Employer of record Australia: coverage, cost per head, and the limits

In summary

• An EOR employs your Australian staff under its own local entity, so you can hire in Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane without registering a subsidiary, an ABN or a payroll account.
• Deel lists EOR from $599/employee/mo, contractor management from $49/contractor/mo and Contractor of Record at $325/contractor/mo. Verified 18 August 2026.
• The superannuation guarantee is paid by the employer on top of salary, not deducted from it — budget it as a real cost line, not overhead.
• Modern Award coverage, not your job title, sets minimum pay, loadings and penalty rates for research and technical staff. Get the award and classification level named in writing.
• Do not buy an EOR if the hire needs employer sponsorship for a work visa, or if you are heading past roughly 10-15 Australian staff — at that point an entity is cheaper and can do things an EOR cannot.

Which providers actually hold an Australian entity

Only Deel’s pricing is verified against a vendor pricing page (18 August 2026)

Dimension	Australian entity model	Where it fits a research buyer	Price we can verify
Deel	Markets owned entities across its core markets and lists Australia within 150+ country coverage — have the employing entity named in the agreement	One to five heads on a defined award period; contractors on the same platform	EOR from $599/employee/mo
Remote	Builds its positioning on owning entities rather than using partners — worth pressing them to confirm Australia contractually, as with everyone else	Teams that want an owned-entity-only guarantee and will run a quote process	Not published by us
Oyster	Mixed footprint across its country list — ask directly whether Australia is owned or partner	Small distributed teams; strong employee-experience positioning	Not published by us
Multiplier	Broad country list; entity model varies by market, so the answer for Australia must come in writing	Price-sensitive shortlists that still need proper local employment	Not published by us
Velocity Global	Positions on complex, multi-country programmes; confirm the Australian arrangement specifically	Consortium programmes spanning many countries with enterprise procurement	Not published by us

Entity models change as providers acquire local operations or drop partners, and a claim on a website is not a term in a contract. Ask each shortlisted provider to name the Australian employing entity in the agreement itself. We only publish prices we have read directly off a vendor pricing page — every other figure here would be a guess, so we leave it blank.

What an Australian EOR actually takes off you

You already know the shape of this, so here is the Australia-specific version. Without a local entity you cannot hold an Australian Business Number, register for PAYG withholding, report through Single Touch Payroll, pay superannuation through the clearing house, or hold a workers’ compensation policy in the relevant state scheme. That is the practical wall stopping a US or UK institution simply putting an Australian postdoc on its existing payroll.

An EOR removes the wall by becoming the legal employer. Its Australian entity issues the employment contract, withholds PAYG income tax, reports pay events to the ATO through Single Touch Payroll, pays the superannuation guarantee to the employee’s chosen or stapled fund, holds workers’ compensation cover in the right state or territory scheme, and administers the National Employment Standards — annual leave, personal and carer’s leave, parental leave, notice of termination, redundancy pay and the newer right-to-disconnect provisions.

What it does not remove is your operational duty. Australian work health and safety law places a primary duty of care on the person conducting the business or undertaking, and where your organisation directs the work at a site that duty can sit with you as well as with the EOR. On a trial site this is not academic: incident reporting, lone working and the supervision of a research nurse are yours in substance whoever’s name is on the contract. Ask how safety incidents and workers’ compensation claims are handled jointly.

You also keep intellectual property — check the contract assigns it to your institution rather than to the provider, since providers use standard templates and funder terms frequently require it. If you are still weighing models rather than countries, the employer of record explainer and the EOR versus PEO comparison settle that first: a PEO co-employs alongside an entity you would need to already have, so it is not available to you here.

The superannuation guarantee is your cost, and it sits on top of salary

This is the single most common budgeting error US teams make on an Australian hire. Superannuation is not a deduction from the employee’s pay in the way a pension contribution often is elsewhere. The superannuation guarantee is an employer contribution paid in addition to ordinary time earnings, into a complying fund the employee nominates.

The legislated schedule of increases reached 12% of ordinary time earnings from 1 July 2025. Confirm the rate for the current financial year before you sign a costing — it is set by statute, not by the provider, and the schedule has moved repeatedly. The practical effect: an advertised salary of A$100,000 is a budget line meaningfully above A$100,000 before the platform fee, and a grant costed on headline salary alone will be short.

Two details matter for research employers. Superannuation is payable on casual and part-time staff too, and the old low monthly earnings threshold that used to exclude very small pay runs no longer applies — a two-day-a-week study assistant accrues super from the first pay. And the timing rules have been tightening, moving from quarterly contributions towards paying super at the same time as salary. Ask how your provider currently pays and reports it, because late contributions attract the superannuation guarantee charge.

There is also a stapling rule: where a new employee does not choose a fund, the employer must ask the ATO for their existing “stapled” fund rather than defaulting them into a new one. A competent EOR does this automatically, but confirm it — getting it wrong creates duplicate accounts.

Add one more state-level line to the model: payroll tax. It is levied by each state and territory above a threshold, and because an EOR’s aggregate Australian wage bill sits far above any threshold, it is generally charged through to you rather than absorbed. Ask for it as a separate line on a sample invoice.

Modern Awards, long service leave and casual conversion

Australia layers Modern Awards on top of the National Employment Standards. An award sets minimum rates by classification level, plus loadings, overtime, penalty rates for unsociable hours, and allowances. Award coverage is determined by the employer’s industry and the employee’s actual duties — not by the job title you advertised, and not by whether the person feels like a professional.

For research and technical staff this produces a counter-intuitive result. The higher education awards that would cover the same person at an Australian university follow the higher education industry, and your EOR is not a higher education employer. A research assistant employed through an EOR is therefore more likely to fall under a general instrument — the Professional Employees Award for professional scientific duties, a health sector award for a trial coordinator or research nurse, the clerical award for administrative support — than under the university instrument your collaborator assumes applies. That changes minimum rates, overtime and allowances.

Do not resolve this by intuition. Ask the provider, in writing, to name the award and classification level for each role and to explain any annualised salary arrangement. Where the offer is comfortably above the high income threshold, a guarantee of annual earnings can take a role outside award coverage entirely — but that threshold is indexed annually, so get the current figure.

Long service leave has no equivalent in most other countries and it surprises everyone. It is state and territory legislation, it accrues from the first day of continuous service, and it generally vests somewhere around seven to ten years depending on the jurisdiction, with pro-rata payment on termination after a qualifying period in several states. A three-year post rarely vests, but the accrual is real, providers may bill or hold against it, and service can carry across if you later move the person onto your own Australian entity. Ask how it appears on the invoice and what happens at offboarding.

Casual conversion changed materially with the 2024 reforms. Casual status now turns on the substance of the relationship rather than the label in the contract, and eligible casuals can notify the employer that they wish to become permanent after six months — twelve where the employer is a small business. Casual loading, commonly 25% under most awards, compensates for the absence of paid leave, so a casual is not automatically the cheap option. If your coordinator has worked a regular roster for a year, expect the conversion request.

Owned entity versus partner entity, and where Remote is genuinely better

You are about to open four more tabs, so let us be useful about it. The real differentiator is not the country count on the homepage — everybody claims 150-plus and everybody covers Australia. It is whether the provider employs your person through an entity it owns or through a local partner firm.

A partner arrangement is not disqualifying — it is how most providers cover their long tail, and a good local partner in Sydney beats a badly run owned entity. But it adds a margin layer and a link to the chain: a payslip query travels from your employee to the platform, to the partner and back, and the platform’s ability to fix a local problem is bounded by its leverage over that partner.

Where Remote is honestly stronger: it has built its entire market position on owning entities rather than renting them, and if an owned-entity guarantee across every country in your programme is the thing you care most about, that pitch is squarely aimed at you. Oyster is well regarded on employee experience, Multiplier competes hard on price, and Velocity Global targets complex multi-country programmes with enterprise procurement processes. All of them are credible in Australia.

Deel still wins for this buyer on two things that survive the comparison. The published price, because for a research office costing against a submission deadline a real number today beats a better number in three weeks. And breadth of engagement type: research programmes are never purely employment — an independent biostatistician, an external monitor, a sessional clinician — and having contractor management and Contractor of Record on the same platform at $49 and $325 per contractor per month (verified 18 August 2026) means one vendor assessment and one invoice format rather than three. Our Deel pricing breakdown and full Deel review go line by line.

Whichever way you go, ask every shortlisted provider the same three questions: name the Australian employing entity in the contract, show me a real sample invoice with payroll tax and superannuation as separate lines, and tell me the offboarding cost for this role before I onboard anyone.

Do not buy an Australian EOR if any of these is true

The hire needs employer sponsorship for a work visa. This is the constraint that most often kills the plan, and the one vendor marketing covers worst. Employer-sponsored routes — the Skills in Demand subclass 482, the Employer Nomination Scheme subclass 186, the regional subclass 494 — require an approved sponsor nominating a genuine position within its own business. An EOR that is not the organisation doing the research sits awkwardly there, some subclasses are effectively unavailable through one, and many providers decline to sponsor at all. If your candidate already has work rights the problem disappears. If not, resolve the immigration route before choosing the employment vehicle, and get the provider’s position in writing.

You are heading past roughly 10 to 15 Australian staff. EOR pricing is linear per head; the cost of a subsidiary is largely fixed — incorporation, an ABN, payroll software, an accountant, a workers’ compensation policy and someone’s time. Somewhere in that band the lines cross, and past it you pay a recurring premium for a service you have outgrown. Run it on your own salary levels. If the three-year plan is a standing Australian team rather than a few funded posts, start the entity conversation now: incorporation takes months, and discovering you needed it does not.

You are on a partner-entity arrangement and did not know it. Not a reason to abandon the model — a reason to change provider, or at least to price the extra margin layer honestly.

Your funder or trial sponsor requires the employment relationship to sit with your institution. Some award terms and some clinical trial sponsor agreements are specific about who employs named site personnel, and a contract in a third party’s name may not satisfy them. This is a five-minute question for your research office that saves a renegotiation later.

The work is genuinely independent. If the person sets their own hours, uses their own equipment, carries commercial risk and bills several clients, they are a contractor, and an EOR is an expensive way to buy comfort. Engage them as a contractor — or, if you want the classification risk formally assessed and carried, at $325/contractor/mo through Contractor of Record. Choose the structure that matches the work, then price it; never the reverse.

If none of those apply — one to five people, a defined award period, work rights in place, employment squarely in substance — an Australian EOR is the right tool and the only remaining decision is which provider. The same logic for a different jurisdiction sits in our employer of record Canada guide.

Get an Australian number into the budget line today

Deel publishes EOR from $599/employee/mo, so you can build a costing now — salary, plus the superannuation guarantee, plus the platform fee — and refine it with a country-specific quote in parallel. That is the whole argument: everyone else on your shortlist returns a number after a discovery call, and grant deadlines do not wait for one.

EOR from $599/employee/mo

Price an Australian hire Opens on the vendor’s site · CASRAI referral link

Frequently asked questions

What does an employer of record Australia arrangement actually cover?

The provider’s Australian entity becomes the legal employer. It issues a compliant contract, withholds PAYG income tax, reports pay events to the ATO through Single Touch Payroll, pays the superannuation guarantee into the employee’s chosen or stapled fund, holds workers’ compensation cover in the relevant state scheme, and administers the National Employment Standards and any applicable Modern Award. You direct the work and keep your own work health and safety duties at the site. It does not cover visa sponsorship for most subclasses.

How much does an employer of record cost in Australia per employee?

Deel lists EOR from $599/employee/mo, verified 18 August 2026 — the only figure on this page read directly off a vendor pricing page. On top sit salary, the superannuation guarantee, state payroll tax charged through by the provider, workers’ compensation premium and any award loadings. Remote, Oyster, Multiplier and Velocity Global quote rather than publish, so treat figures attributed to them elsewhere as unverified. If you need a number for a submission this week, start from Deel’s published price and request country-specific quotes in parallel.

Can we hire employees in Australia without an entity?

Yes, and an EOR is the standard route. Without a local entity you cannot hold an ABN, register for PAYG withholding, report through Single Touch Payroll, pay superannuation through the clearing house or hold a workers’ compensation policy, so you cannot lawfully be the employer. The alternatives are incorporating a subsidiary, which takes months and carries ongoing filing and director obligations, or engaging the person as a genuinely independent contractor — which only works if the substance of the work supports it.

Who pays the superannuation guarantee for a foreign employer?

The employer pays it, on top of ordinary time earnings, and through an EOR arrangement that means the provider pays it and bills you. It is not deducted from the employee’s salary. The legislated schedule reached 12% of ordinary time earnings from 1 July 2025; confirm the rate for the current financial year with your provider, since it is set by statute and has moved repeatedly. Super is payable on casual and part-time staff as well, and late contributions attract the superannuation guarantee charge, so ask how and when your provider pays.

Which Modern Award applies to a research assistant employed through an EOR?

Not necessarily the one you expect. Award coverage follows the employer’s industry as well as the employee’s duties, and an EOR is not a higher education employer — so the university instruments your Australian collaborator assumes apply often do not. A general award such as the Professional Employees Award, a health sector award for a trial coordinator or research nurse, or the clerical award for administrative support is more likely. Require the provider to name the award and classification level in writing for each role.

Can an EOR sponsor an Australian work visa?

Usually not, and this is the limitation most likely to derail the plan. Employer-sponsored routes such as the Skills in Demand subclass 482 and the Employer Nomination Scheme subclass 186 require an approved sponsor nominating a genuine position in its own business, which sits awkwardly with an EOR that is not the organisation performing the research, and many providers decline to sponsor at all. If the candidate already has work rights it is a non-issue. If not, settle the immigration route first.

When does an Australian entity become cheaper than an EOR?

Somewhere around 10 to 15 Australian staff for most institutions. EOR fees scale linearly per head while the cost of a subsidiary — incorporation, ABN, payroll software, accountant, workers’ compensation policy, administration time — is largely fixed, so the lines cross and then diverge. Run it on your own salary levels rather than trusting the band. Below that, and particularly for one to five posts on a defined award period, the EOR is comfortably the cheaper and faster answer.

Related on CASRAI

• Employer of record — the full explainer
• Best employer of record services compared
• Employer of record Canada
• Deel pricing broken down
• All software reviewed by CASRAI