Yes. A partnership that you pay for services in the course of your business gets a 1099-NEC like any other non-corporate payee, once payments for the year reach the reporting threshold. The corporate exemption that spares C and S corporations doesn't reach partnerships, because a partnership isn't a corporation. The distinction that trips firms up is a different one: money a partnership distributes to its own partners never goes on a 1099. That's Schedule K-1 territory.

Why isn't a partnership covered by the corporate exemption?

Because the exemption is written around corporations, not around "businesses that aren't individuals." The instructions for Forms 1099-MISC and 1099-NEC list the reportable condition as a payment made to an individual, partnership, estate, or in some cases a corporation. Partnerships sit on the reportable side of that line by name. An LLC taxed as a partnership lands in the same place, which is why the classification question on a W-9 matters more than the letters after the payee's name. Two vendors can both call themselves an LLC and only one of them gets a form.

What's the threshold for 2026?

$2,000 for services, up from the $600 that stood since 1954. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act raised the section 6041 threshold for payments made after December 31, 2025, and gave the IRS authority to index it for inflation starting in calendar year 2027. If your intake checklist or vendor-review spreadsheet still carries $600 as the services trigger, it's a year out of date and will generate forms nobody needed.

Watch that this is the services threshold specifically. Royalties paid to a partnership still report at $10 or more, and gross proceeds paid to an attorney stay at $600 under a separate statute the 2026 change didn't touch.

When does a partnership payment go on a K-1 instead?

When it's a distribution of the partnership's own profits to its own partners. The instructions are explicit that the 1099 rules don't apply to profits distributed by a partnership to its partners, which are reportable on Schedule K-1 of Form 1065. So the same partnership can be on both sides of the question in one year: it receives a 1099-NEC from a client who paid it for consulting work, and it issues K-1s to its partners for their share of the resulting income. Nothing about receiving a 1099 changes how the partnership reports what it passes through.

Does a partnership have to issue 1099s too?

Yes, and this is the half firms forget. Being a partnership says nothing about your obligations as a payer. A partnership that pays a contractor $2,000 or more for services during the year files a 1099-NEC exactly as a corporation or sole proprietor would. Payer obligations follow from running a trade or business, not from how the payer is taxed.

Where this actually breaks at intake

The answer is a two-second lookup once you know the payee's tax classification, and that is precisely what a shoebox of invoices does not tell you. A W-9 on file for every vendor before the first payment goes out is the whole control, and the firms that get burned in January are the ones reconstructing classifications in arrears from company names. "Smith Consulting LLC" could be a disregarded entity, a partnership, or an S corp, and only one of those three is exempt. That's a document-collection problem sitting upstream of the tax question, and one W-9 per vendor settles it before it ever reaches a preparer. If your own firm is the partnership on the other side of this, weighing how to take on more returns without more headcount, we compared the options.