 employees. You get a named account manager and a four-hour response time written into the contract as a service level agreement, which means it is a commitment you can hold them to.

Enterprise support: Dedicated success manager, quarterly business reviews, and direct escalation paths. Requires custom pricing.

What Users Like

Reviewers keep naming the same four things. They turn a contractor into an employee without leaving the system. Finance gets one invoice to reconcile.

A hire in Poland gets the same experience as a hire in Portugal. And on the base services, no reviewer we read reported a fee they had not expected.

Common Complaints

The negative reviews cluster in two places: what the platform will not bend on, and how long a hard question takes to answer.

On payment flexibility, one reviewer put it as “We hit the ceiling quickly on contractor payment flexibility. Our freelancers work on project milestones, but Remote forces monthly cycles.” Another, on a partner market: “EOR service in Brazil took 6 weeks to onboard one employee. Remote blamed their partner but we’re still stuck with the delay.”

The billing and policy disputes are the ones to read before you sign. A handful of reviewers report accounting errors that were only taken seriously once they withheld payment, and policy shifts on terminations, with requests refused or steered toward a costlier settlement, even where local law had not changed.

Scope and price any termination before you commit to the country.

On support, two reviewers put it plainly. “First-line support is friendly but useless for real problems. Getting to someone who understands employment law takes days of back-and-forth.” And: “The all-in-one pitch sounds great until you need to do something slightly non-standard. Then you discover everything requires manual workarounds.”

Almost everything good and everything frustrating about Remote comes from the same decision: to own its entities rather than rent them, and to run one platform across every worker type.

We rated it against the same evidence we use on every provider, which is published pricing, its own trust and legal documentation, company registry filings, and user reviews from January to April 2026.

The clearest fit we see is a Series A to C company placing its first employees in the UK, Germany, France or Spain: hiring concentrated in Europe, a cash position that still matters, and a preference for one vendor over three.

The single invoice is the part that usually wins the internal argument. If your Finance team reconciles three vendor statements every month, collapsing them into one is a saving you can put a number on and take to whoever signs the purchase order.

Two things should send you elsewhere. Run more than about 50 contractors and Remote’s monthly-only payment cycle will fight you every week, where Deel’s contractor tooling is built for exactly that load.

Grant equity across several subsidiaries with real tax planning behind it and you will outgrow Remote Equity quickly, since it is limited to Delaware C-Corps and stops well short of a dedicated equity platform.

Three things send buyers away from Remote, and we have watched each of them settle a shortlist on its own.

The Oyster trade is the one to think hardest about. Oyster carries no contractor management at all, so you would be adding a second vendor to buy a compliance gain, which is the reverse of why most teams arrive at Remote.

Top alternatives

WhichPayroll may earn a commission if you book a demo through our links. Reviews remain editorially independent.

Buy Remote for the entity model, and treat the price as the second question.

Of the providers we have assessed, very few will name the company that legally employs your staff in Germany and hand you its registration number to check. Where your legal team cares about that, and in regulated industries it always does, Remote is the shortest route to it.

You pay $100 a month more than Deel for the privilege, and you accept 90 countries against Deel’s 130. Neither is disqualifying unless your next hire sits in one of the 40 extra countries Deel reaches.

The $699 is not what decides this. Count how many of your next ten hires fall outside Remote’s 90 countries, and that number will settle it for you.

Remote at a glance

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Best fit for: compliance-first teams hiring into Remote’s owned-entity markets, who want a legal employer they can look up and no deposit against their working capital.

Ask on the call: whether the no-deposit position holds in your contract, and whether a reserve payment applies to a company at your stage. Both are settled before your first hire onboards.

WhichPayroll may earn a commission if you book a demo through our links. Reviews remain editorially independent.

Remote scores 8.0 because three of the four dimensions we measure come out at or near full marks, and the fourth, coverage, comes out at 4.8. The table below shows each weight and what it contributes.

Our coverage term counts countries and cannot see what is behind them, and that costs Remote here. Its pitch is owned entities where rivals use partner arrangements, which is exactly what a headcount of 90 conceals.

A partner network can add a country with a contract, where an owned entity takes months, a lawyer and a filed registration.

So if you want the legal employer to be the company you are actually paying, the 4.8 understates Remote. Read the entity model above and treat this row as a footprint count.

If you need country number 91, no amount of entity ownership helps and the 4.8 is telling you the truth.

These four weights are the whole score. Coverage, pricing transparency and security disclosure are read from published evidence; integration depth is an editorial assessment. Cost friction, offboarding and support quality are not scored and are covered in the body of this review instead.

Full rubric and a worked example on our methodology page.

WhichPayroll is an independent comparison site for global payroll, EOR, and contractor management platforms. We do not sell these services and do not accept payment for editorial placement or reviews. We may earn a commission if you book a demo or request a quote through links on this page.

This review was produced by our editorial team and was not reviewed or approved by Remote before publication.

Data Sources

Remote pricing page (re-verified 2 August 2026) · G2 and Capterra reviews (Jan–Apr 2026) · Remote help centre documentation and Country Explorer · Companies House UK filings.

Change at this update. The $599 annual EOR rate recorded in our June 2026 review is no longer displayed on Remote’s pricing page. We have repriced this review to the displayed $699 and flagged the effect on our pricing-transparency score.

Research Approach

Assessed across entity model and compliance infrastructure (owned entities in the primary markets, vetted partners elsewhere), country coverage depth and quality, pricing transparency and the no-deposit model, onboarding experience, customer support, and verified user feedback from G2 and Capterra.

No live paid pilot was run and no contract with Remote was signed for this review. Where this page describes platform behaviour, it is drawn from published documentation and user reports, not from our own account.

Tools to Evaluate Remote.com

Provider Coverage Lookup: check which countries each provider covers and compare coverage side by side. EOR vs Entity Break-Even Modeler: find the headcount at which setting up your own entity beats paying EOR fees. Employer Cost & Burden Calculator: turn a gross salary into a realistic total employer cost by country.

WhichPayroll Research used in this review

Pricing Transparency Index: how clearly this provider discloses pricing compared with the rest of the market. EOR Cost Benchmark: published fee ranges and first-year cost context across 17 providers.

Global Payroll Coverage Index: country breadth and owned-entity depth, scored provider by provider. Integration Depth Index: how far HR and finance integrations actually reach.

Security Disclosure Benchmark: SOC 2, ISO 27001 and public security disclosure ratings across providers.