Learn how Gusto partnered with Symmetry to automate payroll tax calculations, eliminate compliance fire drills, and free their engineers to build the future of people tech

How Gusto Scales Payroll Compliance with Symmetry 

Gusto is the modern people platform that serves as the operational backbone for 500,000+ small businesses nationwide. By automating complex tasks like payroll, benefits and HR, Gusto empowers small businesses to move beyond paperwork and focus on what matters most: their people. As a leader in the people tech space, Gusto’s goal is to make the lives of working people a little easier, a little more secure, and a little brighter every day.

Mastering the endless responsibility of payroll compliance

Gusto’s mission is to simplify people operations, but the U.S. tax landscape is notoriously complicated: 

• Growing Jurisdictional Complexity: Constantly shifting state and local regulations introduce branching logic and edge cases to already difficult flows. Local tax environments in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky require rooftop-level address accuracy to determine correct jurisdictions, leaving no room for error. 
• Scaling Without Slowing Down: As their client base grew to hundreds of thousands of small businesses, Gusto needed a compliance infrastructure that could handle increasing volume and complexity without becoming a tax on their product innovation.

To solve this, Gusto made a strategic choice: rather than divert engineering resources toward maintaining compliance logic in-house, they built on Symmetry’s compliance foundation, freeing their team to stay focused on building products their clients love. 

Symmetry was the clear answer. As the industry leader in local tax determination, Symmetry offered a depth of accuracy and coverage that competing vendors consistently struggle to match. And because Symmetry’s components are built on modern, developer-friendly APIs and SDKs, Gusto was able to build their own product experience on top of Symmetry’s compliance foundation. Gusto owns the product experience while Symmetry owns the compliance logic. 

Gusto’s relationship with Symmetry goes back to Gusto’s earliest days. As a startup, Gusto licensed Symmetry’s tax engine as the foundation for their payroll product. By building on Symmetry’s compliance infrastructure from day one, rather than building their own, Gusto was free to focus on what made them different: a people-first product experience that small businesses trust. That founding partnership is still at the core of how Gusto operates at scale today.

Precise, automated payroll compliance at scale

Gusto integrated Symmetry’s modern, easy-to-use compliance solutions to automate the most complex parts of the employee lifecycle: 

• Symmetry Tax EngineⓇ: The backbone of Gusto’s payroll stack, powering every U.S. gross-to-net tax calculation across federal, state, and local jurisdictions. Built into the engine is Symmetry’s location and tax determination technology, which resolves employee and employer addresses to rooftop-level accuracy and maps them to the correct jurisdictions, including the most complex local tax environments in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky.
• Payroll PointⓇ: Gusto’s team uses the Payroll PointⓇ portal as an internal diagnostic tool for ad hoc tax-determination and troubleshooting – a fast, reliable way to verify jurisdiction assignments and catch issues before they reach payroll. 
• Tax Radar & Release Notes: Symmetry's Tax Radar and Preview Release Notes give Gusto's compliance and engineering teams advance visibility into upcoming tax changes — new programs, revised forms, and emerging requirements like Paid Family and Medical Leave — weeks before they take effect. This lets Gusto redirect engineering time toward UI work, documentation, and client communications well ahead of effective dates.
• Symmetry Tax Logic Chat: Gusto’s tax team uses Symmetry Tax Logic Chat to gain deeper insights into tax expectations and address client tax questions in real time – putting AI-powered, self-service answers directly in the hands of the people who need them. 

Building on Symmetry’s payroll compliance infrastructure, Gusto has delivered: 

• Unshakeable Accuracy: Symmetry's expert-maintained tax rules power every gross-to-net calculation across the U.S., including the most complex multi-state and local-tax scenarios — reducing the risk of under/over-withholding, agency notices, and client escalations.
• Operational Excellence: Symmetry's compliance data layer and release process offload rate and table changes and many structural updates each year, freeing significant engineering capacity that Gusto redirects to product innovation rather than maintenance.
• Engineering Liberty: With Symmetry owning the compliance logic for PFML, Secure 2.0, benefits, and S-corp rules, Gusto's engineers can ship richer payroll and benefits functionality without re-implementing complex tax logic in-house — turning what used to be a bottleneck into a competitive advantage.

500,000+ small businesses served on Symmetry-powered payroll

Today Gusto serves hundreds of thousands of small businesses and accounting firms with confidence knowing that the compliance infrastructure beneath their platform is accurate, current, and built to scale. By choosing Symmetry as their foundation, Gusto’s team stays focused on what they do best: building a people-first platform that gives every small business the tools to thrive.  

Symmetry is a wholly owned subsidiary of Gusto, Inc.