Gusto retires Core/Complete/Concierge for Simple/Plus/Premium — mid-tier base doubles from $39/mo to $80/mo
Gusto replaced its Core, Complete, Concierge and Select plans with Simple, Plus and Premium. The mid-tier base fee went from $39/mo to $80/mo, multi-state payroll moved out of the entry tier into Plus, and the top tier became sales-only. Legacy customers were grandfathered on a separate page, but hiring in a new state triggered a forced upgrade.
Core at $39/mo + $6/mo per person, Complete at $39/mo + $12/mo per person, Concierge at $149/mo + $12/mo per person. Core advertised payroll in all 50 states with no extra fees for multiple states. These rates are identical on every archived snapshot from 17 March 2018 to 2 July 2022.
Simple at $40/mo + $6/mo per person restricted to full-service single-state payroll; Plus at $80/mo + $12/mo per person with multiple state payroll across all 50 states; Premium showing 'Exclusive pricing / Contact us for details / Talk to sales'; Contractor Only introduced at $6/mo per person with no base fee.
Gusto’s own partner communication dates the announcement precisely. The August 2022 Quarterly Scoop for accounting partners states: “It had been five years since the last pricing update, and the platform has changed a lot. So have our customers. On July 11 we announced that the old plans of Core, Complete, Concierge, and Select were going away, to be replaced by Simple, Plus, and Premium. We gave accounting pros a buffer so your clients don’t have to make this change all at once, but this is now in effect for all new clients.”
The headline is the mid-tier base fee: $39/mo to $80/mo, a 105% increase, with the per-person rate held at $12/mo. A Hacker News submission three days later, on 14 July 2022, was titled “Gusto revamps product tiers, doubling mid-tier base price” (15 points, 1 comment); the comment read: “Looks like only the monthly fee doubled from ~$40 to ~$80, but it’s still $12/employee.”
The larger change is the feature move. Old Core included payroll in all 50 states at no extra cost. New Simple is explicitly single-state only. For a customer running payroll across two or more states, the like-for-like replacement was Plus — a doubling of the base fee and a doubling of the per-person rate for the same job.
Gusto grandfathered existing accounts on a page titled “Gusto Original Pricing”, which kept Core, Complete and Concierge rates live. That page carried its own trigger: “Adding employees in new states? Congrats on growing your team! When you hire an employee in a new state, you’ll be prompted to upgrade to either our new Plus or Premium plan.” The migration was therefore event-driven rather than date-driven — growing accounts repriced themselves, static accounts were left alone. Legacy compare pages for the retired tiers were still returning 200 as late as April 2025.
Premium was not publicly priced at launch. It read “Exclusive pricing — Contact us for details” for nearly two years before a public $180/mo + $22/mo per person rate appeared in July 2024.
Gusto's own partner update states that on July 11 it announced the old Core, Complete, Concierge and Select plans were going away, to be replaced by Simple, Plus and Premium. By the 19 August 2022 snapshot, Simple is $40/mo plus $6/mo per person but restricted to single-state payroll, Plus is $80/mo plus $12/mo per person with multi-state, and Premium reads Exclusive pricing — Contact us for details. Contractor Only appears at $6/mo per person with no base fee.