Competitor Profile
Where this is heading
Miter stopped being a construction payroll product in 2026. In six months it added safety, performance, accounts payable, a reporting studio and job cost tracking, all hung off the labour record, and raised $40M to keep going. The claim underneath is that whoever holds who worked where and for how much can run the rest of a contractor's back office. That makes the comparison a construction ERP's workforce and payables modules, not another payroll vendor.
The read: the strength is the field product and the integrations, and both got stronger. Miter replaced middleware with direct connections to Vista, Foundation, Acumatica and CMiC, built its own connector for on-premise Sage systems, and made its API free and self serve. A vendor that owns the connection to the contractor's ledger is harder to remove than one listed in the ledger vendor's marketplace.
The open question is the engine. Payroll calculation and tax filing have been reported to run on Check, on the evidence of Check's own case study, and Miter's payroll page names no partner. The company now says it pays about a hundred thousand people a week and processes more than $8.5B a year. At that volume, who files the return is a question a buyer should put in writing, and the answer is not on Miter's site.
The sharpest attack is still reliability of the output, with a public record behind it. Three critical incidents in fifteen months sit on Miter's own status page, and one of the two public user reviews on file complains that reports do not work, which are the deliverable. The scale figures are the company's own and none carries a method: 2,000 contractors, 150,000 users, two in every hundred construction workers.
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How the product hangs together, at the level a product leader needs to place it.
Miter is a cloud construction platform launched in 2021, headquartered in San Francisco and New York. It combines payroll and HR with field operations and job coded spend management, in one system for payroll, HR, time capture, scheduling, safety, expenses and construction compliance. The positioning is deliberately narrow: a contractor only system for general contractors and self performing specialty contractors, which the company now describes as an AI operating system for construction.
The organising idea, in the founder's words, is that labour data is the central node of a construction business: who worked, on which job, on which cost code, for how long, for how much. Miter is building outward from that record. In the six months to September 2026 it launched Safety, Performance, Data Studio and Accounts Payable, and its product pages now add Project Intelligence, a job cost tracking view that shows labour cost against budget as soon as time is approved and before payroll runs.
Miter states plainly that Project Intelligence does not replace the ERP or a project management tool. The payroll and HR suite covers construction payroll (prevailing wage, certified payroll, union payroll with trades, locals, fringes and reciprocity, job costing, fully burdened labour, multi state), HRIS and onboarding with I-9 and E-Verify, benefits administration for health, 401(k), dental, vision, life, disability, HSA and FSA with dedicated brokers, recruiting, learning with courses assignable in bulk and inside onboarding, and Performance 2.0 with review cycles, write-ups, warnings and improvement plans. Payroll changes shipped in summer 2026 include tax withholding overrides inside a payroll run, shift differentials, sick pay at the regular rate where a state requires it, and pay rates with effective dates announced as coming soon.
New certified payroll formats were added in September 2026 for Ohio, New York State DOT and Alaska. Field operations remains the clearest differentiator: time tracking across mobile, kiosk, crew and supervisor entry, facial recognition clock-in, geofencing, offline group clock-in, day level approval, and break policies that apply state rules including California meal and rest breaks with automatic premium pay. The Safety app adds checklists with conditional logic, OSHA 300, 300A and 301 reports generated from recorded incidents, a Safety Passport that lets a worker prove credentials by QR code, and Safety Data Sheets with bulk upload and a public viewer.
Spend covers job coded corporate cards, reimbursements with receipt scanning in the mobile app, per diems, and Accounts Payable, launched in August 2026: invoices are read on intake and drafted as bills, each line can be job costed, and bills are paid by ACH or mailed check and synced to the ERP. Integration is the other half of the product. Miter connects to Sage Intacct, NetSuite, Acumatica, QuickBooks Online and Desktop, Xero, Procore, Jonas Premier, ServiceTitan, HCSS, Viewpoint Vista and Spectrum, Foundation, BuildOps and, from September 2026, CMiC.
During 2026 it replaced middleware with direct connections for Vista, Foundation and Acumatica, and shipped Miter Connect, its own agent for on-premise Sage 300 CRE and Sage 100 Contractor that removes the need for a third party connector. Miter API 2.0 is self serve and free to every customer. The architecture is worth stating directly: the payroll engine underneath has been reported as bought, not built.
Check, a payroll as a service provider, publishes a case study in which Miter's chief executive says Check let Miter ship a payroll product with limited capital, and which reports that roughly 90 percent of Miter's customers run payroll through it. Miter's own payroll page says the software withholds and remits taxes, files quarterly and annual returns and issues W-2s and 1099s in all 50 states, and does not name a processing partner. No acquisitions are on record.
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Geographic footprint, and where payroll is native rather than partner-delivered.
Miter runs payroll in the United States only. Its payroll page states the scope in one line: contractors in the US can use all Miter products, while those in Canada can use all products except payroll. So time, HR, safety and spend are sold into Canada, and Canadian payroll is not.
Within the US, Miter claims local, state and federal payroll tax handling in all 50 states, certified payroll, Davis-Bacon prevailing wage, union payroll and multi state processing for crews that move between jobsites. The underlying processing and tax filing have been reported to run on Check, a third party payroll as a service provider. The UK is not served.
There is no UK payroll or compliance capability (no RTI or PAYE, no pensions auto enrolment, no statutory pay handling), no UK pricing or support, and no CIS (Construction Industry Scheme) support. This is a scope statement, not a shortfall: Miter has built a US construction product. The rest of Europe and South Africa are not served, and there is no indication of presence, payroll capability or localisation in either.
The customer base runs from small contractors to large ones. Named customers in the September 2026 announcement include Clayco, described as a top five design-build firm, and Haugland Group, a union infrastructure contractor with more than 1,600 employees. Open sales roles in October 2026 include an enterprise account executive and a regional sales manager for the Northeast, which points to a deliberate move up in customer size.
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The buyer is the contractor CFO, controller or payroll administrator. Miter's wedge was hardest problem first: win construction payroll, with job costing, compliance and ERP integration, then expand into HR, field operations and spend. The 2026 message is system consolidation.
The company's name for what it replaces is the Frankenstack, the mix of 1980s software, spreadsheets and paper in a contractor's back office. Sales are demo gated and consultative, with no self serve checkout. New modules are installed from an in-product App Shop, which is how Safety, Accounts Payable and the API are switched on.
Distribution has run through ERP ecosystems and trade associations: the Sage Intacct Marketplace, NetSuite SuiteCloud (Miter was named 2025 SuiteCloud Breakthrough Partner of the Year), CFMA and SMACNA. In 2026 the emphasis moved toward owning the connection: direct integrations in place of middleware, its own on-premise connector, and a published API. Thirteen roles were open in October 2026, eight of them in sales, including a Head of Partnerships posted in August.
Miter publishes no price book and no tier structure. Pricing is quoted per employee per month, per deal, and by module. The only public reference point is a third party estimate of $15 to $50 per user per month, depending on company size and modules, from the review site payroll4construction.com.
That is not a Miter figure. Direct deposit is advertised as next day with no fee. No implementation fees or contract terms are published.
There is no separate AI price: AI features ship inside the modules.
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Miter's customer facing AI in October 2026 is extraction and drafting, attached to documents the contractor already handles. Its funding announcement describes it in these terms: the technology parses and structures the data in invoices, receipts and pay rate tables, runs workflows contractors did by hand, and surfaces labour and job cost trends while the job is still running. In the field it creates safety reports from photos or voice notes and summarises job status.
What that means in shipped features: invoice intake in Accounts Payable that reads an invoice and drafts the bill; receipt scanning that fills amount, merchant and date; bulk upload of Safety Data Sheets that extracts product details and hazard ratings for review; AI assisted review writing in Performance; and facial recognition as a verification layer on clock-in. Each one prepares a record for a person to review. Miter is explicit that it has gone further inside the company than in the product.
It describes an internal tool that handles routine support tickets on its own, an internal agent that gives support staff context across tickets, calls and systems, and a code review agent. None of these is offered to customers. On payroll itself the founder writes that putting AI into the system that pays a hundred thousand people every week is not something the company takes lightly.
Most of the $40M round is committed to building AI products and hiring the engineers to build them. What is absent: no agent that acts on payroll, no published accuracy or error rate for any AI feature, no named foundation model partner and no MCP server. The API is the only programmatic surface, and Miter reports that fewer than one in ten thousand API requests fail.
Posture: in-product extraction and drafting, with stated intent and funding to go further, and caution about the pay run.
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Diagnosis and the play together. Each is a live attack vector, not a general weakness.
Who actually runs the payroll. Miter owns the interface, but payroll processing and tax filing have been reported to run on Check, a third party provider; roughly 90 percent of Miter's customers process payroll through Check per Check's own case study, which shows a figure of more than $1B in annual wages, well below the $8.5B on Miter's own site. Miter's payroll page does not name a processing partner.
A buyer should ask who is accountable when a filing is late or a penalty lands, and how fast remediation moves when the engine belongs to someone else. One of the two user reviews on Slashdot, dated June 2026 and written by a payroll administrator, states that Miter 'made us delinquent and created penalties for tax jurisdictions'; this is a single review, not a pattern. Reliability is on the public record.
Miter's status page lists 25 incidents since December 2023, three of them rated critical: a platform outage in December 2024, the product failing to load in June 2025, and elevated sync errors in February 2026. June 2025 also saw a major incident in which payroll could not be previewed. No incident is listed after 24 February 2026, which is either seven clean months or a page that is not being updated; the page does not say which.
Will the reports export on deadline. The other Slashdot review, from February 2026, says that 'reports almost never work the way they are supposed to'. That is one reviewer, and Miter's mobile app is rated 4.7 out of 5 across about 2,500 App Store ratings, so the public review record is thin and mixed.
It matters because for a certified payroll product the report is the deliverable. A live export demo on the state and clearinghouse formats a prospect actually files is the direct test. Breadth is arriving faster than depth can be checked.
Safety, Performance, Data Studio, Accounts Payable and Project Intelligence all arrived within about six months, alongside a rebuilt employee portal. Each new module is a new surface to support. The same February 2026 review says a live chat option was replaced by tickets with waits of days; Miter's support page promises a same day reply by email.
Accounts Payable and Project Intelligence also put Miter beside the contractor's ERP on ground the ERP already covers, and Miter depends on those same ERP vendors for distribution. Geography and price. Payroll is US only, with Canada served for everything except payroll, so a contractor working on both sides of the border runs two payroll systems.
No price is published, which makes Miter hard to compare without a sales cycle. Is the AI a differentiator. What ships reads documents and drafts records.
There is no AI that detects a certified payroll error or a prevailing wage misclassification before filing, and no accuracy figure for the extraction that does ship.
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What Miter has bought, where each sits now, and what it says about direction. None of these are signals; they are standing facts about who owns what.
No acquisitions found in the five-year window.
Checked 2026-08-15. Operating cadence and status are re-checked on each profile refresh; a change of state is itself a finding, because nobody announces the day an acquisition finishes being absorbed.
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The latest signals where Miter is the subject. Full history on the signals page.
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The live predictions whose evidence rests on this vendor, including the ones going against us.