Anyone you paid for services in the course of your trade or business, at or above the threshold for the box the payment falls in, unless they're an exempt payee. In practice that means individuals, partnerships, estates, and LLCs that aren't taxed as corporations. Corporations are generally exempt, with five exceptions that happen to cover the payees a CPA firm meets most.

What makes a payment reportable at all?

Three things together. The payment was made in the course of your trade or business, not personally. It went to a reportable payee: the instructions name an individual, partnership, estate, or in some cases a corporation. And it reached the threshold for its box, measured across the whole year rather than per invoice.

Paying a neighbor's teenager to mow your lawn isn't reportable. Paying the same person to mow the grounds of your office is, once the year's total crosses the line.

What's the threshold for 2026?

$2,000 for services, and this changed recently enough that most sources still have it wrong. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act raised the section 6041 threshold from $600 for payments made after December 31, 2025, with IRS inflation indexing available from calendar year 2027. The $600 figure had stood since 1954.

It's per box, not per form:

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

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

• Royalties, broker substitute payments: $10

• 1099-INT and 1099-DIV: $10 (plus $600 for interest paid in a trade or business, and $600 for liquidation distributions)

Anyone writing "the 1099 threshold is $2,000" is wrong about royalties and interest. Anyone writing "$600" is wrong about services.

Who does not get a form?

Corporations, including LLCs taxed as C or S corporations. Tax-exempt organizations, government entities, IRAs and HSAs. Your employees, who get a W-2. And payments for merchandise, freight, storage or telephone, which are outside the rules whoever receives them.

The corporate exemption has five holes: attorneys' fees (1099-NEC box 1a), medical and health-care payments (1099-MISC box 6), gross proceeds paid to an attorney (box 10, at $600), fish purchased for resale (box 11), and federal executive agency payments to vendors. An incorporated law firm or medical practice still gets a form.

Whose name goes on the form?

The payee's, with one trap. A single-member LLC is a disregarded entity, so the form carries the owner's name and TIN, not the LLC's. Form W-9 is built for it: line 1 is the owner's name, line 2 is the LLC's. Note that the word "disregarded" never appears in the 1099-MISC and 1099-NEC instructions, so anyone working from those alone will use the LLC's name and generate a mismatch.

When are they due?

Recipient statements by January 31, with the next-business-day rule when that's a weekend, which pushed the 2025 forms to February 2, 2026. Form 1099-NEC goes to the IRS on that same date. 1099-MISC, 1099-INT and 1099-DIV are due March 2 on paper or March 31 electronically. Ten or more information returns in aggregate and you must e-file.

Where this actually breaks at intake

Every input to this decision is a fact about the payee that someone had to capture before the money moved: classification, TIN, legal name, and the year's running total across every account the firm pays from. None of it can be reconstructed reliably in the last week of January from a vendor list of company names. Firms that file cleanly aren't better at the rule, they collected W-9s at onboarding and kept payments in one place. That's a document problem sitting in front of the tax question, and it's why the fix is a W-9 rule at onboarding rather than a smarter January checklist. The per-box numbers behind all of this are worth having on one page: what is the 1099 reporting threshold?