1099 Season Starts in November: The Prep Checklist That Saves Your January

If your 1099 process has stayed the same for years—chasing W-9s in December, feeling a bit panicked in January, and filing by the 31st while hoping for the best—it’s time to revise it. Creating a repeatable step-by-step process now is especially important now because the reporting threshold has changed.

For payments made in 2026, the reporting threshold for Form 1099-NEC and 1099-MISC jumped from $600 to $2,000, and it’ll be indexed for inflation starting in 2027. That’s the first change to that number since the 1950s. Which means this is the first 1099 season where “we’ve always just sent everyone a form” is actually the wrong answer for a chunk of your clients’ vendor lists.

What Actually Changed (and What Didn’t)

The headline is good news: fewer forms to issue for the smallest vendors. But a couple of things are easy to get wrong if you’re running on autopilot.

• The corporate exception still applies. Payments to most C-corps and S-corps still don’t need a 1099-NEC, regardless of amount.
• The attorney trap still applies, too. You must report payments for legal services even when the law firm is incorporated. The new dollar threshold doesn’t touch this exception; it’s still a flat rule.
• You still need the W-9 before you know anything. The whole point of collecting a W-9 up front is knowing a vendor’s entity type and running total before year-end — not scrambling to figure out in January whether last March’s $1,800 invoice plus November’s $650 top-up pushed someone over the new $2,000 line.
• There’s no grace period for being wrong. The IRS penalty tiers still apply on their usual schedule — climbing from roughly $60 a form if you correct it within 30 days, up past $300 a form after August, to a much steeper number for anything that looks like intentional disregard. Filing late still beats not filing, but neither one is free.

None of this makes 1099 season simpler. It makes it a season where an out-of-date checklist gives you a wrong answer with confidence, which is arguably worse than a slow answer.

The November Checklist

This is the version built for a $2,000 world, and it starts now, not in January:

1. Pull last year’s vendor list and re-run it against the new threshold. Some vendors who got a 1099 last year may not need one this year. Don’t assume. Check each one against actual 2026 payment totals.
2. Chase every missing W-9 now, while you still have leverage. A vendor who won’t return a signed W-9 by year-end is a vendor you may need to start backup withholding on. Which is a conversation that goes much better in November than as a surprise deduction on a December invoice.
3. Flag the exceptions by hand. Attorneys, regardless of entity type. Anyone paid in a gray area between “clearly a vendor” and “clearly an employee.” These are the ones a generic threshold check will miss.
4. Verify TINs before you file, not after the IRS tells you they’re wrong. A mismatched name-and-TIN combination is the single most common reason firms end up defending a CP2100 notice months after the season is over.
5. Confirm the deadline on your calendar — and don’t count on an extension. Both the IRS copy and the recipient copy of the 1099-NEC are due January 31, with no automatic extension available. If the date lands on a weekend, it shifts to the next business day. Check and double-check that you (and everyone else in your firm) know the correct deadline.
6. Make It a Checklist, Not a Memory

The 1099 season is exactly the kind of work that depends on someone remembering to do it, on time, for every single client, once a year. Which is precisely the kind of work that falls apart the moment your most experienced staff member takes vacation in December.

The fix is the same one we keep coming back to: turn the checklist above into a recurring task that assigns itself to the same person (or team) every November, without anyone having to remember it exists. If you’ve already built out your year-end meeting process in October, 1099 prep is the natural next recurring service on the calendar, same checklist-first approach, just aimed at a harder deadline with real penalties attached.

This isn’t new advice, either. We’ve been walking through the essential steps of a 1099 checklist for years. What’s new is the threshold, and the fact that firms running last year’s list without updating it are going to get this year’s answer wrong.

Build It Once, Use It Every November

The Aero Library includes a 1099 prep checklist template built around this workflow — vendor threshold review, W-9 status tracking, TIN verification, and the filing deadline — as a recurring task that renews itself every year instead of getting rebuilt from a sticky note. Pull it in once, schedule it to recur annually, and 1099 season becomes a checklist your team runs instead of a fire your team fights.

Start your free Aero trial today and get this year’s 1099 checklist running before Thanksgiving — not after New Year’s.