Breathe HR API
Breathe HR has a public REST API at developer.breathehr.com with sandbox and production environments. Access is self-serve: an account admin enables the API and generates a key in settings. Webhooks are not natively supported, so integrators poll or go through unified API vendors.
Frequently asked questions
Breathe HR scores A+ on the API Report Card. Breathe HR has a public REST API at developer.breathehr.com with sandbox and production environments. Access is self-serve: an account admin enables the API and generates a key in settings. Webhooks are not natively supported, so integrators poll or go through unified API vendors.
Breathe HR has a workable official integration path. Most engineering teams can build against it directly. Open API: self-serve, documented, with SDKs
Breathe (commonly 'Breathe HR' or 'BreatheHR') is a UK-headquartered cloud HR platform built explicitly for small and medium-sized businesses. The company was founded in 2012 and is based in Horsham, West Sussex.
Vertical: Enterprise / HR / ERP (Sanity vertical mapping: Enterprise/HR/ERP; Airtable bucket: misc). Centralised employee records and HR data store (HR system of record for UK SMBs). Holiday/leave management: request, approval, balance tracking, calendar visibility. Sickness and absence tracking with reporting.
Low-to-moderate, with strong dominance in the UK sub-50-employee tier. ~8,000 customer organisations / ~250,000 employees in the system at the time of the 2020 ELMO acquisition; meaningful growth since then under ELMO ownership but exact 2026 figures are not publicly disclosed.
HR system of record for UK SMBs: employee PII (name, DOB, address, NI number, bank details), employment history, contract data, right-to-work documentation. Org structure: teams, departments, reporting lines, manager relationships, office locations.
Founded 2012, ~14 years old as of 2026. Cloud-native from inception (not a re-platformed legacy product). The UI is intentionally simple and explicitly positioned as 'easy to use' for non-HR-trained SMB founders and ops staff.
Grades measure one thing: can a customer's engineering team get their own data out programmatically? We check six things (whether a real API exists, how access is gated, data coverage, auth quality, docs and developer experience, and stability) and roll them into a letter grade. Grades get re-verified, and they only move on evidence.