Homebase Review 2026: Free Limits and Payroll Costs

Basic is free for one location with up to ten active employees. Current paid cards specify unlimited employees, not a verified fifty-person cap. The plan and trial guide uses active employees; it does not establish a rolling scheduled-worker billing algorithm. Keep roster eligibility separate from people scheduled this week and people receiving payroll this month.

The paid plans are Essentials at $30/location/month, Plus at $70, and All-in-One at $120. With annual billing, their monthly equivalents are $24, $56, and $96 respectively: $288, $672, and $1,152 per location for a year before extras. Basic, Essentials, Plus, and All-in-One are the four workforce tiers; Payroll is not an invented fifth scheduling plan.

For two locations, Essentials monthly is $60 before payroll and other services. The downgrade guidance requires Essentials or higher for every active location in a multi-location account. Our SaaS spending guide recommends modeling the actual charging unit: ten additional workers on an eligible paid roster and one additional location are different cost events.

Documented scheduling workflows include availability, open shifts, trades, templates, and repeating schedules. Those are useful building blocks for an hourly team, but they are not evidence that a particular rota meets staffing requirements. An evaluation should include a normal week, someone unavailable, an uncovered role, and a last-minute change. Check who can publish or change the result, not only how a draft looks.

Current pricing places advanced scheduling/time tracking and team communication on Essentials; Plus adds the AI Scheduling Assistant, PTO/time-off controls, departments, and permissions. All-in-One emphasizes onboarding, labor-cost management, and HR/compliance capabilities. If employee records rather than shift coordination dominate the requirement, compare an HRIS-oriented option such as BambooHR against the actual personnel workflows instead of paying for scheduling features by default.

There is an official placement inconsistency worth preserving: older upgrade guidance includes messaging in Basic and labor-cost management in Plus, while current pricing emphasizes those families higher up. Confirm the exact capability in the chosen plan, rather than saying a whole feature family is absent. Similarly, the presence of AI scheduling is not a tested guarantee of accuracy, appropriate staffing, or reduced management time.

The published payroll rate is $49/month plus $6 for each employee paid. The payroll FAQ defines that person charge once per unique paid employee per month, regardless of payroll frequency. Four pay runs for the same fifteen people therefore produce a $90 person component, not $360. A roster member receiving no pay that month does not generate the paid-person fee.

For one location on Essentials monthly and fifteen paid employees, the example is $30 + $49 + fifteen times $6 = $169/month before taxes and extras. Payroll is not free on Basic or included merely because a workforce tier is called All-in-One. Hourly, salaried, and contractor pay is documented, but eligibility and the precise configuration still need confirmation before treating the example as a quote.

Do not silently multiply or waive the payroll base across multiple legal entities; that detail was not established by the public evidence used here. The SaaS evaluation checklist is helpful for separating confirmed rates from quotation questions. Track locations, unique paid people, optional products, and exceptional fees in separate lines, then reconcile the proposed invoice with the provider before adopting payroll.

US business eligibility is a gate, not a footnote. The payroll FAQ also warns about overseas payees and restricted business types. A company should confirm its legal entity, worker arrangement, and payment destinations before assuming an available scheduling account can activate Payroll. A supported country for using an app does not establish that every payroll situation within or beyond that country is supported.

The payroll-fees guide lists additional charges including $200 per amendment/refiling, $125 for funding failures, and $3 for mailed tax forms. These are not the normal employee fee, but they can affect the real bill. Verify which services and circumstances trigger them, keep funding responsibilities clear, and do not treat the base subscription as the maximum possible monthly expense.

For international hiring requirements, investigate Deel or Remote as different service models, with their own coverage and contracts. Neither an alternative's global positioning nor Homebase's HR/compliance label removes the employer's obligations. Confirm the relevant tax and employment requirements with an appropriately qualified adviser. This documentary review does not establish that a particular payroll setup or generated schedule complies with every applicable rule.

The team-permissions guide distinguishes payroll administration, wage visibility, reports, schedule editing, and timecard locking. Payroll Admin requires Manager/General Manager access; it does not follow automatically from a person's real-world title. A supervisor who needs to edit shifts should not be assumed to need every payroll or wage permission merely because they manage other employees.

Map the intended employee, shift manager, payroll operator, and owner before inviting the whole team. During evaluation, check each role's actual screens and export abilities using authorized sample records. Confirm who corrects a timecard, who locks a period, and who approves the downstream payroll action. These are proposed acceptance checks, not claims that this review executed those actions or verified isolation in a live account.

A broader workforce suite such as Rippling may belong on the shortlist when HR and IT administration are intertwined, but its wider scope does not answer Homebase's permission questions. Choose the smallest set of rights appropriate to the work and document responsibility for offboarding. Plan for a manager leaving without relying on a shared owner login to keep the process running.

The timesheet export instructions document CSV summaries and printing/PDF. The timesheet navigation guide limits the selected range to 31 days at once. That is a reporting-window limit, not proof that older records are deleted after 31 days. A multi-month archive may require repeated exports rather than one large date selection.

Do not present the often-repeated ninety-day Free/four-year paid history distinction as a verified deletion policy here: a complete current primary-source specification was not obtained. The privacy policy permits longer retention for legal, tax, and other stated purposes. Account visibility, downloadable history, and backend retention are separate questions; none should be inferred solely from the size of a date selector.

Create an independent record plan covering required timesheets, schedules, reports, rosters, and relevant payroll records. A timesheet CSV summary does not establish that onboarding documents, permissions, and every personnel record are included or restorable elsewhere. Check representative exported periods and ask about missing fields before cancellation. Sensitive wage and employee information also needs appropriate storage and access controls once it leaves the application.

The documented trial provides fourteen days of All-in-One. Without a card or paid selection, an account transitions to Basic, subject to its eligibility limits; adding a card can authorize billing at the end of the trial. A temporary six-month Payroll/Plus offer is not a permanent free payroll plan and should not determine the ordinary paid starting-price field used in a comparison.

Distinguish downgrading from closing. An account with multiple active locations cannot simply treat them all as separate free Basic allowances under the documented downgrade rule. Before changing a plan, confirm which capabilities will remain, what locations need paid coverage, and how separately subscribed services are handled. A lower future workforce price does not by itself confirm that payroll or another add-on has been cancelled.

The account-closure guide warns that access to most data is lost and recommends saving timesheets, schedules, reports, and rosters first. Complete that work before closure. If moving to another payroll provider, our Gusto alternatives guide provides comparison context, but the transition date, historic records, and filing responsibilities need an explicit handover plan rather than assumptions about automatic migration.

Homebase is a reasonable scheduling and time-tracking shortlist for hourly teams whose location structure and roster fit the documented plans. Basic is genuinely useful to evaluate for one eligible location with ten or fewer active employees. Larger rosters need the paid-plan decision, while Payroll adds a different eligibility gate and billing meter. Free scheduling is not free payroll or a promise of comprehensive HR coverage.

If US payroll is the central requirement, compare the complete configuration with Gusto, including unique paid people, workforce subscriptions, extras, and service obligations. If shift coordination is central, first validate the schedule, time-off, and manager-permission workflow. Our HR and payroll directory helps keep these different buying cases separate instead of selecting the tool with the lowest headline amount.

Proceed only after confirming active-roster eligibility, the exact feature tier, payroll scope, and an independent record plan. Obtain clarification where current feature placement or retention is unclear. The recommendation is based on October 8 official-source research, not measured payroll accuracy, AI scheduling quality, support responsiveness, or employment-law compliance. Those outcomes require a properly scoped evaluation and ongoing business oversight.