The percentage is meaningless without its base
A fee can be charged on the invoice excluding VAT, on the invoice including VAT, or on the gross salary that remains after employer's national insurance has been taken out. Those are three different numbers, and the same headline percentage produces three different deductions.
PayoutPartner charges 4.9% of the invoice amount excluding VAT — the rate for an invoice in NOK paid to a Norwegian bank account. An invoice in another currency adds 0.5 percentage points for the currency settlement, and a payout to an account outside Norway adds another 0.5 for the cross-border payment rails, so a EUR invoice paid to a foreign account is 5.9%. VAT itself is added on top of your invoice, paid by your client, and passed to the state — it never reduces your salary and it is not part of the fee base. The rate that applies to your work is not always the standard 25%, and Skatteetaten lists every rate.
When you compare, do not compare percentages. Take one realistic invoice — say 50,000 kr for the work — and ask each service what lands in your bank account. That single number settles it.
The order of deductions changes the answer
The invoice is a fixed pot, and everything has to fit inside it. The sequence is: the service fee comes off the invoice excluding VAT; an insurance premium, where a client has arranged one, comes off next; employer's national insurance is then backed out of what remains rather than added on top; and only then does a salary exist for your tax card to apply to.
Backing employer's tax out rather than adding it on is the step that surprises people. Gross salary is what is left divided by 1.141, not the remainder itself. Change the order of any two steps and every figure below them changes.
Employer's national insurance is 14.1% because PayoutPartner is registered in Oslo, and the rate follows the employer's location rather than yours. Lower rates exist in the northern zones and they attach to where the paying business is based — Skatteetaten publishes the zones and rates in full.
What the fee has to cover before it is cheap
A low percentage that leaves you doing the reporting is not a low price. The work the fee should be buying is: issuing the invoice in the format the client needs, calculating and reporting VAT at the correct rate, withholding income tax against your tax card, calculating and paying employer's national insurance, filing the a-melding, and producing a payslip.
Ask specifically about expenses. Mileage, diet and documented outlays have their own tax treatment, and a service that pays them as ordinary taxable salary is quietly costing you the difference on every assignment where you travel.
Five questions that change the number
- Is the fee charged on the invoice excluding VAT, including VAT, or on gross salary?
- Is it taken when you invoice, or only when the client actually pays — and what happens if they never do?
- Is there a subscription, a setup fee, a per-invoice charge or a minimum?
- Is insurance included, and is it priced per hour worked or as a percentage of the invoice?
- Are mileage, diet and outlays reimbursed with the correct tax treatment, or taxed as salary?
On PayoutPartner the answers are: the invoice excluding VAT — 4.9% in NOK to a Norwegian account, plus half a point for a non-NOK invoice and another half for a payout abroad; only when the client pays, and nothing if the invoice goes unpaid; no subscription, setup fee, per-invoice charge or minimum; insurance only where a client has arranged it, priced per hour worked and absent on most assignments; and yes, with the correct treatment.
And compared with running your own ENK?
Registering an enkeltpersonforetak is free, so on a per-invoice basis a company always looks cheaper. The costs it carries are elsewhere: bookkeeping, VAT returns once you pass the registration threshold, the annual filing, and either your own hours or an accountant's fee. Against a handful of invoices a year those fixed costs dominate; against full-time freelancing they are spread thin and the percentage is the expensive part.
There is no threshold at which one becomes correct for everyone. There is a point at which the arithmetic flips for you, and it depends on how much you invoice and how much of it you would be deducting.