Ultimate Employee Payroll Spreadsheet Template for Google Sheets & Excel

The payroll function in six figures: what it costs a month and a year, how many people are on it, the average salary across them, what benefits add, and what the employer pays in total once everything beyond gross pay is counted. A department table underneath splits the payroll by team with each one's share, and two charts carry the annual picture by department and the trend across the year.

The list everything else is built from. Each person takes a name, position, department, pay type, rate, weekly hours, start date and status - and because pay type distinguishes salaried from hourly, both can sit in the same roster with the annual figure worked out correctly for each. Marking someone as no longer employed takes them out of the payroll figures without deleting their row, so the record survives the departure.

Every rate the workbook uses sits at the top of this sheet - the state rate, the two payroll contributions, the earnings ceiling on the first of them, the retirement rate and the employer unemployment rates - followed by the federal bracket table. Beneath them, one row per person: gross pay from the roster, then each deduction computed from those cells, then net pay. Nothing in the deduction columns carries a rate of its own. That is the point of the layout: the figures a payroll run applied are visible in one place rather than buried in formulas, and bringing the file to a new tax year or a different state is editing cells rather than hunting through columns. The federal column reads the bracket table directly, so moving a floor or a rate there moves every employee's tax.

The annual view of the same thing: each person's salary, their estimated federal tax, and each payroll contribution, all reading the rates on the payroll sheet rather than carrying a second copy of them. Beneath that, the employer side - the matching contributions and the unemployment charges, each against the wage base it applies to. The employer block is the useful half. Payroll cost is not the wage, and this is where the difference is set out per person rather than as a single line in a total.

What employment costs beyond pay. Each person carries their health, dental and vision cover, the retirement match earned against their salary, and a value put on accrued time off, adding to a total per employee - with a section expressing that total as a share of salary, which is the figure that makes the real cost of a hire visible.

Budget against actual by department, with the variance in both money and percentage terms, alongside a comparison across three years. Planned figures are entered rather than derived, which keeps the sheet usable however your budgeting cycle runs.