BambooHR partners with Xero Payroll to expand global reach to New Zealand, Australia, and the UK

What do you call bamboo Down Under?

We believe the fine Australians and New Zealanders in HR still call it bamboo, and soon, more people leaders in the region will have smoother access to BambooHR too.

People, payroll, and benefits platform BambooHR announced Thursday a new payroll integration with Wellington-based Xero Payroll, a leading cloud accounting company in New Zealand, Australia, and the UK, as part of its ongoing global expansion efforts.

The partnership aims to help simplify international payroll for BambooHR clients and allow HR teams to sync employee data to country-specific payroll programs.

The expansion comes as more companies look overseas for global expansion in the era of AI dominance, according to recent surveying conducted by BambooHR. Some 79% of business and HR leaders report that they’re optimistic about their company’s growth prospects; 39% are already hiring internationally, and another 29% expect to enter new markets within the next year, the survey found.

The study mirrored ADP research HR Brew reported last month, which found about one-third of companies plan to expand their workforce globally in 2026.

US employers have experienced ongoing domestic labor shortages related to declining birth rates, demographic changes, and changes to immigration enforcement amid the second Trump term.

“The demographic challenges have been plaguing talent leaders for most of the time that I’ve been in this work, which has been my entire working lifetime,” Alison Lands, VP of the employer mobilization practice at Jobs For the Future, told HR Brew last month. “The labor market has only continued to get tighter, and the pain points have only continued to get more painful. So there’s never a better time to think about it than right now. Kicking the can down the road will make things more difficult.”

The ADP study found that both midsized companies (50–1000 employees) and large enterprise orgs with more than a thousand employees are both looking abroad.

“Despite an increasingly complex global marketplace, businesses of all sizes continue to expand their international reach,” BambooHR’s chief product officer, Brian Crofts, said in a press release ahead of the announcement.

The move helps firm up BambooHR as a “single source of truth” on employee data, saving time and talent executing global payroll, and helping customers keep compliant internationally, according to Crofts.

BambooHR’s new payroll integration allows HR teams to automatically sync BambooHR employee data directly into Xero Payroll, rather than manual data entry.

The Xero integration follows a November announcement that Adam Christensen would helm BambooHR’s marketing and brand business, hired to focus on elevating the company’s brand and category leadership and expanding its global reach.

BambooHR already works with more than 30,000 companies in 190 different countries.