Guide
The 1099-NEC filing threshold jumps from $600 to $2,000 for 2026 payments. If you use subs, helpers, or a second truck on busy weeks, here's exactly what changes and what doesn't.
For years, if you paid any non-employee $600 or more in a calendar year for labor, you had to send them a Form 1099-NEC by January 31 and file a copy with the IRS. Starting with payments made in 2026, that threshold jumps to $2,000. The change came out of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and applies to payments made after December 31, 2025 — so it affects the forms you'll file in early 2027, not the ones you're filing right now for 2025 work.
Old rule: 1099-NEC required at $600+ paid in a year. New rule: 1099-NEC required at $2,000+ paid, starting with 2026 payments.
If you're a solo operator who occasionally brings in a helper for a big job, this is genuinely good news — a lot of small, one-off jobs that used to trigger a 1099 now won't. Think: the guy you paid $900 to help haul debris on one landscaping job, or the apprentice electrician you brought on for a single weekend install.
If you run a crew — a cleaning company with rotating subs, a landscaping outfit with seasonal help, an HVAC shop that farms out duct work — this barely changes anything. Most working subcontractors clear $2,000 from you well before June. You'll still be issuing 1099s to nearly everyone you pay regularly; you'll just have a shorter list of the occasional, small-dollar helpers who fall off it.
This is the part people get wrong. The threshold change is a reporting rule, not a tax rule. None of the following changed:
Say you run a small landscaping business and use three seasonal helpers between March and November:
That third case is the whole practical effect of this change: fewer small, one-off helpers show up on your January paperwork. Everyone doing real, recurring work for you still does.
The mistake to avoid is treating this as a January problem. If you pay a sub $750 in April and another $900 in September, you're at $1,650 — still under the threshold, but one more $400 job in November pushes them over $2,000 and now you owe them a form. If you haven't kept a W-9 on file, you're emailing a sub in January asking for their tax ID, which is an awkward way to end the relationship for the year.
Keep a running total per sub as you pay them, the same way you'd track job costs. If you're already using something like our job profitability calculator to see what a job actually nets after materials and labor, add subcontractor pay to that same running log — it does double duty as your 1099 tracker and tells you whether hiring the sub is even worth it once you're honest about your break-even on the job.
Simple rule of thumb: any time you pay someone who isn't on your payroll, get a W-9 first, log the payment against their name, and re-check their year-to-date total before every check after the first.
None of this is legal or tax advice — the specifics of your situation, your state, and your entity type matter, so run the details past your accountant. But the tracking habit itself is just good bookkeeping, and it's exactly the kind of recurring admin task that's easy to let slide when you're also running jobs. If sub payment tracking, W-9 collection, and other repetitive back-office work keep falling to the bottom of the list, that's the kind of thing our done-for-you admin help is built to take off your plate. For a lighter-weight fix, the Operations Kit ($19) includes ready-to-use tracking templates you can drop a sub's name and running total into today.
Yes. The $2,000 threshold only changes who you have to send a 1099-NEC to at year-end — it doesn't touch the W-9 requirement. Get a signed W-9 from anyone you pay for labor before the first check goes out, every time, no matter how small the job looks.
Starting with payments made in 2026 (reported on forms filed in early 2027), you only have to issue a 1099-NEC to a subcontractor or non-employee you paid $2,000 or more during the year, up from the old $600 threshold.
Yes, the old $600 threshold still applies to any payments made during 2025, even though those forms are filed in early 2026. The $2,000 threshold only applies to payments made from January 1, 2026 onward.