I wrote a paper. Because nobody defined these four terms properly.

EOR, PEO, Global Payroll, COR. Still confused? That's the problem.

EOR, PEO, Global Payroll, COR. Four terms that dominate every conversation about global hiring. And four terms that almost nobody uses correctly.

I’ve spent a loooong time in this market. I’ve watched companies buy the wrong product because a vendor used the wrong term. I’ve seen compliance teams inherit risk they didn’t know they were taking on. I’ve had advisors tell companies they needed an EOR when what they actually needed was global payroll - and the other way around.

The terminology problem is not minor. When you pick the wrong model, you either overpay, take on unexpected liability, or create a compliance gap that shows up later in a tax audit or an employment dispute.

So I wrote a paper about it. It’s live on SSRN now.

And the four models are not the same, and the differences matter.

With an EOR, the vendor becomes the legal employer of your worker in the foreign country. They handle payroll, taxes, benefits, and employment contracts. You direct the work. They own the legal relationship. You don’t need your own entity in that country.

A PEO is co-employment. The PEO shares the employer relationship with you - they handle HR administration, benefits, and compliance, but you typically need your own registered entity in the country first. Common in the US. Less common internationally.

Global Payroll is different at its core. You are the employer. You have the entity. You just need someone to run payroll across multiple countries without getting it wrong. No co-employment. No legal employer transfer. Just payroll execution.

COR - Contractor of Record - engages a contractor on your behalf. The worker is classified as an independent contractor, not an employee. The COR handles the contract and payments. The key risk is misclassification. If the worker should legally be an employee, calling them a contractor does not protect you.

The taxonomy in the paper is built around four questions. Who is the legal employer - is it the vendor, you, or shared? Do you need your own entity in the country? How portable is the model across different countries? And who carries the liability?

Run any of the four models through those four questions and the differences become clear. EOR answers all four differently from PEO. COR is different at its core from Global Payroll. The terms are not interchangeable because the answers are not interchangeable.

Why does this paper exist? There’s no formal definition of these terms anywhere. Vendors define them however suits their product. Regulators use different language. Even the academic literature on platform work and worker classification doesn’t map cleanly onto how these services are actually sold and used.

The ILO has a framework for employment relationships - who employs who, what obligations follow - but nobody had applied it systematically to these four categories. I drew on that framework, regulatory definitions across jurisdictions, academic literature on worker classification and platform work, and ten years of watching how these models get used and misused in practice.

The result is a taxonomy and a decision framework. The decision framework is at the end of the paper. If you’re trying to figure out which model fits your situation, start there.

What this paper is not: it’s conceptual. I’m not testing the taxonomy across every jurisdiction. That’s future research - and I say so explicitly. I’m also co-founder of an independent advisory platform in the global employment solutions market. That’s declared upfront. The paper doesn’t recommend any vendor. It’s not a sales tool. It’s an attempt to give the market a shared vocabulary that actually holds up.

Most people think this terminology confusion is just a minor communication issue. It’s not. It’s a structural problem in the market. And it costs companies real money.

If you advise companies on global hiring, this is the vocabulary your companies need you to have. If you’re buying one of these services, the decision framework alone is worth the read. If you work in global HR and you’ve ever sat in a meeting where three people used EOR to mean three different things, you’ll recognise every problem this paper is trying to solve.

The paper is 23 pages. Link here.