BambooHR Pricing: Cost Per Employee and Plans

Short answer: BambooHR publishes its rates, which puts it in the minority of HR and recruiting vendors. Checked on August 3, 2026, Core is $10, Pro is $17 and Elite is $25 per employee per month, and companies with 25 employees or fewer pay a flat rate starting at $250 a month. The Applicant Tracking System is included in all three plans. Payroll, Benefits Administration, Time and Attendance and Global Employment are priced separately as add-ons. There is no free plan, though there is a free trial with no credit card required. You still fill in a form to get your exact number, because volume discounts are applied automatically based on headcount.

Last updated August 2026.

How much does BambooHR cost?

BambooHR charges per employee per month across your entire headcount, not per recruiter or per HR seat. That is the single most important thing to understand about the bill, and we will come back to it, because it is where most budget surprises come from.

Here are the published rates, taken from bamboohr.com on August 3, 2026.

Plan	Rate	Job openings allowed	Applicant tracking
Core	$10 per employee per month	5	Included
Pro	$17 per employee per month	25	Included
Elite	$25 per employee per month	50	Included
Small companies	Flat rate starting at $250 per month for 25 employees or fewer	By plan	Included

Note what changes across the tiers and what does not. The ATS is in every plan, so you are not being upsold on the ability to hire. What you buy as you move up is depth in the rest of the HR system, plus the number of requisitions you may have open at once.

What does BambooHR cost per year?

Per-employee pricing is easy to underestimate because the unit is small. Ten dollars sounds like nothing. Multiplied by a headcount that grew 40 percent last year, it stops sounding like nothing. Here is the list-rate arithmetic at a few common company sizes.

Headcount	Core, monthly	Pro, monthly	Elite, monthly	Pro, annualized
25 or fewer	Flat rate starting at $250 per month			From $3,000
50	$500	$850	$1,250	$10,200
100	$1,000	$1,700	$2,500	$20,400
200	$2,000	$3,400	$5,000	$40,800
500	$5,000	$8,500	$12,500	$102,000

Treat these as list-rate math rather than as quotes. BambooHR says volume discounts are applied automatically as headcount grows, with no negotiation required, so a 500-person company will not pay the straight multiplication above. The point of the table is the shape of the curve, not the final figure: your HR software bill is a function of how many people work for you, and it moves every time you hire, whether or not the hire had anything to do with HR software.

Is BambooHR free?

No. BambooHR has no free plan and no permanently free tier. It does offer a free trial, and the signup page states plainly that no credit card is required and that the trial ends automatically rather than rolling into a paid subscription. The page does not state the trial length. Published pricing starts at $10 per employee per month, with the $250 monthly floor for companies of 25 or fewer.

If you have found a page describing a free BambooHR plan, it is almost certainly describing the trial, or it is out of date.

What discounts does BambooHR offer?

Three, and all of them are stated publicly rather than held for the negotiation.

• Automatic volume discounts. Applied based on headcount, with BambooHR explicitly saying no negotiation is needed. Useful to know before you spend a week preparing to haggle.
• Nonprofit discount. An additional 15 percent for qualifying organizations.
• Bundle discount. 15 percent off when you combine the Payroll and Benefits Administration add-ons, for US-based employees.

What are the BambooHR add-ons?

The per-employee rate covers the core HR system. Four things sit outside it and are quoted separately: Payroll, for US employees only; Benefits Administration, also US employees only; Time and Attendance; and Global Employment, which BambooHR offers powered by Remote.

Build your comparison on the total, not the platform rate. A company that needs payroll and benefits administration alongside the core system is buying three products, and comparing that combined number against a competitor's all-in platform price is the only apples-to-apples version of the exercise.

Two adjacent costs are worth putting in the same budget line even though no vendor bills them to you. Syndication to Indeed, ZipRecruiter and LinkedIn is included in the ATS, but the sponsored placement that actually produces applicants is not, and if you are hiring fully remote then the specialist boards where remote roles get listed are another line entirely. And onboarding in BambooHR covers packets, checklists and e-signatures, which is document readiness rather than role readiness. Actual role training and certification tracking is a separate system.

Which recruiting vendors publish their pricing?

BambooHR being transparent is genuinely unusual, and it is worth seeing against the field. Here is where the vendors in this category stand, checked in August 2026.

Vendor	Publishes pricing?	Entry rate as published
BambooHR	Yes	$10 per employee per month, Core
Manatal	Yes	$15 per user per month, billed annually
CVViZ	Yes	$99 per month, Starter
Prescreener	Yes	$199 per month, Starter
Workable	Yes	$299 per month, Standard
Ashby	Partly	$400 per month, Foundations. Higher tiers by quote
JazzHR	Yes	$1,000 per year, Hero
SmartRecruiters	Partly	Essential starts at $14,995. AI screening sits in a quote-only edition
Greenhouse	No	Quote only
Lever	No	Quote only
iCIMS	No	Quote only
Workday	No	Quote only
HireVue	No	Quote only
Paradox	No	Quote only
Fountain	No	Quote only, no free trial
Sapia.ai	No	Quote only, billed per hire

The pattern is not really about vendor honesty. It tracks who the product is sold to. Tools bought by an office manager or an HR lead publish prices because the buyer expects to see them. Tools bought through a procurement cycle with a multi-year contract do not, because the price is genuinely assembled per deal. Where that leaves you practically: if your shortlist mixes both kinds, you cannot finish the comparison without running the quote-only sales processes to the end, and those take longer than most teams plan for.

The part of BambooHR pricing that catches hiring teams out

Two mismatches, and they compound.

The first is that the price tracks headcount while the work tracks hiring. A 180-person company that opens six roles pays exactly what a 180-person company that opens none pays. In a growth year that feels fair, since you are hiring and the system is earning its keep. In a flat year you are paying a bill sized by past success for a system doing very little recruiting work. Whether that is acceptable depends on how much of the value you get from the HR side, which for most BambooHR customers is genuinely most of it.

The second is the job openings cap, and this is the one that surprises people, because it is a hiring limit inside a product priced on employees. Core allows 5 open requisitions. A 70-person company running a hiring push with nine roles open at once has to move to Pro, and that upgrade is not a small add-on for the recruiting team. It reprices all 70 employees from $10 to $17, taking the bill from $700 to $1,190 a month. The trigger was recruiting activity. The charge landed on headcount.

Worth checking your own numbers against that before a renewal. If you are close to the cap, model the upgrade at your real headcount rather than assuming the jump is proportionate to the extra requisitions.

Does BambooHR include AI resume screening?

No, not natively, and this is the gap most likely to matter if your requisitions draw large applicant piles. Checked on August 3, 2026, BambooHR's applicant tracking page names job distribution, automated candidate emails, digital offer letters with e-signatures, interview self-scheduling, candidate source and funnel reports, background check integrations, a mobile hiring app and new-hire packets. It does not name AI resume screening, candidate scoring, candidate ranking or applicant matching.

BambooHR's own AI page points the same way. The capabilities it describes are plain-language questions against your HR data, burnout and engagement risk signals, unusual time-off pattern detection, performance inconsistency flags, drafting recognition messages and approving routine timesheets. That is AI aimed at managing the people you already employ, not at evaluating the people applying.

This is a product decision rather than an oversight, and at modest hiring volume it is the right one. It becomes a real cost when a role draws 400 applications, because the software will hand you 400 candidate records and the reading is still yours. That work does not disappear from the budget, it just moves from a software line to recruiter hours, where it is harder to see. If that is where your time is going, a dedicated AI resume screening layer reads the pile and ranks it with reasons, and runs alongside the BambooHR you already pay for rather than replacing it. Our BambooHR alternative page walks through how the two fit together and where BambooHR is the better buy.

Questions to ask before you sign

• What is the rate at our actual headcount, after automatic volume discounts? The published figure is the list rate. Get yours in writing.
• What happens to the price when headcount grows mid-term? Ask whether you are charged on a snapshot, an average or live headcount, and when it is trued up.
• How many requisitions will we realistically have open at peak? Compare that against the plan cap, then price the upgrade at your full headcount.
• What is the all-in number with Payroll, Benefits Administration and Time and Attendance? Apply the 15 percent bundle discount where it qualifies, and compare that total against competitors, not the platform rate alone.
• Is the contract annual, and what are the terms on reducing headcount? Per-employee pricing is pleasant on the way up and less so if you need it to come back down.
• Who reads the applications? If the answer is a recruiter opening every one, cost that time and put it next to the software line.

Frequently asked questions

How much does BambooHR cost per employee? Checked on August 3, 2026, BambooHR publishes Core at $10, Pro at $17 and Elite at $25 per employee per month. Companies with 25 employees or fewer are charged a flat rate starting at $250 a month instead. Volume discounts are applied automatically as headcount grows, so larger companies pay less than the straight per-employee multiplication.

Does BambooHR charge per user or per employee? Per employee. The rate applies across your whole headcount, not to the number of HR or recruiting seats using the system. That is the opposite of how a per-seat ATS such as Manatal is billed, and it is why the two are hard to compare without running the arithmetic at your actual company size.

Is the BambooHR ATS included or an add-on? Included, in all three plans. What differs by plan is the number of job openings you may have at once: 5 on Core, 25 on Pro and 50 on Elite. The paid add-ons are Payroll, Benefits Administration, Time and Attendance, and Global Employment.

Does BambooHR have a free trial? Yes. The signup page states that no credit card is required and that the trial ends automatically, so it does not convert into a paid plan on its own. The page does not state how long the trial runs. There is no free plan.

Is BambooHR worth it for a small business? If you need an HR system of record, generally yes, and the published pricing makes it one of the easier products in this category to evaluate without a sales call. The $250 monthly floor for 25 employees or fewer means very small teams pay an effective per-employee rate well above $10, so a five-person company is paying $50 per employee. Check that against what the system replaces before signing.