BambooHR introduces Extended Term Subscriptions with an Employee Minimum — and drops 'We never require an annual contract'

For three years the BambooHR pricing FAQ carried one sentence that did a lot of commercial work: “We never require an annual contract.” It appears on every archived pricing page from 2 December 2022 through 5 December 2025, and it is gone by 30 December 2025.

The contract explains the deletion. The Terms of Service dated 11 December 2025 rewrites the payment section around a fork that did not previously exist. Every subscription is now designated on its Order Form as either a Month-to-Month Subscription or an Extended Term Subscription, and the latter carries a new section 5.6, Employee, Package, and Product Minimums:

“Your minimum bill will be based on the Employee Minimum and all applicable Product Minimums for the duration of the Extended Term Subscription, regardless of actual usage… Any decrease in your employee count or product-specific headcount below the Employee Minimum or any Product Minimum will not reduce the fees owed.”

Above the minimum, fees still track “all non-terminated employees in the Service.” The net effect is a one-way ratchet: growth raises the bill immediately, contraction does not lower it until renewal. Extended Term subscriptions auto-renew for successive twelve-month terms and require “a minimum of sixty (60) days notice before the expiration of your existing Term” to avoid renewal.

The trade is real in both directions, and worth stating plainly. Extended Term customers gain protection from mid-term repricing other than headcount fluctuation, with 60 days’ notice before a renewal reprice. Month-to-Month customers keep no minimum at all, and retain the separate promise added in the 19 May 2025 Terms of Service that BambooHR “shall not change the price of any subscription package (e.g. Core, Pro, Elite, Payroll, BenAdmin) more than once in a calendar year.”

What is missing is the explanation. The pricing page removed the old promise and replaced it with softer framing rather than a side-by-side statement of the two terms — so a buyer reading only the pricing page in 2026 encounters neither the old guarantee nor the new minimum, and meets section 5.6 for the first time on an Order Form.

The mechanic bites hardest in this category specifically. BambooHR’s billable unit is the workforce, so the exact event that most makes a company want its HR software bill to fall — a layoff, a seasonal wind-down, a divestiture — is the one the Extended Term contract refuses to price.

Dating note: 11 December 2025 is BambooHR’s own ‘Last Updated’ date on the Terms of Service, confirmed against archive snapshots that show the prior 30 October 2025 version on 9 December 2025 and the new version by 30 December 2025.