Before you trust a platform with your payroll, you want to know who’s behind it. Search for answers and you’ll get two flavors: Wikipedia’s history lesson and stock sites full of undated tables. Neither answers what you’re really asking, which is whether this company is solid and whether businesses like yours actually run on it. We work inside Paylocity every day, so we pulled the facts from primary sources, dated every one, and added the thing the fact pages can’t: a fit verdict.
Paylocity at a Glance
Paylocity is a publicly traded HR, payroll, finance, and IT software company (NASDAQ: PCTY), founded in 1997 by Steve Sarowitz and headquartered in Schaumburg, Illinois. Here’s the company in nine verified facts:
Paylocity at a Glance
Verified from primary sources, August 2026
Founded
1997
as Ameripay Payroll Ltd.; renamed Paylocity in 2005
Founder
Steve Sarowitz
board member and largest individual shareholder
CEO
Toby Williams
sole CEO since August 2024
Headquarters
Schaumburg, Illinois
largely remote workforce
Ownership
Public — NASDAQ: PCTY
IPO March 2014; no parent company
Size
6,700 employees · 41,650 clients
per paylocity.com, August 2026
Revenue
$1.771B in fiscal 2026, up 11%
Best Fit
Midsize companies, roughly 50–500 employees
Who Owns Paylocity?
No parent company owns Paylocity. Paylocity Holding Corporation is an independent, publicly traded company, listed on NASDAQ under the ticker PCTY since its March 2014 IPO, which raised about $120 million.
Ownership today is a mix of institutions and insiders. Institutional investors hold roughly 83% of Paylocity’s shares, led by BlackRock at 8.19% and T. Rowe Price Investment Management at 7.55%, according to ownership data compiled by WallStreetZen (accessed August 2026; the page doesn’t date its snapshot). Founder Steve Sarowitz remains the largest individual shareholder with 15.88%, or about 8.5 million shares. Former CEO Steve Beauchamp holds 4.62%. Holdings like these shift every quarter as funds rebalance, so treat any snapshot, including this one, as a point-in-time reading.
One piece of context the stock pages never add: Sarowitz held 44% of Paylocity at the 2014 IPO. The decline since isn’t a founder heading for the exits. It’s the normal dilution of taking a company public and staying for the next decade, and he still holds a board seat along with the largest individual stake. For a buyer, that combination reads as continuity: the person who started the company in 1997 still has skin in the game.
Who Founded Paylocity, and What Was It Called Before?
Steve Sarowitz founded Paylocity in 1997 in the Chicago area under its original name, Ameripay Payroll Ltd. The company became Paylocity in December 2005, so if a colleague remembers working with “Ameripay” two decades ago, that was the same business.
Sarowitz didn’t stumble into payroll. Before founding the company he worked at Robert F. White, then the largest independent payroll firm in the country, and later served as president of the Independent Payroll Providers Association. The bet he made early still defines the product: Paylocity shipped its first web-based software-as-a-service platform in 2002, years before “cloud payroll” was a category, and never carried the desktop-software baggage older competitors had to shed.
Ameripay took its first outside funding in 2008, six years before the IPO.
Who Runs Paylocity Today?
Toby Williams is Paylocity’s President and Chief Executive Officer, and he’s been sole CEO since August 2024. His path there was a slow-motion promotion rather than a shakeup: Williams joined Paylocity as CFO in 2017, became President and Co-CEO alongside Steve Beauchamp in 2022, then took the top job alone. Before Paylocity he was Chief Product and Strategy Officer at the education-software company Ellucian and spent 2006 to 2011 leading mergers and acquisitions at Paychex.
Beauchamp, who ran Paylocity as CEO for most of its growth years, now sits on the board, and so does founder Steve Sarowitz. That’s worth a moment if you’re evaluating vendors. Leadership churn at a payroll company tends to show up eighteen months later in product and support priorities. Paylocity’s recent leadership changes have all been internal promotions, not outside hires.
Where Is Paylocity Located?
Paylocity’s headquarters is in Schaumburg, Illinois, a northwest suburb of Chicago. The company also lists additional offices and describes its workforce as largely remote, spread across the United States and several other countries (per paylocity.com, August 2026).
If you’re used to older payroll vendors with a branch office in every metro, Paylocity works differently. Its service model is remote-first. Your implementation and support teams will almost certainly not be local to you, wherever you are. In practice that matters far less than it did in 2005, but it’s the honest answer to “where are they located” as it affects you.
How Big Is Paylocity?
Paylocity employs about 6,700 people and serves 41,650 client organizations, per its own figures published on paylocity.com as of August 2026.
Financially, Paylocity reported $1.771 billion in total revenue for fiscal year 2026 (ended June 30, 2026), up 11% from the prior year, with recurring and other revenue of $1.651 billion, up 12.2%. The company grew its client base roughly 7% over the year.
For a buyer, the size question is really a stability question, and the numbers answer it. A company with $1.77 billion in annual revenue and 12 years on the public markets isn’t a startup risk. At the same time, Paylocity is an order of magnitude smaller than the payroll industry’s giants, and it behaves like it: midsize clients are its core market rather than an afterthought, which shows up in how the platform is packaged and supported.
What Companies Use Paylocity?
Paylocity’s customer list answers the “what big companies use it” question honestly: some recognizable names, but the typical customer is a midsize organization you haven’t heard of.
The recognizable names are real. Paylocity’s published case studies (paylocity.com, August 2026) feature the Dallas Stars, the Archdiocese of Miami, State Bank of Texas, outdoor-furniture manufacturer POLYWOOD, and Humane Animal Rescue of Pittsburgh, among others. Paylocity’s marketing targets 11 industries by name, including healthcare, education, manufacturing, nonprofits, restaurants and hospitality, retail, technology, and religious organizations.
Third-party data tells the same story from the outside. Bloomberry, which identifies Paylocity customers through job-posting crawls, tracked 10,275 companies using the platform as of its August 3, 2026 update, and found 48% of them have between 51 and 200 employees, with healthcare the most common industry at 9%. That’s a sample skewed toward companies actively hiring, but the shape matches Paylocity’s own segmentation, which splits its market into small (1–99 employees), midsize (100–499), and enterprise (500+).
Put simply: hockey teams and archdioceses use Paylocity, but the center of gravity is a 50-to-500-person organization with one overworked HR team.
What Size Company Is Paylocity Right For?
Paylocity’s official answer is “everyone”: it sells packages for companies from 1 to 500+ employees. Our answer, after years of running the platform for clients, is narrower.
The sweet spot is roughly 50 to 500 employees. That’s the range where the evidence converges: it’s where Bloomberry’s tracked-customer data clusters, it’s the midsize segment Paylocity’s packaging is built around, and it’s the point where a company has outgrown small-business payroll tools but doesn’t need a global enterprise system. If you’re in this range, Paylocity should probably be on your shortlist.
Below about 50 employees, the platform works, but a 20-person company that needs only basic payroll will leave most of a full human capital management suite unused. The exception is a small company growing fast enough to grow into it, which is exactly the buyer Paylocity’s small-business segment is designed to catch.
Above about 500 employees, plenty of organizations run Paylocity happily, and the enterprise segment exists for them. The candid caveat is that companies with complex multi-country operations often shortlist global-first enterprise platforms, and that’s a different aisle of the market.
One more fit question matters more than size, and it’s the one buyers most often get wrong. Paylocity is software, not a service. It is not a PEO: you stay the employer of record, and the platform won’t run itself. So the real question behind “does Paylocity fit us” is “who will run it every day.” Companies with a full HR team handle it in-house. Leaner teams often pair the platform with a partner like our Managed HR service, where we run Paylocity day to day and your team keeps the decisions. Either model works; picking one deliberately is what separates companies that love the platform from companies that own an expensive login screen.
What Size Company Fits Paylocity?
Paylocity’s own market segments, with the sweet spot our clients’ experience supports
-
Small
1–99 employees
Works if you’re growing into it. A very small team that needs only basic payroll will leave most of the suite unused.
-
Midsize — the core market
100–499 employees
Where the platform’s packaging and support are aimed, and where most tracked Paylocity customers sit.
-
Enterprise
500+ employees
Widely used. Companies with complex multi-country operations often shortlist global-first platforms instead.
The Short Version
Paylocity is an independent public company (NASDAQ: PCTY), founded by Steve Sarowitz in 1997, led by CEO Toby Williams since August 2024, and headquartered in Schaumburg, Illinois. It employs about 6,700 people, serves 41,650 clients, and booked $1.77 billion in fiscal 2026 revenue. Its customers run from hockey teams to animal shelters, but the center of the customer base, and the platform’s sweet spot, is the midsize company of roughly 50 to 500 employees.
So the ownership question checks out. The fit question is yours to answer: does your team have the hands to run what you’re about to buy? If you’d like a second opinion on that one, we’re easy to talk to.
Paylocity Company Facts FAQ
Who is the parent company of Paylocity?
Paylocity has no parent company. Paylocity Holding Corporation is an independent, publicly traded company whose largest shareholders are institutional investors, led by BlackRock and T. Rowe Price Investment Management, according to ownership data compiled by WallStreetZen (accessed August 2026). Founder Steve Sarowitz is the largest individual shareholder, holding 8,504,664 shares per the same data.
Is Paylocity publicly traded?
Yes. Paylocity trades on the NASDAQ exchange under the ticker symbol PCTY, and its shares have been public since the company’s March 2014 IPO, which raised about $120 million. Paylocity’s financial reports are published quarterly at investors.paylocity.com.
Are Paychex and Paylocity the same company?
No. Paychex and Paylocity are two separate, independent, publicly traded companies. The confusion is understandable beyond the similar names: Paylocity CEO Toby Williams led mergers and acquisitions at Paychex from 2006 to 2011 before joining Paylocity in 2017, but the two companies have no ownership connection.
How many clients does Paylocity have?
Paylocity reports 41,650 client organizations on its website as of August 2026, alongside about 6,700 employees and a partner network of more than 5,500 brokers, financial advisors, and consultants. Paylocity’s clients range from small businesses with fewer than 100 employees to enterprises with 500 or more.
