Yes. An LLC that pays a contractor for services in the course of its business files a 1099-NEC once the year's payments reach the threshold, and its own tax classification has nothing to do with it. Whether the LLC is disregarded, taxed as a partnership, or taxed as an S corporation changes how the LLC reports its own income. It changes nothing about what the LLC owes its vendors in January.

Why doesn't the LLC's own classification matter here?

Because there are two separate questions and they get run together. Classification governs the receiving side: whether a payee gets a form at all, and whose TIN goes on it. Issuing is governed by whether you made a reportable payment in the course of a trade or business. A single-member LLC with no employees and one contractor has the same filing obligation as a hundred-partner firm.

The clean way to hold it: ask "am I running a business and did I pay someone for services?" for issuing, and "what is this payee, for tax purposes?" for receiving. Same form, two different tests.

What's the threshold for payments made in 2026?

$2,000 for services. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act raised the section 6041 threshold from $600 for payments made after December 31, 2025, and the IRS can index it for inflation from calendar year 2027. That $600 had stood since 1954, which is why it's baked into so many vendor-review templates. Using it in 2026 produces forms that were never required.

The threshold is per box, not per form, and that catches people out:

• Nonemployee compensation, rents, prizes, other income, medical and health-care payments: $2,000

• Gross proceeds paid to an attorney, and fish purchased for resale: $600

• Royalties and broker substitute payments: $10

Which contractors does the LLC not have to send a form to?

Corporations, generally, including LLCs that elected C or S corporation treatment. Also tax-exempt organizations, government entities, IRAs and HSAs, employees (they get a W-2), and payments for merchandise, freight, storage or telephone rather than services.

The corporate exemption has carve-outs worth memorizing, because they're the ones a firm actually meets. Attorneys' fees go on a 1099-NEC even when the law firm is a corporation. Medical and health-care payments go on 1099-MISC box 6 even when the practice is incorporated. Gross proceeds paid to an attorney go in box 10, at their own $600 trigger. A federal executive agency reports vendor payments to corporations too.

When are the forms due?

Recipient statements by January 31, and the rule rather than the date is what to remember: when January 31 falls on a weekend the deadline rolls to the next business day. For the 2025 forms, that pushed 1099-NEC filing to February 2, 2026. Form 1099-NEC goes to the IRS on the same date as the recipient copy; 1099-MISC, 1099-INT and 1099-DIV are due to the IRS by March 2 on paper or March 31 electronically. File ten or more information returns of any kind in aggregate and e-filing is mandatory.

Where this actually breaks at intake

The obligation is simple; the record-keeping isn't. Getting January right means knowing, for every vendor, what they are for tax purposes and how much they were paid across the whole year, including the invoice that was paid from the wrong account in July. Firms miss forms not because the rule is hard but because payments are scattered across cards, transfers and reimbursements while the W-9s were never collected. That's a reconciliation problem sitting in front of the tax question: the rule takes a minute, the year's payment history takes a week. Note the mirror image if the LLC in question is your own firm sending prep work out, because then you're the one whose client data moves: that disclosure has its own §7216 consent requirement.