Payroll tax deposits and filing

Not tax advice. This page reports what IRS pages said on the date we read them. Confirm your own deposit schedule, due dates and penalty exposure with a CPA or payroll professional before you act.

What this page covers and what it does not

It covers the federal mechanics of depositing and filing employment taxes for a mid-market employer. It does not cover state withholding or state unemployment deposits, which have their own agencies; those registrations are in the state employer registration checklist. Per-employee paperwork such as Form W-4 is in the new hire compliance checklist, and the successor-employer wage-base and W-2 questions that arise when a business is bought are in merging payrolls after an acquisition.

What is deposited

The IRS Depositing and reporting employment taxes page (page last reviewed 29 Jun 2026, retrieved 14 Oct 2026) states: “In general, you must deposit federal income tax and Additional Medicare tax withheld as well as both the employer and employee Social Security and Medicare taxes.” FUTA is separate: the same page states “Only the employer pays FUTA tax, and it is not withheld from the employee’s wages.”

Publication 15 (2026), What’s New (retrieved 14 Oct 2026), states for 2026 that “The rate of social security tax on taxable wages is 6.2% each for the employer and employee. The social security wage base limit is $184,500.” and that “The Medicare tax rate is 1.45% each for the employee and employer”, with no wage base limit for Medicare tax. Section 14 states “For 2026, the FUTA tax rate is 6.0%. The tax applies to the first $7,000 you pay to each employee as wages during the year.” and that the credit for state unemployment contributions may be as much as 5.4%, which leaves a 0.6% rate after the maximum credit. These are 2026 figures; the page does not give 2027 ones.

Monthly or semiweekly: the lookback period

Publication 15 (2026), section 11, When To Deposit (retrieved 14 Oct 2026) states: “Before the beginning of each calendar year, you must determine which of the two deposit schedules you’re required to use.” and that the schedule “isn’t determined by how often you pay your employees or make deposits.” For a Form 941 filer, the schedule “is determined from the total taxes reported on Forms 941, line 12, in a 4-quarter lookback period. The lookback period begins July 1 and ends June 30”. For calendar year 2026 its Table 1 lists July 1, 2024 through June 30, 2025. “If you reported $50,000 or less of taxes for the lookback period, you’re a monthly schedule depositor; if you reported more than $50,000, you’re a semiweekly schedule depositor.”

Two further statements from the same section matter to a growing company. Adjustments made on Form 941-X “don’t affect the amount of tax liability for previous periods for purposes of the lookback rule”, so the amounts originally reported are the ones counted. And for a new or acquired business, “your tax liability for any quarter in the lookback period before you started or acquired your business is considered to be zero. Therefore, you’re a monthly schedule depositor for the first calendar year of your business.” The About Form 941 page (retrieved 14 Oct 2026) describes the semiweekly depositor test with the same $50,000 lookback figure and adds the $100,000 condition below.

When each schedule’s deposit is due

Publication 15 (2026), section 11 (retrieved 14 Oct 2026) states: “Under the monthly deposit schedule, deposit employment taxes on payments made during a month by the 15th day of the following month.” For semiweekly depositors: “deposit employment taxes for payments made on Wednesday, Thursday, and/or Friday by the following Wednesday. Deposit taxes for payments made on Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and/or Tuesday by the following Friday.” Its example: a semiweekly depositor’s liability for a payday of Friday, May 29, 2026 “must be deposited by June 3, 2026 (Wednesday).” The section also states that if a deposit date is not a business day, the deposit is timely if made by the close of the next business day, and that for deposit purposes “legal holiday” means a District of Columbia legal holiday, not other statewide holidays.

The $100,000 next-day deposit rule

Publication 15 (2026), section 11, $100,000 Next-Day Deposit Rule (retrieved 14 Oct 2026) states: “If you accumulate $100,000 or more in taxes on any day during a monthly or semiweekly deposit period (see Deposit period, earlier in this section), you must deposit the tax by the next business day, whether you’re a monthly or semiweekly schedule depositor.” It adds: “If you’re a monthly schedule depositor and accumulate a $100,000 tax liability on any day during the deposit period, you become a semiweekly schedule depositor on the next day and remain so for at least the rest of the calendar year and for the following calendar year.” The threshold is determined “before you consider any reduction of your liability for nonrefundable credits.”

Electronic deposit

Publication 15 (2026), section 11, How To Deposit (retrieved 14 Oct 2026) states: “You must use EFT to make all federal tax deposits. An EFT can be made using EFTPS, IRS Direct Pay, or your IRS business tax account.” It states that EFTPS, Direct Pay and the business tax account are free, that you can arrange for a tax professional, financial institution, payroll service or other trusted third party to deposit for you, and that “EFTPS accepts same day payments of $1 million or less if the payment is submitted before 3:00 p.m. Eastern time on a business day.” For payments over $1 million, it says to submit the deposit by 8:00 p.m. Eastern time the day before the due date. A third party “may have different cutoff times.” The IRS deposit page (retrieved 14 Oct 2026) states the same electronic requirement.

Form 941: quarterly filing

The About Form 941 page (page last reviewed 22 Jul 2026, retrieved 14 Oct 2026) states that employers use Form 941 to report federal income, Social Security and Medicare taxes withheld and the employer’s share of Social Security and Medicare taxes. Publication 15 (2026), section 12, states that if you paid wages subject to withholding or Social Security and Medicare taxes “you must file Form 941 quarterly even if you have no taxes to report” unless an exception applies, that “Form 941 must be filed by the last day of the month that follows the end of the quarter”, and that “if you made timely deposits in full payment of your taxes for the quarter, you may file by the 10th day of the 2nd month that follows the end of the quarter.” The IRS due dates page (page last reviewed 21 Apr 2026, retrieved 14 Oct 2026) lists the quarterly dates as April 30, July 31, Oct. 31 and Jan. 31, and says that if the date falls on a Saturday, Sunday or legal holiday you may file on the next business day.

FUTA: when to deposit and Form 940

Publication 15 (2026), section 14, Depositing FUTA tax (retrieved 14 Oct 2026) states: “If your FUTA tax liability for any calendar quarter is $500 or less, you don’t have to deposit the tax. Instead, you may carry it forward”, and that if it is over $500 “including any FUTA tax carried forward from an earlier quarter, you must deposit the tax by EFT.” The deposit is due “by the last day of the first month that follows the end of the quarter.” For the fourth quarter, an amount over $500 is deposited by the Form 940 due date (January 31); at $500 or less you can deposit or pay with Form 940. The About Form 940 page (page last reviewed 11 Sep 2026, retrieved 14 Oct 2026) states: “Use Form 940 to report your annual Federal Unemployment Tax Act (FUTA) tax.” For the 2025 return, Publication 15 states: “File your 2025 Form 940 by February 2, 2026. However, if you deposited all FUTA tax when due, you may file on or before February 10, 2026.” The due dates page lists Form 940 among forms filed annually with a due date of Jan. 31 and says that if you deposited all FUTA tax when due you have 10 additional calendar days. The 2025 figures are year-specific; the 2026 return dates are not stated in the pages we read.

Forms W-2 and W-3

The IRS deposit page (retrieved 14 Oct 2026) states: “Forms W-2 are required to be furnished to employees and filed with SSA by January 31.” and that employers who file 10 or more information returns, counting Forms W-2 and the 1099 series together, “are required to file them electronically.” The General Instructions for Forms W-2 and W-3 (2026) (page last reviewed 30 Apr 2026, retrieved 14 Oct 2026) state: “The due date for filing 2026 Forms W-2, W-2AS, W-2CM, W-2GU, W-2VI, W-3, and W-3SS with the SSA is February 1, 2027, whether you file using paper forms or electronically”, and that Copies B, C and 2 must be furnished to employees by February 1, 2027. So the January 31 statutory date and the date the instructions give for 2026 forms differ by a day; use the instructions’ date for the form year you are filing.

Failure-to-deposit penalties

The IRS Failure to Deposit Penalty page (page last reviewed 24 Feb 2026, retrieved 14 Oct 2026) states that the penalty applies to employers that do not make deposits “On time”, “In the right amount” or “In the right way”, that it is calculated “based on the number of calendar days your deposit is late, starting from its due date”, and that “The penalty amounts don’t add up.” Its tiers are: 1 to 5 calendar days late, 2% of the unpaid deposit; 6 to 15 calendar days, 5%; more than 15 calendar days, 10%; and 15% if the amount remains unpaid more than 10 calendar days after the date of the first notice or the day you get a notice for immediate payment. Publication 15 (2026), section 11, Deposit Penalties, shows the same four rates and adds a 10% rate for amounts paid directly to the IRS or with the return instead of being deposited.

Publication 15 also states that the penalties “don’t apply if any failure to make a proper and timely deposit was due to reasonable cause and not to willful neglect.” Separately it describes the trust fund recovery penalty: “The penalty is 100% of the unpaid trust fund tax,” and it may be imposed on “all persons who are determined by the IRS to be responsible” and who acted willfully. We did not read the statute or the IRS’s own penalty-abatement procedures, so we do not describe how either is applied.

What changes after an acquisition or with several entities

The pages we read change the deposit mechanics above in only three stated ways. First, an acquired business’s pre-acquisition quarters count as zero in your lookback, quoted above, which makes the first year monthly unless the $100,000 rule is triggered. Second, Publication 15’s Introduction states that “Eligible single-owner disregarded entities and QSubs are treated as separate entities for employment tax purposes” and “must report and pay employment taxes on wages paid to their employees using the entities’ own names and EINs”. Third, Publication 15 section 1 states “You should have only one EIN” and that if you took over another employer’s business you should not use that employer’s EIN; successor wage-base carryover is covered on the acquisition payroll page. We found no passage in the pages we read that combines the lookback or deposit schedule of two different EINs, and we do not assert one. How your own group is structured is a question for your CPA.

What we could not confirm

The IRS EFTPS page path we tried returned HTTP 404 and was not read; electronic-deposit statements come from Publication 15 and the IRS deposit page. IRS Topic no. 653 was read but discusses failure-to-file and failure-to-pay penalties rather than deposit tiers, so it is not cited for the tiers. We did not read the Instructions for Form 941, the Internal Revenue Code or Treasury regulations on deposits, the Publication 15 edition for 2027, or any state deposit rule. We did not confirm the 2026 Form 940 due date or the 2027 lookback period from a page we read, so neither is stated. We did not read a page addressing aggregation of related entities for deposit purposes, and none is stated.

Where this sits

Where this sits: registering the employer accounts that deposits and returns are filed under is covered in the state employer registration checklist; the per-employee Form W-4 and new-hire steps that feed the withholding are in the new hire compliance checklist; what a purchase changes about wage bases and W-2 reporting is in merging payrolls after an acquisition.

Where this sits: the deposits above apply to employees; whether a worker is an employee or a contractor for federal employment tax is covered in the contractor vs. employee classification guide.

Where this sits: employee 401(k) deferrals withheld through payroll are a separate deposit duty with its own timing rule, covered in the 401(k) employer requirements guide.