Do You Still Send 1099s to Your Cleaners? The $2,000 Threshold, and Why the Deadline Is February 1, 2027

Yes, and for 2026 payments the threshold is $2,000 per payee, not $600. Forms are due February 1, 2027, because January 31 is a Sunday. Every figure read October 11, 2026.

Yes, you still send them. For payments you made during calendar 2026 the threshold is $2,000 or more per payee, not $600, and the forms are due February 1, 2027.

Both halves of that sentence are missing from most of the pages currently telling short-term rental operators what to do. Of fifteen host, landlord and property-manager pages opened on October 11, 2026 that state a contractor reporting threshold, eight print $600 and nothing else. And no IRS 1099 instruction sheet prints February 1, because the statutory date is January 31 and January 31, 2027 falls on a Sunday. Below is the arithmetic on which of your cleaners actually gets a form, the payment method that moves the filing duty off you entirely, the five states where the federal change does not help you, and what one missed worker costs.

Do you still send 1099s to your cleaners? Yes, at $2,000 instead of $600

You do, and the only thing that changed is the dollar line. Pay one cleaner, handyman, landscaper or photographer $2,000 or more across calendar 2026 by cash, check or bank transfer in the course of your rental business, and you owe that person a Form 1099-NEC and the IRS a copy of it.

The Instructions for Forms 1099-MISC and 1099-NEC, revision 12-2026, put it in one line at box 1a: "Enter nonemployee compensation (NEC) of $2,000 or more." Read October 11, 2026. Box 1 of the 1099-MISC, for rents, and box 3, for other income, moved to the same figure.

The change came from section 70433(a) of Public Law 119-21, enacted July 4, 2025, which struck $600 from Internal Revenue Code section 6041(a) and inserted $2,000. It applies, in the statute's own words, with respect to payments made after December 31, 2025. That is keyed to the date money left your account, not to when the work was done and not to the tax year an accrual belongs to. A December 2025 check for a December 2025 turnover sits under the old $600 rule. A January 2026 check for that same turnover sits under $2,000.

Treasury set out the mechanics provision by provision in its proposed rule at 91 FR 20599, published April 17, 2026: section 70433(a) raised the threshold, 70433(b) added section 6041(h) to index it, 70433(c) pointed section 6041A at the new figure, 70433(d) did the same for backup withholding, and 70433(f) set the effective date.

What did not change is on the same form. Box 10 of the 1099-MISC, gross proceeds paid to an attorney, still reads "$600 or more" in the 12-2026 instructions, because it runs on section 6045(f) rather than section 6041. Direct sales for resale in 1099-NEC box 2 is still $5,000. So a single 1099-MISC for 2026 carries two different thresholds on one page. Anyone writing that the $600 threshold is gone is wrong in a way that costs their reader a form.

The regulation is also not finished. Treasury published the rule above as a proposal, held a hearing on July 17, 2026, and as of October 11, 2026 has published no final rule. The live text of 26 CFR 1.6041-1(a)(1)(i), current as of October 7, 2026, still reads "$600 or more". The statute governs and the regulation lags, which means an operator who looks up the regulation to check sees the old number and gets no warning.

The $600 figure is still live on more than half the pages aimed at operators

Eight of fifteen. Of the pages checked on October 11, 2026, eight print $600 as the current contractor threshold with no mention of the change, five print $2,000 correctly, and two lead with $600 and note the change further down where a scanning reader will not reach it.

The clearest example is titled for this tax year. A free 2026 short-term rental 1099 filing kit, carrying no date anywhere on the page, instructs the reader to track monthly to identify when they cross the $600 threshold with any vendor, and defines a "Below Threshold" status as a reportable total under $600. A manager following a kit named for 2026 would issue forms to every payee between $600 and $2,000. That is unnecessary work with a filing risk attached and no benefit on the other side.

Live product documentation is no better. A major property management platform's help article on managing the 1099 tax form, undated, still states $600. Intuit publishes both answers at once: its small-business 1099 guide says the thresholds moved from $600 to $2,000 for payments made during the 2026 calendar year, while its 1099 deadline page on the same content hub says you must generally issue a 1099 if you have paid $600 or more in a calendar year. Both were live on October 11, 2026.

And the IRS's own landing page is one of the stale ones. About Form 1099-MISC, last reviewed March 30, 2026, tells filers to report at least $600 in rents, prizes and other income, and links the 12-2026 instructions that say $2,000. The page contradicts the document it points at. Checking the form instructions rather than the summary page is the difference, and nothing on the summary page tells you to.

The threshold is an annual total per payee, which is where a portfolio comes apart rather than a single door. A lead cleaner paid out of the operating checking account in January and off the business debit card in August is one payee at one total, and an operator reading one account at a time will put her under the line when she is over it. MagicBNB's Bank account integration links checking, savings, business and merchant accounts with real-time and historical sync, so the figure is the sum across every account rather than the sum of whichever one you happened to open. What you need by January is a twelve-month total against a name. How many accounts it came out of does not change the number, only your odds of finding it.

$600 in 1954 was $7,471.67 in August 2026 dollars

The line had not moved since 1954, and in real terms the new one is still about 73% below where the old one started. The source credit on section 6041 reads August 16, 1954, chapter 736, 68A Stat. 745. Thirteen later amendments between 1962 and 2011 changed cross-references and the categories of covered payment and left the $600 untouched every time.

"This reporting level had been in place since 1954 and had not been indexed to inflation." Treasury and the IRS, proposed rule REG-113229-25, 91 FR 20599, April 17, 2026.

CPI-U for August 1954 was 26.9 on the 1982 to 1984 base. For August 2026 it was 334.980, in the release dated September 11, 2026. That ratio is 12.4528, so $600 in August 1954 is $7,471.67 in August 2026 dollars, and the new $2,000 is $160.61 in 1954 money. Those are calculated from the two published index values rather than quoted: the BLS inflation calculator renders its answer from a form and carries no figure in page text, so it is not a citable source.

The practical version of that number: $600 held flat while prices rose more than twelvefold, so the real value of the reporting line fell by roughly 92% over seventy-two years. That is how a figure written for a meaningful payment ended up catching a $650 one-off gutter clean. Indexing starts now. Section 6041(h), added by the same provision, raises the $2,000 for calendar years after 2026 using the cost-of-living adjustment under section 1(f)(3) with 2025 as the base year, and rounds the increase, not the total, to the nearest multiple of $100. 2026 is the last flat year. No 2027 figure has been published yet, so any specific amount circulating for 2027 is somebody's estimate.

The deadline is February 1, 2027, and no IRS 1099 instruction says so

February 1, 2027, a Monday, for both the recipient copy and the IRS filing. The statutory date is January 31 under section 6071(c), and the 12-2026 instructions print exactly that: section 6071(c) requires you to file Form 1099-NEC on or before January 31. January 31, 2027 is a Sunday.

The shift rule is in Part C of Publication 1099 (2026), the general instructions dated March 19, 2026: if a due date falls on a Saturday, Sunday, or legal holiday in the District of Columbia, file by the next business day. Section 7503 is the statute behind it. The next business day after Sunday January 31, 2027 is Monday February 1.

The IRS prints February 1, 2027 itself, just never on a 1099 document. The 2026 General Instructions for Forms W-2 and W-3 give February 1, 2027 for filing and for furnishing employee copies, and Publication 926 (2026) repeats it for the Social Security Administration filing. W-2 runs on the same January 31 statutory date, so the arithmetic is identical. An operator working from the 1099-NEC instructions alone sees January 31 and no mention of a shift.

One state agency has already printed it, and it disagrees with itself in the process. Georgia's Employer's Withholding Tax Guide, revised June 2026, says in prose that W-2s and 1099-NECs are due by January 31, then prints 2/01/2027 in its own due-date table, with 3/01/2027 for all other 1099s. The table is right and the prose is not, in a publication a state revenue department issued four months ago.

The 1099-MISC dates are different and they also shift. To the IRS it is February 28 on paper and March 31 electronically. February 28, 2027 is a Sunday, so paper lands Monday March 1, 2027, while March 31, 2027 is a Wednesday and does not move. Recipient copies are January 31 generally, so February 1, with boxes 8 and 10 getting until February 15. February 15, 2027 is a Monday, which looks safe until you check the holiday list: it is Washington's Birthday, a legal public holiday in the District of Columbia under 5 USC 6103(a), so boxes 8 and 10 land Tuesday February 16, 2027. Four of those five dates are derived from the published statutory date plus the shift rule. The IRS has not printed any of them as calendar dates for tax year 2026.

The 1099-NEC has no paper-versus-electronic split at all. Both routes are January 31, so February 1. E-filing buys you no extra time on this form, which is the reverse of the 1099-MISC pattern and the single most common reason an operator files it late.

Which of your cleaners gets a form: a payee ledger at eight doors

Fewer than you expect, and the W-9 collection work does not shrink with them. Take a composite eight-door operator across two markets, paying crews directly rather than through a management company, with three W-2 staff on the books. Twelve payees for 2026, every figure a full-year total:

• Lead cleaner, five doors: $18,400. Over $2,000. Form 1099-NEC.
• Second cleaner, three doors plus backup turns: $6,250. Form 1099-NEC.
• Summer overflow cleaner, June to August: $1,840. Over $600, under $2,000. No federal form for 2026. Would have had one for 2025.
• Handyman, paid by check: $3,920. Form 1099-NEC.
• Landscaper, sole proprietor: $2,310. Form 1099-NEC.
• Window and gutter contractor, one annual visit per market: $1,150. No form.
• Photographer, two reshoots: $1,100. No form.
• Linen and laundry service, incorporated: $7,480. No form, because payments to a corporation are generally exempt at any amount.
• Locksmith, incorporated: $640. No form on either ground.
• Pool service, paid entirely on the business credit card: $4,900. No form from you. The card settles it.
• Attorney, lease review, fee for services: $2,750. Form 1099-NEC box 1a, and the corporate exemption does not reach legal services.
• Turnover cleaner sourced and paid through a marketplace: $3,100. Settled by the platform processor, not by you.

Five 1099-NECs at the $2,000 threshold. At $600 it would have been eight. Three payees drop out of the filing and the dollars involved total $4,090, which is why the relief is smaller than the headline suggests: the payees who fall off are the small ones by definition, and the ones left are the ones you were always going to file.

Two exemptions in that list are worth reading twice. Payments to a corporation, including an LLC taxed as one, sit outside the 1099-NEC entirely at any amount. The 12-2026 instructions then carve back out of that exemption for medical and health care payments, substitute payments in lieu of dividends, gross proceeds paid to an attorney, attorneys' fees, and payments by a federal executive agency, and state it flatly: the exemption from reporting payments made to corporations does not apply to payments for legal services. A cleaning company organized as an S corporation gets no form. The lawyer who read your lease does.

Then the trap that has nothing to do with the threshold. The electronic-filing mandate counts every information return type together, not ten of any one kind. T.D. 9972, published at 88 FR 11754 on February 23, 2023, lowered the paper threshold to ten returns in aggregate for returns required to be filed on or after January 1, 2024, and 26 CFR 301.6011-2(c)(4)(i) says those returns are counted in the aggregate. Five 1099-NECs and three W-2s is eight. Add one 1099-MISC for an owner rent payment and one more form of any covered type and you are at ten, and electronic filing is mandatory. Corrected returns do not count toward the ten, and neither route changes the February 1 date.

That ledger is the actual deliverable, and almost nobody has it in January. The bank statement carries merchant strings, the property management system carries payouts, and what the filing needs is a twelve-month total against one human being with a W-9 attached. MagicBNB's Smart transaction ledger gives every bank transaction an AI-suggested category with a confidence band, an allocate-to-property multi-split for a crew that covers four doors on one invoice, and automatic matching of bank deposits against the payout records pulled from the PMS. The output is a per-payee, per-property total you can read in December instead of reconstructing in the last week of January, which is the difference between a filing and a guess.

Paying by card moves the reporting duty off you completely

Card and third-party network payments are reported by the settlement entity on a Form 1099-K under section 6050W, not by you on a 1099-NEC, and the $2,000 threshold has nothing to do with it.

The regulation is explicit. 26 CFR 1.6041-1(a)(1)(iv) says transactions that would otherwise be reportable under both section 6041 and section 6050W are reported under section 6050W and not section 6041. The worked example immediately after it is a restaurant owner paying a repairman by credit card, and the stated conclusion is that the payor is not required to file an information return under section 6041 with respect to the transaction. Substitute a cleaner for the repairman and nothing in the analysis changes.

The 12-2026 instructions say the same thing from the other end: payments made with a credit card or payment card, including third-party network transactions, must be reported on Form 1099-K by the payment settlement entity under section 6050W, and are not subject to reporting on Form 1099-MISC or Form 1099-NEC.

This is a who-reports rule rather than a how-much rule, which makes it more useful to an operator than the threshold change. Cash, a paper check and a plain bank transfer leave the duty with you. A card payment moves it. Where a specific consumer payment app falls depends on whether that particular transaction is settled by a payment settlement entity under section 6050W, which turns on the app and on the account type the payment went out as, and no primary source read for this piece resolves it app by app. Do not assume an outcome for a named app in either direction. Read your own account documentation, or pay the crew one way on purpose so the answer is the same every month.

The cleaning marketplace that ranks first for this question states its own position plainly: it does not provide tax documents, its payments processor issues a Form 1099-K to the contractor, and on that basis the host does not need to send a form. The reasoning tracks the regulation above. It is still the vendor's reading rather than an IRS determination, and the page, dated February 13, 2026, states no dollar threshold at all. Treat it as a vendor position, keep the invoice trail, and do not let it stand in for your own records.

The W-9 problem the threshold increase made worse

Collect the W-9 before the first payment, because you cannot know in January who will cross $2,000 by December. Backup withholding applies at 24%, which is not actually a figure in the statute: section 3406(a)(1) sets it as the payment multiplied by the fourth lowest rate of tax applicable under section 1(c). The IRS publishes the 24% rate on its backup withholding page, last updated October 10, 2026, and in Publication 1281. The trigger that matters to an operator is simple: the payee fails to furnish a taxpayer identification number.

The threshold moved that trigger with it. Section 70433(d)(1) rewrote section 3406(b)(6)(A) to cross-reference the dollar amount in effect for the calendar year under section 6041(a), and renamed the subsection heading to refer to a threshold rather than to $600. Backup withholding attaches only to reportable payments, and Publication 1281 says it in one line: payments that are not subject to information reporting also are not subject to backup withholding. Pay a cleaner $1,500 in 2026 with no W-9 on file and there is no mandatory withholding, because there is no reportable payment.

Two things still bite. First, the threshold is an annual aggregate you do not know until the year is over, while Publication 1281 tells a payer facing a refused TIN to begin backup withholding immediately on any reportable payments. That is not an instruction you can follow in March for a payee who will reach $2,100 in November. No IRS publication read for this piece addresses the timing, and the gap is real rather than something to paper over. Collecting the W-9 first is the only version that works. Second, if you do withhold, the filing duty attaches regardless of amount: Publication 1099 (2026) says reporting backup withholding applies even though the amount of the payment may be below the normal threshold for filing Form 1099 or Form W-2G.

One correction to something stated as a rule almost everywhere. The IRS does not require you to collect a W-9 from everyone you might pay. Publication 1099 (2026) Part J says the IRS suggests that you request the recipient complete Form W-9, and the Instructions for the Requester of Form W-9, revision 3-2024, set no amount-based collection rule and no universal timing rule. What they do say is that absent a Form W-9 or other certification the payor generally must presume the payee is subject to withholding, which is a better argument for collecting early than a mandate would have been. Collect from everyone because of the aggregate problem above, not because the IRS told you to.

Your state did not get the memo, and in five of them that matters

No state tax agency has published guidance on the federal change. Across thirteen states checked on October 11, 2026, nine tie the state obligation to state withholding or to the existence of a federal form rather than to any dollar figure, so the federal change propagates silently and nobody announces it. Five cases cost an operator a form, a withholding, or both.

Pennsylvania: a $5,000 withholding line that straddles the federal one

Pennsylvania requires withholding at 3.07% on Pennsylvania-source non-wage income paid to nonresidents, mandatory above $5,000 of payments to a payee in the calendar year and optional below it. The rule also reaches lessees paying rent or lease payments for Pennsylvania real estate to nonresident lessors in a trade or business, so a Pennsylvania operator can be caught on both sides of it. Separately, the payor must file the federal 1099-MISC or 1099-NEC with the Department and furnish the payee a copy by January 31 of the following year, through myPATH alongside form REV-1667.

Pay a nonresident cleaner $3,000 in 2026 and you have a federal 1099-NEC duty at $2,000, no mandatory Pennsylvania withholding at $5,000, and a Pennsylvania filing anyway. Nothing about the move to $2,000 touches that $5,000, and the two thresholds now straddle each other in a band roughly three thousand dollars wide that catches a mid-sized cleaning arrangement exactly.

Michigan: direct filing, no withholding condition, no dollar floor

Michigan requires the state copy of a 1099-NEC filed directly with Treasury whenever one is issued to a Michigan resident, without regard to where the issuer is domiciled, where the work or services occurred, or whether withholding is indicated on the form. Michigan participates in the federal Combined Federal/State Filing program and still says the 1099-NEC copy must come to it directly. The deadline is January 31, so February 1, 2027.

The obligation attaches to the form rather than to the payment, which has a consequence Michigan has not addressed. A payee under $2,000 generates no federal form, so there is no state copy to remit. The federal change quietly shrinks Michigan's intake without Michigan changing a word.

California: a four-year-old guide still printing $600

The Franchise Tax Board's guide to information returns filed with California, revised January 31, 2022, states $600 or more for nonemployee compensation. It also tells filers that if you have an exception requiring you to report something differently for federal and state purposes, such as a different dollar amount, you file separately with the IRS and with FTB. In 2022 that was a general caution. Read in 2026 it describes the position a California operator is now in exactly, and whether FTB intends to collect at $600 is published nowhere. The guide sets February 28 on paper, March 31 electronically, and January 31 to the recipient.

North Carolina: a program participant that will not take the program

North Carolina requires the 1099-NEC and 1099-MISC only where North Carolina withholding is reported, states no dollar threshold at all, and sets January 31 as the deadline. Asked directly whether it accepts Combined Federal/State Filing, the Department's own FAQ answers no, and says the required W-2 and 1099 statements must be filed directly with the Department. North Carolina is listed as a participating state in the federal program publication. Both statements are current, and the state's answer is the one that binds you.

Hawaii: required, February 28, and you cannot file it electronically yourself

Hawaii requires state copies of nine federal forms including the 1099-NEC from anyone engaged in a trade or business in Hawaii, with no general dollar threshold, on form N-196 by February 28 of the following year. The Department does not accept form N-196 or any Form 1099 filed electronically directly from the taxpayer, so your routes are the federal combined program or paper in an envelope. The form carries revision year 2020, six years behind the change it has not addressed.

The rest, briefly. Georgia, Arizona and South Carolina require the 1099-NEC only where state tax was withheld, and none of the three publishes a dollar threshold for it. Arizona also leaves the 1099-NEC off its list of electronically accepted forms, on a page still captioned for calendar year 2025. South Carolina sets an unrelated line of its own at $10,000 for withholding from nonresident contractors, which can catch an out-of-state cleaning company on a multi-property contract. Tennessee says the plainest thing any state says: the state copy of all Form 1099s should not be sent to Tennessee, since there is no requirement to do so. New York publishes no 1099-NEC filing requirement. Texas publishes nothing either way. Florida requires only the 1099-K, from settlement entities, under section 212.134 of its statutes. Colorado runs a dedicated 1099-NEC page that explains the file format and never states who must file or at what amount.

One more correction while you are here, because it is repeated constantly. The 1099-NEC is in the Combined Federal/State Filing program. Publication 1220, revision 5-2026, says Form 1099-NEC is part of the CF/SF Program and lists it in the forms table. The program excluded it in its earlier years and a great deal of live content still says so. The same publication removes Missouri from the participating list and disclaims itself: each state's requirements are subject to change by the state, and it is the issuer's responsibility to contact the participating states to verify their criteria. Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina and Hawaii are four demonstrations of why that sentence is in there.

What a CPA needs from you in January is not your bookkeeping. It is a payee list with annual totals, an entity type, a state, and the rail each total came down, because those four things decide form, threshold and which agency gets a copy. MagicBNB's Monthly Portfolio Report Builder carries 40-plus column definitions grouped by Booking, Financial, and Taxes and Payout, named template saving, and PDF and Excel dual export, so the version your accountant opens in Excel and the version an owner reads as a PDF come off the same numbers. Save it once as a template in December and the January request is a download rather than a week.

What MagicBNB will not do here, said plainly: it does not generate a Form 1099, does not file one, does not collect W-9s, is not tax software, and is not a substitute for a CPA or an enrolled agent. It reports what left your accounts and where it went. The form belongs in filing software or in your accountant's hands, and the five states above are the argument for putting it there rather than in a spreadsheet you maintain in the last week of January.

What it costs to get this wrong

$340 per form at the top tier, doubled to $680 per worker, because the two penalties stack. Section 6721 penalizes failing to file a correct information return with the IRS. Section 6722 penalizes failing to furnish a correct statement to the payee. They are separate penalties on the same piece of paper, and missing both on one cleaner exposes you to both.

For returns and statements required in 2027, the inflation-adjusted amounts in Revenue Procedure 2025-32 are $60 per return corrected within 30 days, $130 per return corrected after 30 days but by August 1, and $340 per return after that or not filed at all. Each applies under both sections. Intentional disregard removes the ceiling: the greater of $690 per return or 10% of the aggregate amount required to be reported correctly, with no annual cap.

The annual caps for everybody else are $244,500, $698,500 and $1,397,000 by tier for a business with average annual gross receipts of $5 million or less across the three most recent tax years, which is every operator this is written for, and roughly three times those figures above $5 million. At eight doors the caps are decoration. The per-return amounts are the entire exposure, and at twelve payees the worst case is four figures rather than six.

The IRS does not publish most of that. Its information return penalties page, last reviewed May 11, 2026, has no 2027 row at all, with 2026 as its newest at $60, $130, $340 and $680 for intentional disregard, and it publishes no maximum amounts in any year, referring readers to Publication 1099. Publication 1099 (2026) Part O gives the tier structure and the $5 million definition and no dollar figures, referring readers back to the web page. Revenue Procedure 2025-32 is currently the only IRS source for the 2027 amounts and the only source anywhere for the caps. A page quoting $690 against 2026, or $680 against 2027, has read the wrong year.

What is not a consequence, despite being presented as one constantly: failing to file a 1099 does not cost you the deduction. No provision of section 162 conditions a business deduction on having filed an information return, and 26 CFR 1.6041-1, the regulation that imposes the reporting duty, contains no disallowance provision. The sanction Congress legislated is the penalty regime above. That is for federal income tax purposes, and states can and do differ.

The substantiation duty is a separate thing and it survives the threshold change untouched. Section 6001 and 26 CFR 1.6001-1(a) require records sufficient to establish the deductions on your return, and that applies to the $1,840 summer cleaner who now gets no form exactly as it did when she got one. A payment that generates no 1099 still needs an invoice, a bank record and a name. Losing the form removes a corroborating document, and on audit an undocumented cash payment fails on substantiation grounds, which lands in the same place as disallowance by a different route.

Your cleaner may not be a contractor, and then the threshold is irrelevant

If you control how the work gets done rather than only the result, the 1099 question is the wrong one and the threshold is irrelevant. The IRS test is the common law one, sorted into behavioral control, financial control and the type of relationship, and the IRS states outright that there is no magic or set number of factors that decides it, recommending you document each factor you relied on. Publication 15-A (2026) puts the centre of gravity in one line: the key consideration is whether the business has retained the right to control the details of a worker's performance. Form SS-8 gets you an IRS determination, and the IRS says it may take at least six months.

Why it matters more this year than last, and nobody has connected these two rules. Relief from employment taxes for a good-faith misclassification is conditioned on having filed all required federal information returns consistent with contractor treatment. Raising the threshold to $2,000 means a payee under $2,000 generates no required return, so for the smallest payments there is nothing to file and nothing to be inconsistent about. At $2,400 it runs the other way: skip the 1099-NEC because you half-remember a higher number and you have failed a condition of the relief provision, on a worker whose classification was already arguable.

The household-employee rules are probably the wrong rules for your properties, and this next part is a reading of a definition rather than published guidance. Publication 926 (2026) names housecleaning workers, housekeepers and maids as household workers and sets the 2026 cash-wage threshold at $3,000, which the Social Security Administration coverage threshold table confirms, up from $2,800 for 2025. But Publication 926 defines household work as work done in or around your home. A short-term rental you do not live in is not your home.

On that definition the Schedule H regime and its $3,000 floor do not reach a cleaner at a property the operator does not occupy at all, which puts the worker back into either business contractor treatment at $2,000 or ordinary business employee treatment with no floor, a W-2 and quarterly Form 941s. No IRS guidance applies or disapplies Publication 926 to rental property the operator does not live in. The $3,000 figure every article on this question reaches for may simply be the wrong number for a portfolio operator. That is a question to put to your CPA rather than a conclusion to act on from a blog post. For reference the FUTA floor sits below both: $1,000 of total cash wages in any calendar quarter of 2025 or 2026, on the first $7,000 per employee.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need to send a 1099 to my Airbnb cleaner?

Yes, if you paid that one cleaner $2,000 or more during calendar 2026 by cash, check or bank transfer in the course of your rental business and the cleaner is not a corporation. Under $2,000 for the year there is no federal form. Paid entirely by card or through a marketplace's payments processor, no form from you at any amount, because the settlement entity reports it on a 1099-K instead.

What is the 1099-NEC threshold for 2026?

$2,000 or more per payee for the calendar year, up from $600. The 12-2026 instructions state it at box 1a. It applies to payments made after December 31, 2025, so it is keyed to when you paid rather than to when the work was done. The figure is indexed for calendar years after 2026 under section 6041(h), and no 2027 amount has been published, so 2026 is the last flat year.

Is the 1099 deadline January 31 or February 1, 2027?

February 1, 2027, for both the recipient copy and the IRS filing. The statutory date is January 31 under section 6071(c), January 31, 2027 is a Sunday, and the next-business-day rule in Publication 1099 Part C and section 7503 moves it to the Monday. The IRS prints February 1, 2027 for the identically-timed W-2 deadline and prints it nowhere in the 1099 instructions, which is why most calendars still show January 31.

Do I send a 1099 to a cleaning company that is an LLC?

Not if the LLC is taxed as a corporation, at any amount, because payments to a corporation are generally exempt from the 1099-NEC. A single-member LLC that is a disregarded entity reporting on its owner's Schedule C is not exempt, so it gets a form at $2,000. The W-9 is how you find out which one you are dealing with, and that is the practical reason to collect it from every vendor regardless of what you expect to pay them.

Does paying my cleaner through Venmo, PayPal or a credit card change who files?

A credit or payment card payment moves the reporting duty to the payment settlement entity under section 6050W and off you entirely, and 26 CFR 1.6041-1 carries a worked example of a payor who pays a repairman by card and is not required to file. Whether a specific consumer app does the same depends on whether that transaction is settled by a payment settlement entity, which turns on the app and the account type, and no primary source resolves it app by app. Check your own account documentation rather than assuming either answer.

What happens if I just do not send them?

$340 per form under section 6721 and another $340 under section 6722 for the recipient copy, at the top tier for returns required in 2027, so $680 for one cleaner. Intentional disregard is the greater of $690 per return or 10% of what should have been reported, with no cap. The deduction itself is not at risk, because no provision of section 162 conditions it on filing an information return. The records behind the deduction are, under section 6001.

Key takeaways

• The 1099-NEC threshold for payments made during calendar 2026 is $2,000 or more per payee, up from the $600 that had stood since 1954, and it is keyed to the date you paid rather than the tax year the work belongs to.
• The deadline for both the recipient copy and the IRS filing is Monday February 1, 2027, because the statutory January 31 falls on a Sunday, and no IRS 1099 instruction sheet prints the shifted date.
• Eight of fifteen host and landlord pages checked on October 11, 2026 still print $600 as the current figure, and so does the IRS's own About Form 1099-MISC landing page, last reviewed March 30, 2026.
• $600 in August 1954 is $7,471.67 in August 2026 dollars on the published CPI-U, so the new $2,000 is $160.61 in 1954 money and roughly 73% below the original threshold in real terms.
• Payments made by credit or payment card are reported by the settlement entity on a 1099-K under section 6050W and are not reportable by you on a 1099-NEC at any amount, so the payment rail decides who files before the dollar figure does.
• Missing one worker's form costs $340 under section 6721 plus $340 under section 6722 at the top tier for returns required in 2027, and Pennsylvania's $5,000 nonresident withholding line and Michigan's direct-filing rule are both unaffected by the federal change.

The form on the other side of this one is the 1099-K you receive rather than issue, and our breakdown of why your 1099-K never matches your payouts covers the reconciliation that catches it. If the problem underneath this post is that you cannot produce a payee total without a weekend of work, start with the bookkeeping system for a short-term rental portfolio.

A twelve-month total against every vendor name, ready in December rather than reconstructed in the last week of January. See your payee totals in MagicBNB →

About MagicBNB

MagicBNB is portfolio analytics for operators running 2 to 20 short-term rental doors. It connects your property management system and your bank accounts and reports what each door actually kept, which is also where the figures a January filing needs already live. Recurring rules let you mark one transaction as recurring and have every future payment to the same merchant tie itself to the same property split, with past matches backfilled, so a monthly cleaning retainer stops being twelve decisions. The Expense inbox isolates only the unallocated transactions, which turns a quarterly catch-up into a fifteen-minute weekly pass. And Property Detail breaks expenses down by category per door, cleaning, utilities and maintenance separately, so you can see which property is carrying the crew cost before the year closes. MagicBNB does not file your forms. It makes sure the numbers on them are the ones that left your account.