U.S. Human Capital Management and Payroll Applications Forecast, 2025–2028

This IDC study discusses the human capital management (HCM) and payroll applications market for 2025–2028. The U.S. market for human capital management and payroll applications continues to show steady growth at or near the thresholds for equivalent global growth reported in Worldwide Human Capital Management and Payroll Applications Forecast, 2024–2028 (IDC #US52601624, October 2024). The United States is forecast to continue to account for the highest global percentage of the market for HCM and payroll applications, and that percentage is expected to grow from around 50% in 2023 to 57% by 2028. Forecast global market share attributable to the United States is reinforced by challenges and opportunities that G2000 companies are facing from economic and sociopolitical uncertainty in the United States. The United States hosts the highest number of G2000 company headquarters in addition to the scale of its domestic employer count. Companies are being challenged to reimagine their futures with split opportunities between the G2000 that can diversify their operations globally and their domestic-only counterparts. At the same time, the rise of AI is opening doors to modernize workforce applications to connect goal setting into the realities of business execution for nimbler skilling and operational and tactical shifts."A growing field of U.S. market and regulatory uncertainty is making unpredictable change a constant factor for many organizations. In response, many business leaders are charging their executive teams to lean into AI toward building more adaptable, agile, and performatively productive operational strategies," says Zachary Chertok, senior research manager for Employee Experience at IDC. "For HR teams, AI and performative frameworks are starting to evolve employee performance into an outcome while fusing core functions like learning and training into broader AI-personalized resourcing frameworks accessed through individual portals. As the AI drumbeat grows louder in HR and payroll, it is changing how employees are resourced at work, how the workforce is sourced, trained, and performatively evaluated and valued, and how workforce capacity is reflected in the design of OKRs."