BambooHR Pricing 2026: $250 a Month Flat Under 25 Employees, Then About $10 a Head
As of November 7, 2026, BambooHR costs $250, $425 or $650 a month flat for 25 employees or fewer, then $10.25, $17.50 or $25 per employee. What a small company really pays per head, which add-ons are quote-only, and the webhook gap that breaks onboarding automations.
How much does BambooHR cost? The short answer
As of November 7, 2026, BambooHR charges a flat monthly rate up to 25 employees: $250 for Core, $425 for Pro and $650 for Elite. From 26 employees it switches to per-employee pricing that BambooHR's FAQ puts at $10.25, $17.50 and $25 a month, with automatic volume discounts. So a 10-person company pays $25 an employee on Core, and a 40-person company about $10. Payroll, benefits administration and time tracking are add-ons sold by quote.
Prices and plan contents come from bamboohr.com/pricing, and the automation details from BambooHR's developer documentation on webhooks. Both were read November 7, 2026. The headcount examples are our arithmetic on the published numbers.
BambooHR plans side by side
| Plan | 25 employees or fewer | 26+ employees (FAQ rate) | Plan card shows | What it adds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Core | $250 a month flat | $10.25 per employee | $10 | Employee records, report builder, workflows and approvals, hiring and onboarding, time off, eNPS, AI assistant for HR data questions |
| Pro | $425 a month flat | $17.50 per employee | $17 | Core plus performance reviews and 1:1s, employee community, AI assistant that answers from your policies and handbook |
| Elite | $650 a month flat | $25 per employee | $25 | Pro plus compensation planning with Mercer salary benchmarks, HR benchmarks, admin training, 2 hours a year of data integrity services, 30 more days of implementation |
One thing to notice: the plan cards and the FAQ on the same page disagree by a few cents ($10 vs $10.25, $17 vs $17.50). The FAQ is the more specific statement, so we use it below; expect your quote to land near those figures before volume discounts. BambooHR does not publish the discount schedule. It does publish two other discounts: 15% off for registered nonprofits, and 15% off when you combine Payroll and Benefits Administration with any plan (US employees only). Month-to-month and longer terms are both offered.
The 25-employee line: what each employee really costs
The flat minimum means small companies pay much more per head than the headline. Here is the effective monthly cost per employee at common sizes:
| Employees | Core a month | Per employee | Pro a month | Per employee | Elite a month |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8 | $250 | $31.25 | $425 | $53.13 | $650 |
| 15 | $250 | $16.67 | $425 | $28.33 | $650 |
| 25 | $250 | $10.00 | $425 | $17.00 | $650 |
| 26 | $266.50 | $10.25 | $455 | $17.50 | $650 |
| 40 | $410 | $10.25 | $700 | $17.50 | $1,000 |
Figures from 26 employees are before BambooHR's unpublished volume discounts, so treat them as a ceiling. The takeaway: at 8 employees, Core costs $3,000 a year, $375 per person. Below about 15 people you are paying mostly for the minimum, so the question is less "which plan" than "do we need an HR system yet, or a few good automations on the tools we already pay for".
Add-ons: where the quote grows
BambooHR lists four add-ons without prices: Payroll (direct deposit, federal and state tax filing, US employees only), Benefits Administration (open enrollment, life events, carrier connections, US only), Time and Attendance (shift scheduling, overtime, time clocks and kiosks) and Global Employment powered by Remote (employer of record and contractors). Every one of them is "get a quote". If payroll is the reason you are shopping, ask for the bundled Payroll plus Benefits price in writing, since that is where the published 15% bundle discount applies.
Connecting BambooHR to the rest of your stack
BambooHR says it has more than 150 integration partners in its marketplace. For anything the marketplace doesn't cover, it has an API and two kinds of webhooks, and the difference between them decides what you can automate:
- Global webhooks are set up by an admin in BambooHR settings and watch a fixed list of standard fields: hire date, employment status, department, job title, address and similar.
- Permissioned webhooks are created through the API and can watch any field the API user is allowed to see.
- Both work on custom fields, but fields in custom tables are not supported. If you track certifications, equipment or licenses in a custom table, a change there will not fire a webhook. The automation has to poll the API on a schedule instead.
- Payloads only go to HTTPS addresses and are signed with SHA-256 HMAC, so the receiving workflow should verify the signature before it acts.
A typical build: a new hire's status changes to active, a webhook fires, and the workflow creates their Google Workspace and Slack accounts, adds them to payroll-adjacent tools, books orientation and posts a welcome. With a no-code tool in the middle, each hire is one run of a several-step workflow, which is cheap at small-company volumes; our automation platform pricing comparison shows what that costs on each tool, and how much Zapier costs covers the task meter if Zapier is already in your stack. Offboarding is the mirror image and the one that matters more for security.
Is BambooHR worth it for a small business?
At 25 or more employees, Core at roughly $10 a head is a fair price for a clean employee record, onboarding checklists and time off in one place. Under about 15 employees the $250 minimum is the issue, not the software. Many owners at that size get most of the value from a shared employee database, a form-driven onboarding checklist and an automation that copies new-hire data into the systems they already use, the same pattern we cover in how to automate data entry with AI. Pro and Elite make sense when performance reviews or compensation planning are an actual process at your company, not an aspiration.
Who can build HR and onboarding automations for my business?
If BambooHR's marketplace already has a connector for each tool you use, turn those on first. Bring in a builder when onboarding still means someone copying the same data into five systems, when your key data lives in a custom table webhooks can't see, or when you want an AI assistant that answers staff questions from your handbook in Slack or by text. SuperDupr, the AI ops shop Justin McKelvey runs, builds that layer: BambooHR stays the system of record, and the workflows read and write it through the API. We sell the build, not BambooHR licenses. An AI workflow automation project is published at $10,000 to $25,000, and most systems go live in 2 to 4 weeks. Bring your headcount and a list of the steps in your current onboarding to a free strategy session and we'll tell you which ones are worth automating.
Sources
- BambooHR, Plans and Pricing (bamboohr.com/pricing), read November 7, 2026: Core, Pro and Elite plan cards ($10, $17 and $25 per employee a month), FAQ rates for companies over 25 employees ($10.25, $17.50, $25) and flat rates for 25 or fewer ($250, $425, $650), plan contents, add-ons (Payroll, Benefits Administration, Time and Attendance, Global Employment), 15% Payroll plus Benefits bundle discount for US employees, 15% nonprofit discount, automatic volume discounts, payment terms, 150+ integration partners.
- BambooHR Developer Documentation, Webhooks (documentation.bamboohr.com/docs/webhooks), read November 7, 2026: global and permissioned webhooks, monitored fields, custom fields supported, custom tables not supported, HTTPS only, SHA-256 HMAC signature headers.
- Worked examples: SuperDupr's arithmetic on the published prices above, for the headcounts stated, before unpublished volume discounts.
Frequently Asked Questions
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As of November 7, 2026, BambooHR's pricing FAQ says companies with more than 25 employees pay $10.25 per employee a month for Core, $17.50 for Pro and $25 for Elite, with automatic volume discounts. The plan cards on the same page round these to $10, $17 and $25.
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Companies with 25 or fewer employees pay a flat monthly rate: $250 for Core, $425 for Pro and $650 for Elite. For a 10-person company that works out to $25 an employee a month on Core, or $3,000 a year.
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No. Payroll, Benefits Administration, Time and Attendance and Global Employment are add-ons, and BambooHR prices each by quote. It publishes a 15% discount when Payroll and Benefits Administration are combined with any plan, for US employees.
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Yes. BambooHR has a REST API plus two kinds of webhooks: global webhooks set up by an admin that watch a fixed list of standard fields, and permissioned webhooks created through the API that watch any field the API user can access. Fields in custom tables do not trigger webhooks, so automations on that data have to poll the API.
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Yes. Volume discounts apply automatically as headcount grows, registered nonprofits get an additional 15% off, and combining Payroll and Benefits Administration gets a 15% bundle discount for US employees.
Written by
Justin McKelveyFormer CTO at an AI startup and former Head of Product, with 50+ products shipped. I ran snowboard and bike shops before I taught myself to code, so I build AI systems and websites with the owner in mind.