How to Pay International Employees (Hint: Most of Them Should Be Contractors)

You believe you have 2 options. And both of them suck.

Running a business is sometimes about picking the least bad option.

But when it comes to how to pay international employees and contractors, there’s a middle ground that most people are simply not aware of.

Here are the 2 options everyone understands.

Option 1: Do it manually with Wise, PayPal, or Payoneer.

Which is fine if you have 2 people.

But if you’re doing batch payments, you’re now manually updating a spreadsheet every month.

• Adding people
• Removing people
• Making sure bonuses are calculated correctly
• Double-checking the bank details you typed in by hand

You probably didn’t get into business to run payroll like that.

Option 2: Pay an EOR platform $600 a month per person.

If you’re paying a Virtual Assistant $1,000 a month, $600 is kind of insane to pay just to run a transaction every month.

That’s 60% of the hire’s pay.

To press a button.

There’s a third option sitting between these two, and the companies that could tell you about it have every reason not to.

I run a staffing agency called HireUA.

We’ve placed over 1,100 people into businesses across 35 countries, and my Finance Admin runs payments for hundreds of contractors every single month.

Weekly and monthly cycles.

Bonuses, adjustments, currency preferences, all of it.

So this isn’t theory.

This is the operating manual, with real numbers from real payment runs.

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First, Let’s Fix the Words

You typed “employees.”

You almost certainly meant “contractors.”

I know this because I hear it on discovery calls every week.

People say “my employee in the Philippines” or “my team member in Colombia” when the person is, legally speaking, an independent contractor.

And that’s fine.

“Contractor” sounds so formal. It sounds like a guy in a hard hat building your deck.

So everyone just says “employee” or “team member” instead.

For everyday conversation, no problem.

Words are words.

For paying people, the distinction is everything.

An actual foreign employee means you either own a legal entity in their country or you’re renting one from an EOR.

It means statutory benefits, local payroll taxes, severance rules, and a government on the other side of the world with opinions about your business.

A contractor means they invoice you and you pay the invoice. The overwhelming majority of overseas hires should be contractors.

I’ve owned companies in Poland and Canada, I’ve researched entity formation across half of Eastern Europe, and my position on this is not subtle.

I wrote a full breakdown of the contractor vs. employee question and why the standard advice gets it wrong. Read that if you’re still deciding how to structure the relationship.

This article assumes you’ve decided.

Now you need to actually move the money. Because here’s the thing nobody tells you: you don’t have an employment problem.

You have a payments problem.

And payments problems are much, much cheaper to solve.

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What It Actually Costs to Pay People Overseas

Let me give you numbers that don’t come from a pricing page.

We processed contractor payments through Wise for years at HireUA. The average cost worked out to about $10 to $15 per person.

There are anomalies depending on where in the world the person sits — one corridor might run $40, another might run $2. And if the contractor has their own Wise account on the receiving end, a Wise-to-Wise transfer is free.

Which is fantastic.

Not $600.

Not $500.

10 or 15 dollars to move money from a US business to a contractor in Ukraine, Poland, the Philippines, or Colombia — in dollars if they want dollars, in their local currency if they want that instead.

Sit with that gap for a second.

The EOR seat costs 40 to 50 times more than the transaction it wraps around. Now, is the EOR doing more than moving money?

Yes.

It’s employing the person locally, running statutory benefits, carrying compliance.

If you actually need those things, the fee has a job.

But if what you need is “my contractor invoices me and I pay it” — and for most of you reading this, that is exactly what you need — you’re being quoted a legal infrastructure fee for a wire transfer.

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Three Ways to Pay International Employees and Contractors

Every payment setup I’ve seen across 1,100+ placements lands in one of three buckets.

Route	Cost Per Person	What You Get
Manual transfers (Wise, PayPal, Payoneer)	$10–15	The cheapest rails. You own the spreadsheet, the timing, and every mistake.
Contractor payment option on an EOR platform	$30–50	Batch payments, contract storage, tax document collection, no hand-built math
Full EOR seat	$500–700	Local legal employment, statutory benefits, compliance handled in their country

The bottom row gets all the marketing.

The top row gets all the Reddit-style word of mouth.

The middle row is the one most small businesses should actually be looking at, and it’s the one nobody leads with.

Here’s the part that should raise an eyebrow.

Most of the EOR platforms have a contractor payment option, and it runs somewhere around $30 to $50 a head.

Same companies.

Same software.

The $600 product and the $35 product are living in the same building.

They don’t lead with the $35 product for the same reason a steakhouse doesn’t lead with the soup.

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What the Manual Route Really Costs You

The $10-15 per person number makes the manual route look unbeatable. So let me tell you what it’s actually like to run, because I ran it for years.

The fees are cheap.

The process is what costs you.

Here’s how a month actually worked for us.

1. We collect from clients in advance, around the 25th of the month.
2. The money lands in the bank account.
3. Then it has to be transferred from the bank to Wise before any batch can go out.
4. Depending on how the transfers line up, the full chain — collection, clearing, transfer, batch — can stretch to 10 days.

You have now built a 10-day cash conversion cycle into your own payroll.

Congratulations.

And the batch itself?

It’s an Excel file.

You build it by hand.

• Every name
• Every amount
• Every bonus adjustment
• Every currency

Then you upload a spreadsheet that moves your entire payroll and hope nobody fat-fingered a digit.

At 2 contractors, this is a non-issue.

15 minutes a month.

Once you start getting up to a dozen, it becomes more painful.

The batch file grows, the adjustments multiply, and now it’s a real job that someone on your team owns.

That’s the honest math on the cheap route.

The fees are $10 a person.

The overhead is a process you have to build, staff, and never screw up.

This is exactly why that middle tier exists.

For $30 to $50 a head, the batch runs itself, the contracts live in one place, and nobody is maintaining a spreadsheet with other people’s rent on it.

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The Currency Question, From Someone Who Lived It

Every article on this topic has a currency section written by someone who has never been paid in a foreign currency in their life.

I have lived abroad for over a decade and counting.

Let me tell you what exchange rates actually do to real people.

Currency is the part of how to pay international employees that most guides get backwards.

When I lived in Poland, I watched the zloty go from 4.4 to the dollar down to 3.7.

Doesn’t sound like much, right?

A few tenths of a decimal.

Our cost of living went up almost 20%.

From nothing but the exchange rate.

Same apartment, same groceries, same life — 20% more expensive, because the dollars coming in bought fewer zloty.

I lived in Ukraine when the hryvnia was 40 to 1. It eventually strengthened to 22.

Anyone earning dollars there watched their local purchasing power get cut nearly in half, then claw its way back.

That’s the reality.

Some months and years, getting paid in dollars is great. Other months and years, it stings.

It’s just part of life when you earn in one currency and spend in another.

So which currency should you pay in?

Here’s my on-the-ground report, and it cuts against the standard advice:

Most of Them Want Dollars Anyway

Maybe not a Pole or a Czech these days, with the euro next door and the zloty strong.

But a Serbian, a Ukrainian, and most of Latin America and Southeast Asia?

They prefer dollars. That’s what their parents kept in the couch. That’s what their grandparents trusted when the local currency did something ugly, which, in most of these countries, it has, within living memory.

Your average contractor in Eastern Europe or Latin America is not investing in index funds.

They keep their savings in USD and convert only what they need for everyday spending.

The dollar is their savings account.

I’ll put it this way: I do not know a single Ukrainian who keeps more than their month-to-month expenses in the local currency.

Maybe a few thousand dollars in the bank, depending on what they make.

The rest is in dollars.

And it’s probably not in a bank at all.

So don’t overthink it. Ask each person how they want to be paid, in what currency, on what platform.

Then do that.

The best payment setup is the one your contractor picks.

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The Requests We Say No To

Across 35 countries, we have been asked for every payment method that exists.

• Bank wire.
• Wise.
• Payoneer.
• PayPal.
• Local transfer apps I’d never heard of
• And yes — crypto

We’ve had contractors ask to be paid in crypto more than once.

We don’t do it.

Not because it can’t technically work.

Because payroll is the one part of your business where “technically works” is not the standard.

The standard is: the money arrives, on time, every time, in a form the contractor can actually spend, with a paper trail you’d be comfortable showing your accountant.

A payment rail you can’t document is a problem you’ve scheduled for later.

So when someone asks for an exotic setup, we offer the boring ones.

The boring ones are boring because they work.

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When the $600 Seat Is Actually Worth It

I want to be fair, because the full EOR product does have a job.

If you need an actual employee — with statutory benefits, in a country with strict labor enforcement, structured as real local employment — and you don’t have an entity there, an EOR is the cleanest way to do it.

Some countries in Western Europe basically force the issue.

And even then, a $3,000/month hire plus a $600 seat is still around half of what the equivalent US employee costs all-in.

The seat isn’t a scam.

It’s a specific tool for a specific situation.

The problem is that it gets sold as the default to people whose actual situation is “I have a contractor and an invoice.”

If you’re not sure which situation you’re in, that’s the contractor vs. employee question — and I’ve written the full argument on that separately.

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Common Questions on How to Pay International Employees and Contractors

Can Gusto pay international employees?

Gusto handles international contractor payments in a growing list of countries, but it does not run foreign payroll for actual international employees.

If the person is a contractor, Gusto can work.

If you need real foreign employment, you’re back to an entity or an EOR.

Can I pay international contractors through QuickBooks Online?

QuickBooks can record the expense, but it’s not built to be your international payment rail.

Most businesses pay through Wise, Payoneer, or a contractor payment platform, then sync or categorize the transaction in QuickBooks.

Do international employees and contractors pay taxes?

Yes — in their own country.

Your contractor in the Philippines handles Philippine taxes.

Your contractor in Ukraine handles Ukrainian taxes.

Their tax compliance is their responsibility as an independent business, which is one more reason the contractor structure is cleaner for everyone.

How long do international payments take?

The transfer itself: usually minutes to 2 days on modern rails.

The full cycle is what catches people.

If money has to move from your bank to a payment platform before a batch goes out, budget up to 10 days end to end and schedule accordingly.

Contractors plan their lives around payday.

Late payments are how you lose good people to someone more organized than you.

What’s the cheapest way to pay international contractors?

Per transaction, manual transfers through Wise or similar — roughly $10-15 per person on average, sometimes free if both sides have Wise accounts.

Cheapest overall depends on your headcount.

Past a handful of people, the $30-50 contractor payment tier usually wins once you price in the hours someone spends building batch files by hand.

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The Simplest Version of All

Everything above is the do-it-yourself manual.

Rails, fees, forms, currencies, timing.

There’s also the version where you skip the manual.

That’s the version of how to pay international employees where you don’t think about it at all.

When you hire through HireUA, we charge a card. We handle everything after that.

Payments, currencies, platforms, the contractor’s preferences, the paperwork.

• You get one predictable charge a month and your people get paid on time, every time, however they want
• You never build a batch file
• You never chase an invoice or a bank detail
• You never find out at 9 PM that a transfer got flagged for verification the night before someone’s rent is due

One card.

Everything handled.

If that sounds better than becoming your own international payroll department — book a call.

We’ll find you the person AND pay them, so you can get back to the business you actually started.