QuickBooks Payroll ServiceThe dates a payday leaves on the wall.

A calendar we refuse to invent

The IRS employment-tax due-dates page and Publication 15 are the calendar. This page points at them. It does not typeset a private version that will be quietly wrong next year. What we will say, because the depositing page says it in plain language, is that employers generally file Form 941 each quarter for withheld income tax and for Social Security and Medicare, that Form 940 reports federal unemployment tax, and that a deposit of that unemployment tax is required for a quarter in which the tax due is more than five hundred dollars, by the end of the month after the quarter. Only the employer pays federal unemployment tax. It is not taken out of the paycheck.

Deposits are electronic. The IRS lists free paths, including its own payment system, and paths that may charge, including a bank, a same-day wire, and a payroll company. Knowing which path you are on is part of setup. Discovering the path on the due date is how a fee or a miss becomes a surprise.

Monthly or semiweekly is not a mood

There are two deposit schedules. You determine which applies before the calendar year starts, using Publication 15. This site deliberately does not print the lookback dollar cutoffs. They live in the publication, and they are read on the day you check, from the publication, not from a blog that froze them. If your software asks you to choose and you do not know, stop and open the publication. Guessing is a deposit on the wrong week, and the failure-to-deposit penalty is the letter that follows. The IRS page says the tiers do not stack. The tier that fits the lateness is the penalty. That is kinder than a pile, and it is still money.

Year end brings Form W-2. The same IRS discussion says employers who file ten or more of the information returns it names, counted together, file them electronically. Due dates for filing and for giving the forms to people are on the due-dates page. We will look them up with you in the season. We will not carve them into this paragraph as if they were geology.

Texas dates beside the federal ones

The twenty-day new-hire report does not wait for a quarter. The quarterly wage report does not replace it. Unemployment tax uses the wage base and the rate on your notice. For a new employer in 2026 the state's table says two point seven zero percent on the first nine thousand dollars of each employee's wages, until four chargeable quarters. Your notice, once you have one, outranks a memory of the table. December is when those notices typically arrive, calculated from the first of October. Read yours in December. Do not let it sit under a catalog until March.

A useful wall has three kinds of marks. Draft dates you approve. Deposit dates the schedule requires. Filing dates for the quarter, the year, and the new hire. If a mark has no owner, it is decoration. Decoration is how a date passes while everyone assumes the provider sent it. Ask the provider, in writing, which marks they own. Keep the answer with the account numbers.

If a date already passed and you are not sure the filing happened, that is a fine reason to write. Bring the quarter, not a theory. We will help you see whether you are looking at a missing setup or a missing send. Those are different repairs.

Put the next deposit date on the same note as the next draft date, in two different inks if that helps you see they are not the same errand. The draft pays people. The deposit sends what was held back. Owners who treat them as one trip to the bank are the ones who fund net pay and leave the tax sitting.