Remote

Remote is a global employment platform. Its purpose is narrow and well defined: let a company hire, pay and stay compliant with someone who lives in a country where that company has no legal entity. It does this through an employer of record (EOR) model, alongside contractor management, global payroll for companies that already have entities, and benefits administration.

What Remote actually is

There are four distinct products under the same login, and buyers routinely confuse them:

• Employer of Record — Remote's own local entity becomes the legal employer of your hire, handling the employment contract, statutory contributions, payroll and benefits in that country while you direct the work.
• Contractor management — compliant contracts, invoicing and payouts for self-employed contractors, with classification guidance to reduce misclassification exposure.
• Global payroll — payroll processing for countries where you already hold an entity, consolidated into one platform rather than one local provider per country.
• HR and benefits administration — onboarding, time off, documents, equipment and locally appropriate benefits packages layered on top of the employment relationship.

Employer of record — the part that matters

EOR is the reason most teams evaluate Remote at all. Setting up a legal entity, a local payroll registration and a compliant employment contract in a new country is slow, expensive and hard to unwind. An EOR removes that step: Remote's local entity employs the person, and you pay Remote.

The trade-off is real and worth stating plainly. You gain speed and shed administrative and compliance burden, but you no longer hold the employment relationship directly, and the arrangement carries a recurring per-employee cost rather than a one-off setup cost. Above a certain headcount in a single country, incorporating your own entity usually becomes the cheaper long-run option — and Remote documents entity-transfer paths for exactly that scenario.

Compliance posture

Remote's public position is that it owns its local entities in the countries where it offers EOR rather than relying on a chain of third-party partners. That distinction matters for two reasons: accountability when something goes wrong in a specific jurisdiction, and consistency of the employment contract and IP assignment terms across your workforce.

Intellectual-property and invention-assignment handling is documented as part of the standard employment agreement, which is a genuine concern for engineering and product hires. Data protection and information-security certifications are published on Remote's security pages; verify the current scope of those attestations yourself if procurement will ask, because certification scope changes over time.

Country coverage

Remote publishes a country-by-country directory covering the employment models it supports in each market, statutory benefits, notice and probation rules, leave entitlements and employer cost estimates. Coverage is broad, but it is not uniform: some countries support full EOR, others support contractors or payroll only, and onboarding timelines differ by jurisdiction. Treat the country page for your specific hire — not a global headline number — as the source of truth.

Pricing

Remote prices EOR per employee per month, contractor management per contractor per month, and payroll separately, with annual commitments priced differently from monthly. We deliberately do not reproduce figures here: employer costs on top of the platform fee (statutory contributions, mandatory benefits, 13th-month payments where applicable) vary enormously by country and dominate the total cost of employment. Model the fully loaded cost per country using Remote's employee cost calculator and its published pricing page.

Where Remote fits

• Remote-first companies hiring internationally without wanting an entity in every country.
• Companies testing a new market with one or two hires before committing to incorporation.
• Teams converting contractors to employees where misclassification risk has become material.
• Finance and people teams consolidating a patchwork of local payroll providers into one platform.

Where it does not fit

• Single-country companies — domestic payroll software will be cheaper and more specialised.
• Large concentrations of headcount in one country, where your own entity eventually wins on cost.
• Teams needing only contractor payouts and nothing else — a lighter payments tool may suffice.
• Hiring in a country where Remote does not support your required employment model — check the country page first.

Independent verdict

Remote is one of a small number of credible global employment platforms, and its owned-entity model plus unusually detailed public country documentation are the strongest things about it. It is a serious option for any company whose hiring plan crosses borders before its legal structure does.

What it is not is a way to make international employment cheap. EOR converts a large, slow, one-off legal problem into a predictable recurring cost — a good trade at low headcount per country and a poor one at high headcount. Decide on that basis, price the fully loaded employer cost per country, and revisit the decision as each country's headcount grows.