Watch it file itself
The pointer does the typing and clicking. Nothing here is real — it is the same screens you will use, with sample data, running end to end.
What each step asks for, why it asks, and what usually goes wrong.
Create your free account
Sign up with an email address. You can build payers, recipients and complete forms without entering a card — payment is only taken at the point you submit a form to the IRS. That means you can put the whole return together, check how it prints, and decide afterwards.
An account is per business owner, not per payer. One login can file for as many payers as you need, which is the normal arrangement for a bookkeeper or an accountant filing on behalf of several clients.
Add the payer
The payer is the business the forms are filed under. Its name and tax ID print on every form you send, so this is the record worth getting exactly right the first time.
Required: last name or business name, street address, city, state and ZIP. The TIN type toggles between EIN and SSN. Everything else — middle name, suffix, country, phone, disregarded entity, email — is optional and can be left blank.
The most common cause of a rejected return is a payer name that does not match the EIN in IRS records — usually because a trading name was entered instead of the registered legal name. If the business trades as something else, the registered name goes in the name field and the trading name goes in the disregarded-entity field.
Filing for several payers at once? They can be imported from a spreadsheet rather than added one at a time.
Choose the tax year and the form
Pick the year the payments were made in, not the year you are filing. Money paid during 2026 is reported on tax year 2026 forms, which are filed in early 2027. This is the single most common mix-up, and it is worth pausing on because the year decides everything that follows.
Once the year is set, the form list narrows to the forms that exist for it. TaxFormHero supports the 1099 series including 1099-NEC and 1099-MISC, Forms W-2 and W-2C, the ACA 1095 series, and over twenty forms in total. Picking a form does not create anything yet — the list of people you are filing for comes next.
Not sure which form a payment belongs on? The guides section covers the common judgement calls, including contractor versus employee and which box a given payment goes in.
Add your recipients
A recipient is the person or business you paid. Required: last name or business name, street address, city, state and ZIP, plus the tax ID.
The TIN type matters here. An individual contractor files under their own name and social security number, so the type moves from EIN to SSN. An incorporated contractor files under the business name and EIN. Entering an SSN while the type still reads EIN is a mismatch waiting to happen.
Recipients are stored against the payer, so someone you file for this year can be reused next year without re-entering them. Larger lists can be imported from a spreadsheet.
Enter the amounts and save
Each recipient arrives in the table as a Draft with no amounts on it. Open the form, press Edit, fill in the boxes that apply, and save. The status moves to Ready once the form has what the IRS requires.
The boxes are the real ones from the form you picked. On a 1099-NEC that is Box 1a nonemployee compensation, Box 1b cash tips, Box 4 federal income tax withheld and Box 5 state tax withheld. You only fill in what applies — a straightforward contractor payment is usually Box 1a and nothing else.
Amounts are reported gross. Report what you paid the contractor before any expenses they billed you for, and do not net off amounts they owed you. If you withheld federal tax under backup withholding, that goes in Box 4 — it does not reduce Box 1a.
Choose your add-ons
Five options sit against each form in the table, chosen per form rather than for the whole batch, so you can run a TIN check on the one recipient you are unsure about without paying for all of them.
- Mask — hides all but the last four digits of the recipient's tax ID on the copy they receive. The full number still goes to the IRS. Free, and it changes only what prints.
- TIN check — compares the name and tax ID against IRS records before you file. The cheapest way to avoid a CP2100 notice and the backup-withholding obligations that can follow a mismatch.
- State filing — sends the return to the state as well as the IRS, where the state requires it.
- Print & mail — the recipient copy printed and posted for you.
- E-delivery — the recipient copy sent electronically, where the recipient has consented to receive it that way.
Each is priced per form. Current prices are on the pricing page.
Review, pay and file
Tick the forms marked Ready, add them to the cart and pay. That is the action that sends them — nothing reaches the IRS before it.
Forms go to the IRS over IRIS A2A — the application-to-application channel of the Information Returns Intake System, a direct machine-to-machine transmission rather than anyone keying your data into the IRIS web portal. Each form comes back accepted or rejected.
A rejected form is fixed and resubmitted as a correction, and so is a form that was accepted and later found to be wrong. Either way the route is the same and it is covered in filing a correction below.
Recipient copies are yours to distribute unless you added print & mail or e-delivery, in which case that happens for you.