Introducing Mercury Payroll

Mercury Payroll launches today: W-2 and 1099 contractor payroll, health benefits and 401(k), and the tax filings, registrations, and administrative compliance work behind them — run from the Mercury account you already use for banking, and in all 50 states.

You didn't start your company to become its payroll expert. But most payroll products are built as though you did. They'll calculate the withholdings and generate the forms, then hand you a to-do list of which state to register with, which notice needs a response, which coverage you’re now required to carry.

Then, the work is yours: a ten-page set of instructions and a portal login, steps that have to happen in a specific order, deadlines someone else set, and no way to know you've missed one until a letter arrives with a penalty printed on it. And most platforms cap how many states you can hire in at all — one on the cheapest plan, the rest on the premium plan — so as the list gets longer, the bill goes up at the same time.

I co-founded Central, which Mercury acquired in April, to solve this. We paired an in-house team with AI automations to take compliance work off founders’ plates entirely. Mercury had the same obsession, applied to everything a company does with money.

Your bank account should do more than hold your money. It should power everything your company does with money, from the moment money comes in, to the moment it goes out. For Mercury customers who run payroll, payroll is roughly 20% of what goes out. Now payroll lives alongside the money that powers it. Payroll can see your cash before every run, and every paycheck, filing, and tax payment happens where your money already is. This is where that starts.

Because your EIN, entity details, and account are already on file at Mercury, most of the setup is done before you get started. You confirm what's there, add what's new, and go — rather than spending weeks standing up a separate payroll system and re-submitting documents you've already sent us once. One login for banking and payroll means there's no second tool to configure or connect.

Adding someone to payroll covers everything they need to start working. You send the offer and your hire fills in their own details, taxes, and direct deposit. A licensed broker helps you pick a health, dental, and vision plan — available in all 50 states — and enrolls every hire as you add them.

You can offer a 401(k) as well, either through our partner or self-managed. And you can issue a company card with spend limits in the same flow, so a new teammate can buy what they need without waiting on you. When someone leaves, their card closes with them.

Because payroll lives inside your account, it reads your real balance rather than a stale copy of it. If an upcoming pay run is going to come up short, you hear about it while there's still time to do something.

Compliance isn't a one-time setup. It's also renewals, new state laws, city-level rules, and notices that arrive on someone else's schedule. Mercury Payroll files and remits federal and state payroll taxes, handles W-2s and 1099s at year end, responds to unemployment claims, and triages the mail states send you.

Our team watches for obligations you may not know about (like the local income tax that applies when you hire someone in parts of Colorado or Pennsylvania) and opens the accounts for you. This extends to all 50 states, with no cap on how many and no higher support tier to move into. Government fees pass through at cost.

Adjusting someone’s salary starts a chain of dominoes: changes to benefits withholdings, 401(k) contributions, tax withholdings. Rather than having to remember and make all these changes manually, you can just ask Command to do it all for you. Type “Bump Priya's salary to $120,000,” and Command works out the proration, the updated withholdings, and the right pay run for it to take effect, then drafts the change for your approval.

Mercury Payroll is free for eligible Mercury customers through the end of 2026.

Starting in 2027, pricing is $100 per month for the platform, plus $50 per month for each person you paid that month. The compliance work completely handled for you is included in that cost: filings, registrations, government notices, and multi-state coverage across all 50 states with no caps, rather than sitting behind a higher support tier.

If you're thinking about running payroll through Mercury, get in touch and we'll talk through what you need and what setup would look like for your team.

If you're already using Central, your account manager will be in touch. We will start inviting customers to the new Mercury Payroll interface over the coming weeks once the product is ready for you, and we’ll handle the migration for you.