Square Payroll is a separate, paid add-on that runs full-service payroll, calculating and filing payroll taxes, handling direct deposit, and supporting both W-2 employees and 1099 contractors, priced as a base monthly fee plus a per-person charge. If you're also using Square's own timecards, hours clock in and flow into payroll automatically. We don't run payroll for you. We build what checks it against the rest of the business once a pay run goes out.
Square Payroll is priced separately from Square's payment processing, typically a flat monthly base fee plus an additional charge per employee or contractor paid that period. A contractor-only plan exists at a lower cost for businesses that only need to pay 1099 workers and don't run a W-2 payroll at all.
If a business already uses Square's Team Management for scheduling and timecards, hours clocked at the register flow directly into Square Payroll without anyone re-entering them, Square's own version of connecting sales-floor activity to a pay run.
Square Payroll calculates and files federal and state payroll taxes on the business's behalf and supports direct deposit to employees, which covers most of the compliance side a small business would otherwise have to handle separately.
Square connects its own timecards to its own payroll well. What it doesn't do is check a finished pay run against that same period's actual sales to see whether labor cost is drifting as a percentage of revenue, by location or by shift, that comparison has to happen somewhere else, usually by someone pulling two reports side by side after the fact.
Contractors paid outside Square Payroll, through a different method entirely, don't automatically show up anywhere for year-end 1099 tracking, which means a business running payments through more than one system can lose track of exactly who still needs a form at year-end unless something's tracking all of it in one place.
A finished Square Payroll run gets compared against that same period's Square sales, by location if there's more than one, with a flag the moment labor drifts past a set percentage instead of someone noticing at month-end.
A contractor paid outside Square Payroll still lands in the same year-end tracking as everyone else, instead of falling through the cracks because they were paid a different way.
Tell us how you're currently checking labor cost against revenue, and we'll look at whether that comparison needs a person at all.
Square connects its own timecards to its own payroll well. It's the comparison against what actually sold, and the contractors paid some other way, that usually still falls on a person. Square Payroll's just this page's example. The same question applies to any pay run that only gets checked against the rest of the business after the fact.
Let's talk →A base monthly fee plus an additional charge per employee or contractor paid that period, with a lower-cost contractor-only plan available if you only need to pay 1099 workers. Square's own pricing page has the current numbers, since they're revised periodically.
Yes, if the business also uses Square's Team Management for scheduling and time tracking, hours clocked at the register flow directly into a Square Payroll run without re-entering them.
Yes, Square offers a contractor-only plan at a lower cost for businesses that only need to pay 1099 workers and don't run a traditional W-2 payroll.
Yes, it calculates and files federal and state payroll taxes on the business's behalf as part of running a pay cycle.
Yes, direct deposit to employees is included as a standard part of running payroll through Square.