Form 941 and Payroll Tax Deadlines for Florida Employers

Form 941 is due the last day of the month after each quarter ends: April 30, July 31, October 31 and January 31, rolled forward when that date falls on a weekend or holiday. If you deposited every dollar of payroll tax on time and in full during the quarter, you get until the 10th day of the following month instead. And read this twice: paying deposits through EFTPS is not filing your return. Those are two separate obligations with two separate penalties.

Who files Form 941, and who doesn't

You file Form 941 if you withhold federal income tax or FICA from employee wages. The exceptions are real, not edge cases:

• Household employers (nanny, housekeeper, home health aide) report on Schedule H with their Form 1040 instead.
• Agricultural employers file Form 943.
• Very small employers file Form 944 once a year rather than four times — but only if the IRS notifies you to. You cannot switch on your own. The cutoff is $1,000 or less of annual employment tax liability.
• Seasonal employers skip quarters with no wages, but only if you check the seasonal box in Part 3.

Now the part that catches people. Once you have filed your first Form 941, you must file every quarter after that, including quarters with zero wages and zero tax. The obligation stops only when you file a final return (check the closed-business box in Part 3 and enter the last date you paid wages) or qualify as seasonal. Businesses that go quiet mid-year and simply stop filing collect non-filer notices.

Paying a contractor on a 1099 is not payroll and does not belong on Form 941. If you are unsure whether someone is a contractor or an employee, settle that question first. It is far more expensive than a missed deadline.

The deadlines

The extended date is conditional. Miss one deposit, by one day, and you lose it for that quarter.

Depositing is not filing

EFTPS moves money. It does not file returns. The IRS is explicit that taxes you deposit still have to be reported by filing Form 941 on paper or through e-file.

To e-file, you need either IRS-approved software plus a 94x Online Signature PIN (or a signed Form 8453-EMP), or an Authorized IRS e-file Provider or Reporting Agent — which is what most payroll services are — filing on your behalf. Paper filing is still permitted.

What is not permitted is assuming the deposits took care of it. An employer who is perfectly current on deposits and never files the return still gets the failure-to-file penalty: 5% of the tax due per month, capped at 25%, plus interest, on tax the IRS is already holding.

Which deposit schedule you are on

Your schedule for the year is set by your lookback period: the four quarters ending June 30 of the prior year.

Two rules override both. First, the next-day rule: if $100,000 or more of employment tax liability accumulates on any single day, that deposit is due the next business day, and you become a semiweekly depositor for the rest of the year and all of the next. Second, new employers with no lookback history default to monthly. If you started operations last year or this year, that is you.

Semiweekly depositors always get at least three business days after the semiweekly period closes, so a legal holiday in Washington, DC pushes the date out. In Q2 2026 that means Memorial Day (May 25) and Juneteenth (June 19).

The rates

Four things this table hides:

The wage base resets per employer, not per employee. Someone who works for two of your companies, or changed jobs mid-year, has Social Security tax withheld twice on the same wages. You must keep withholding anyway. The employee recovers the excess as a credit on their Form 1040.

The $200,000 Additional Medicare trigger is a withholding rule, not a liability threshold. You withhold at $200,000 per employee regardless of filing status. Married-filing-jointly employees (threshold $250,000) may get some back; married-filing-separately employees ($125,000) and two-earner couples may owe more. They reconcile on Form 8959. Payroll gets blamed for this every year and payroll is right.

The 0.6% FUTA rate assumes your state is not a credit reduction state. Florida is not currently, but the Department of Labor redetermines that annually based on outstanding federal unemployment loans. If you have employees in multiple states, check each one.

FUTA is reported annually but deposited quarterly. Form 940 is due January 31. The deposit is due by the last day of the month after any quarter in which accumulated FUTA liability passes $500 — the same day as your Form 941. That deposit is easy to forget.

What the penalties cost

Late filing runs 5% of the tax due per month, capped at 25%. Late deposits are tiered: 2% at one to five days late, 5% at six to fifteen days, 10% at sixteen days or more, and 15% once an IRS demand notice has gone ignored for ten days.

The trap is that the 10% penalty has a second trigger. It applies to any required deposit not made by electronic funds transfer. Mail a check for a deposit and you owe 10% even if it arrives early. Only amounts remitted with a return, where the de minimis rules allow it, can be paid non-electronically.

The Trust Fund Recovery Penalty

Withheld income tax and the employee's share of FICA are trust fund money. You collected it on the government's behalf. If the business does not remit it, IRC section 6672 lets the IRS assess 100% of the trust fund portion personally.

Two things are widely misunderstood.

Scope of the money. The penalty reaches only withheld federal income tax plus the employee's share of FICA. It does not reach your matching FICA share. It is not 100% of the Form 941 balance.

Scope of the people. Title is not the test. The IRS must show the person was a responsible person — with the duty to collect, account for and pay over, and the power to direct it — and acted willfully. A titular officer with no authority over funds is not liable. A bookkeeper, controller or outside payroll agent with check-signing authority can be. Using a payroll service does not transfer the liability to the payroll service.

This is not veil piercing, whatever you may have read. Section 6672 creates a direct, independent liability for your own failure to act; the corporation or LLC stays fully intact and still owes the tax. Corporate formalities, adequate capitalization and clean books — the classic veil-piercing defenses — do nothing here.

Florida: two forms, one date

No state income tax withholding means no state withholding return to reconcile. Your only state-level quarterly payroll filing is Florida Reemployment Tax, Form RT-6, filed with the Florida Department of Revenue and due the same day as Form 941.

Do not assume the federal rules carry over:

• There is no "deposited on time, get ten extra days" extension for RT-6.
• RT-6 has the opposite no-activity rule from Form 941. It is due even for quarters with no employees and no wages.
• The RT-6 taxable wage base is the first $7,000 of each employee's wages, which matches the FUTA base. Track it once, use it twice.
• Experience-rated rates run from 0.1% to 5.4%. Use the rate on your annual notice from the Department of Revenue, not an estimate.
• New hires in Orlando, Jacksonville, Miami or anywhere else in the state must be reported to the Florida New Hire Reporting Center within 20 days.

One hurricane-season note: when a disaster declaration covers your county, the IRS and the Department of Revenue sometimes postpone filing and deposit dates. It is county by county and never announced in advance. Do not plan around it, but check after a storm before you pay a penalty you do not owe.

Three lines that cause most amended returns

Line 2 is "Wages, tips, and other compensation." It is not gross payroll. It ties to Box 1 of the W-2, so it excludes pre-tax 401(k), 403(b), SIMPLE and SARSEP deferrals and Section 125 cafeteria plan amounts such as pre-tax health premiums, FSA and dependent care. It also will not equal Lines 5a and 5c, because 401(k) deferrals are still subject to Social Security and Medicare tax. That mismatch is normal and expected. Keying gross payroll into Line 2 gives you a wrong return and a year-end reconciliation that will not tie to the W-3.

Line 12 is "Total taxes after adjustments and nonrefundable credits" — not raw total tax, which is Line 6. Line 12 comes after the fractions-of-cents, sick pay and tips/group-term-life adjustments and after the qualified small business payroll tax credit for research activities. It is the figure your deposits are compared against.

Line 13 is total deposits for the quarter, including any overpayment applied from a prior quarter and overpayments applied from a Form 941-X, 943-X or 944-X filed this quarter. Enter only what you wired and you will show a balance due that does not exist.

Line numbering shifts between form revisions. Read the captions on the revision you are actually filing.

If you are a non-resident founder

Where you live does not matter. If your US company pays wages for work performed in the United States, it files Form 941, deposits by electronic funds transfer, and files RT-6 if those employees are in Florida.

You need an EIN before you can run payroll. You can get one without a US Social Security number, but the application cannot be completed through the online portal. Taking owner distributions from a foreign-owned entity is not payroll. Paying yourself for work you perform as a US-based officer generally is. And the Trust Fund Recovery Penalty does not stop at the border: delegating payroll to a US-based administrator is not a defense if you had the duty and the power to direct payment.

What to do next

1. 01Confirm your deposit schedule for the year from your lookback period. New business with no lookback history? You are monthly.
2. 02Reconcile your payroll register to Line 2 on a W-2 Box 1 basis, not gross wages.
3. 03Compare Line 12 to Line 13. If there is a gap, find it before the IRS does.
4. 04Confirm every deposit went by electronic funds transfer, on time. Check whether a quarterly FUTA deposit is also due.
5. 05File the return — through e-file software, your payroll provider or Reporting Agent, or on paper. EFTPS will not do it for you.
6. 06File RT-6 the same day, even if you had no wages that quarter.
7. 07Archive the filed return, the e-file acknowledgment, the payroll register and the deposit confirmations.

If a past quarter is wrong, correct it on Form 941-X rather than waiting for the notice. Voluntary corrections cost less than assessed ones.

Accounting BOSS works with employers in Orlando, Jacksonville and Miami, and with non-resident founders running US payroll from abroad, on quarterly filings, deposit schedules and IRS cleanup. Contact us if a quarter is coming due and something above did not sit right.

Rates, wage bases and dates change every year. Verify current figures against IRS and Florida Department of Revenue sources before you file.