Hammr vs. Miter vs. Trayd vs. Patriot vs. Gusto: Which Payroll Platform Actually Fits Your Crew

Every contractor I talk to who is unhappy with their payroll software is unhappy for the same reason: the software treats a worker as a person who gets paid, and the contractor needs a worker who gets paid and gets charged to a job, a cost code, a classification, and sometimes a wage determination.

That gap is the whole conversation. It is also why payroll shopping for a construction company goes sideways so often. Owners compare base prices, pick the cheapest one, and then discover in month three that the office manager is still rebuilding the hours in a spreadsheet before anything touches the general ledger.

Here is how five platforms actually compare, and, more usefully, how to tell which one you are.

The five things that make construction payroll different

Before you look at a single price, be honest about which of these you need:

1. Job costing at the labor line. Not “payroll expense” as one number, but wages plus taxes plus workers’ comp plus benefits pushed to the right job and cost code. Fully burdened, not gross.
2. Multiple pay rates per person. A guy who runs the excavator Monday and swings a hammer Tuesday is two rates in the same week, and overtime has to be calculated on the weighted average.
3. Field time capture that crews will actually use. If the hours arrive as a photo of a handwritten sheet, nothing downstream saves you anything.
4. Certified payroll and prevailing wage. Federal WH-347 forms, fringe tracking, classification management, and whatever portal the GC or agency wants them uploaded to.
5. Workers’ comp class codes. Multiple codes per employee, applied by the work performed, not by the job title on file.

A platform that handles all five is a construction product. One that handles none is a general business product that contractors sometimes use anyway. Both categories are legitimate. The mistake is buying one when you needed the other.

The construction-native group

Hammr

Hammr is a modern, cloud-based payroll and HR platform built specifically for contractors. It handles prevailing wage, certified payroll, union rules, multi-rate workers, and multi-state compliance, and generates WH-347s alongside state forms and third-party formats like LCPtracker and eMars. Time tracking is built in rather than bolted on, with a bilingual English/Spanish mobile app that works offline on jobsites with bad service, plus geofenced clock-in and crew-level supervision.

Where it earns its keep is the certified payroll workflow. Contractors coming off manual processes routinely describe multi-hour weekly report builds collapsing into a download. Hammr also does not charge per payroll run, so off-cycle and corrective runs are free.

Integrations lean toward the mid-market: Sage Intacct is a first-class partner, with other accounting and ERP connections available.

Pricing: quote-based, depending on modules and headcount.

Best fit: specialty and commercial contractors doing public or federally funded work, with real field crews and real compliance exposure.

Miter

Miter occupies similar ground with a broader “construction operating system” ambition: payroll, HR, benefits, expense management, scheduling, and time tracking in one platform. Its strongest single feature is real-time fully burdened job costing, meaning wages, payroll taxes, workers’ comp premiums, benefits, union fringes, and per diems all land in your job cost detail rather than showing up as a month-end journal entry you have to allocate yourself.

Pay rate groups are the mechanism worth understanding. You define rates, fringe rules, benefit offsets, and overtime logic by job, crew, union, or classification, and Miter picks the correct rate automatically. It supports weighted-average overtime, which is the calculation most generalist platforms quietly get wrong for multi-rate employees.

Integrations cover Sage 100, 300, and Intacct, Acumatica, NetSuite, and QuickBooks. Next-day pay is included at no extra cost, and off-cycle runs are free.

Pricing: roughly $15 to $50 per user per month, depending on company size and modules selected. At 15 field employees, that works out to somewhere between $225 and $750 per month, with the construction compliance modules pushing you toward the top of that range.

Best fit: contractors who want the compliance depth without the legacy software feel, and who care about mobile usability for the field.

Trayd

Trayd is the newest entrant here and the most narrowly aimed. It was built specifically for specialty trade contractors, the electricians, plumbers, concrete crews, ironworkers, and fireproofing subs who put skilled hands on the job rather than coordinating the project. The founders’ argument is that most construction software was built for general contractors even though specialty trade contractors vastly outnumber them, and having read a lot of construction software marketing, I think they are right about that.

The technical premise is the sharpest statement of the problem I have seen from any vendor: a single worker can earn four different rates in one day depending on the trade task, the project scope, and the jurisdiction, and generic payroll platforms cannot handle that much rate variability. Everything in the product follows from that. Field time capture, automatic rate determination, union deductions, prevailing wage overrides, multi-state tax, multi-entity payroll, certified payroll output.

The feature nobody else on this list has is earned wage access. Because Trayd authenticates attendance in real time, it can offer same-day and instant pay, which turns payroll into a retention tool. That matters more than it sounds. Skilled workers leaving the trades for gig work often cite cash flow control as the reason, and a crew that can draw earned wages the same day is a crew with one less reason to leave.

Trayd raised a $10 million Series A in March 2026, led by White Star Capital with follow-on participation from Suffolk Technologies and Y Combinator and a new strategic investment from RXR, bringing total funding to $15 million. The company reports revenue up over 600% year over year and average weekly payroll processing falling from 14 hours to 27 minutes.

Pricing: quote-based, tied to the number of workers processed through payroll.

The caveat, and it is a real one for us. Trayd started in New York and the Northeast, where union density and regulatory complexity are highest, and is only now expanding nationally with roughly two dozen employees. It is engineered for conditions western North Carolina does not have: heavy union agreements, state prevailing wage stacked on federal, dense multi-jurisdiction work. Outside the Northeast, support depth and state tax setup are not yet proven at scale. And an early-stage vendor holding your tax filings and W-2 history carries real switching risk if the company gets acquired into somebody else’s stack.

Best fit: union or commercial specialty subs with 25-plus field workers, multi-state or multi-entity exposure, and a real problem holding onto skilled labor.

The generalist pair

Patriot Software

Patriot is the budget option, and it is honest about it. Basic Payroll runs $17 per month plus $4 per worker and leaves tax filing to you. Full Service runs $37 per month plus $5 per worker and handles federal, state, and local filings, deposits, and year-end W-2s. Unlimited payroll runs and free direct deposit are included on both.

For a ten-person shop, Full Service lands around $87 per month. Gusto Simple at the same headcount is $109, and Gusto Plus is $200, so Patriot is modestly cheaper than Gusto’s entry plan and well under half the cost of the plan most contractors actually need.

What you give up is everything on the construction list. No certified payroll. No prevailing wage engine. No multi-rate overtime logic. Time and attendance is a separate add-on at $6 per month plus $2 per employee, and it is time tracking, not job-costed field time. The interface is functional rather than modern.

Best fit: a small residential shop, a handful of W-2 employees in one state, all private work, and an owner who values keeping fixed overhead down.

Gusto

Gusto is the default small business payroll platform for a reason. Tax filing is automatic on every paid plan, onboarding is genuinely good, benefits administration is built in, and workers’ comp is available pay-as-you-go rather than as an annual deposit you have to finance.

Pricing as of September 2026:

• Simple: $49 per month plus $6 per person. Single state only.
• Plus: $80 per month plus $12 per person. Adds multi-state payroll, next-day direct deposit, and time and project tracking.
• Premium: $180 per month plus $22 per person. Adds HR advisory, priority support, and custom reporting.
• Contractor Only: $35 per month plus $6 per contractor.

Pay attention to the tier gating, because it is where the real cost lives. The single-state limit on Simple pushes any contractor working across the NC/GA/SC lines up to Plus, which doubles the per-head charge. At 15 employees that is $139 per month versus $260.

Gusto’s project tracking gives you labor allocation by job on Plus, which is more than Patriot offers and less than either construction-native platform. It does not produce certified payroll natively.

Best fit: residential builders and trade shops under roughly $3M in revenue doing private work, who want benefits and HR handled alongside payroll.

Side by side

The North Carolina wrinkle

This is where the decision gets easier for a lot of contractors in our part of the state.

North Carolina has no state prevailing wage law. There is no “Little Davis-Bacon Act” here, and state and locally funded public projects are governed by whatever wage terms the awarding agency writes into the contract. Federal Davis-Bacon applies only when the project is federally funded or federally assisted and exceeds $2,000.

So if you build custom homes in Highlands and Cashiers, remodel in Franklin, or run a specialty trade on private commercial work, the certified payroll machinery in Hammr and Miter is a feature you are paying for and not using. That is a real argument for staying on a generalist platform.

The counterweight: federal infrastructure dollars have been flowing into North Carolina in volume, and “federally assisted” is a broader net than most contractors assume. Grants, loans, and loan guarantees all pull a project under Davis-Bacon even when no federal agency is on the other side of the contract. If your pipeline includes water and sewer, school work, DOT subcontracting, or anything touching a federal grant program, the question stops being theoretical.

How I’d actually decide

Under 10 employees, private work only, one state. Patriot Full Service. Spend the savings on a bookkeeper who can job cost properly on the accounting side.

10 to 30 employees, private work, want benefits and HR. Gusto. Go straight to Plus if you cross state lines or want project tracking. Do not talk yourself into Simple and then pay for four add-ons.

Any Davis-Bacon work at all, at any size. Hammr or Miter. The first certified payroll penalty, or the first week your office manager spends two and a half hours building a WH-347 by hand, erases the price difference. Between the two, Miter has published pricing and a broader module set; Hammr’s field app and prevailing wage reporting formats are its strength.

Specialty trade sub, 25-plus in the field, losing people over pay timing. Get Trayd on the demo list alongside Miter. Same-day pay is the only feature on this page that helps you keep a crew rather than just pay one. Ask hard questions about their support coverage and state tax setup outside the Northeast, and get the quote in writing.

Growing past 25 field employees with multiple crews and cost codes. Construction-native, regardless of prevailing wage. At that size the job costing alone justifies it, because the alternative is a manual allocation process that gets less accurate every month you grow.

One last thing

The cheapest payroll platform is not the one with the lowest monthly invoice. It is the one that produces labor data your books can use without a human retyping it. I have watched contractors save $150 a month on software and spend fifteen hours a month cleaning up what it produced.

Price the software. Then price the hours.

If you want help mapping a platform to your actual crew, cost codes, and the work you are bidding next year, book a discovery call.

Alter Accounting does not accept commissions, referral fees, or residuals from any software vendor. If we recommend a platform, it is because it fits your work.

Pricing above reflects published rates as of September 2026 and is subject to change. Verify current pricing directly with each vendor before making a decision.