Payroll Tax Deposit Schedule Calculator
Enter lookback-period Form 941 liability and a pay date to see whether you deposit monthly or semiweekly, your deposit due date, and the next-day rule flag.
Payroll Tax Deposit Schedule Calculator
Your deposit schedule
Your schedule is fixed before the year starts and runs the whole year.
Add line 12 from all four Forms 941 in the window shown in the results. Use the amounts you originally reported, because later Form 941-X corrections do not count.
This payroll
The date wages are actually paid, not the period end and not the date the tax accrued.
Withheld federal income tax plus both halves of Social Security and Medicare for this one pay date, before any nonrefundable credits.
Only used for the under-$2,500 pay-with-return check. Leave blank if you do not know it.
Fill this in to see which failure-to-deposit penalty tier a late deposit lands in.
Federal Form 941 deposits only. FUTA (Form 940) and state deposits run on separate schedules.
Both figures come from statute (IRC section 6302 and the deposit regulations) and neither is indexed for inflation. They have not moved in decades, so they will not shift on you each January the way the Social Security wage base does.
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How the lookback period sets your schedule
Your deposit schedule for a calendar year is decided before that year starts, from four Forms 941 you already filed. The window runs July 1 through June 30, and it ends a full six months before the year it governs. For deposit year 2026 the lookback period is July 1, 2024 through June 30, 2025: Q3 2024, Q4 2024, Q1 2025 and Q2 2025. For 2027 it shifts to July 1, 2025 through June 30, 2026.
It feels backwards to set next year's schedule from two-year-old figures, and that is the point. The IRS wants the answer settled and unambiguous on January 1, not recalculated every quarter. Add line 12 from those four returns. $50,000 or less makes you a monthly schedule depositor. More than $50,000 makes you semiweekly. Exactly $50,000.00 is monthly, because the test is inclusive.
Use the amounts you originally reported. Publication 15 gives the case directly: an employer with a $45,000 lookback total discovers it was understated by $10,000 and files a Form 941-X in January 2026. The corrected total would have crossed the line, but the employer stays monthly for 2026, because the lookback total is what was reported at the time. New employers get the same simple answer from the other direction. Any lookback quarter before you started or acquired the business counts as zero, which puts you on the monthly schedule for your first calendar year.
Line 12 is withheld federal income tax plus both halves of Social Security and Medicare, so the FICA tax calculator covers two of its three components, and the employer payroll cost calculator builds the full employer-side figure. Worth saying plainly: the $50,000 line, the $100,000 next-day threshold and the $2,500 de minimis figure are written into statute and are not indexed for inflation. The Social Security wage base and the tax brackets move every January. These three numbers have sat unchanged for years, so any page telling you to check for a new deposit threshold each year is padding.
Some filers sit outside this window entirely. Form 943, 944 and 945 filers look back to the second preceding calendar year instead, so for 2026 that is all of calendar year 2024. Household employers usually file Schedule H with their own Form 1040 rather than Form 941, which puts them outside the deposit regime entirely (the nanny tax calculator covers that case). If you are self-employed and paying 1040-ES, you are not making a 941 deposit at all: see the 1099 quarterly tax set-aside calculator for those dates.
Reading the semiweekly table without counting on your fingers
"Semiweekly" does not mean you deposit twice a week. It means the week is cut into two deposit periods, and each one has its own deadline:
- Wednesday, Thursday or Friday payday: deposit by the following Wednesday.
- Saturday, Sunday, Monday or Tuesday payday: deposit by the following Friday.
The IRS's own worked example runs like this. Green, Inc. pays wages on Friday, May 29, 2026. That payday sits in the Wednesday-to-Friday period, so the deposit is due Wednesday, June 3, 2026. If you run a single monthly payroll, you can still be a semiweekly depositor. You will make exactly one deposit that month, just on this timetable. Pay frequency and deposit schedule are unrelated, and Publication 15 says so outright. If you are sorting out the payroll side of that, the pay frequency converter handles cadence.
Then there is the extension almost every article skips. Semiweekly depositors always get at least three banking days after the period closes, and every legal holiday inside those three days adds another day. Take a Friday, January 15, 2027 payday. The period closes that Friday, and the normal answer is the following Wednesday, January 20. But Monday, January 18 is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, so the three banking days run Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. The deposit is due Thursday, January 21. A calculator that only knows the Wednesday rule answers January 20 and never mentions the holiday, which is harmless here and a coin flip everywhere else.
"Legal holiday" is narrower than it sounds. It means a legal holiday in the District of Columbia, and statewide holidays do not count, so a state-only holiday in your own state shifts nothing. This tool ships the DC list for 2026 and 2027 as a frozen table. Outside those years it shifts for weekends only and tells you so on screen, rather than quietly guessing.
Last trap: the quarter straddle. Wednesday, September 30 and Friday, October 2, 2026 sit in one semiweekly period, but they fall in different quarters. Both deposits are due Wednesday, October 7, and they have to be made as two separate deposits, one per quarter. File them as one and the quarter totals on your Forms 941 will not reconcile.
What it costs to miss a deposit
The failure-to-deposit penalty is a percentage of the deposit itself, and it steps up with how late you are:
| Penalty | Charged for |
|---|---|
| 2% | Deposits made 1 to 5 days late. |
| 5% | Deposits made 6 to 15 days late. |
| 10% | Deposits made 16 or more days late, but before 10 days from the date of the first IRS notice asking for the tax due. Also charged on amounts that should have been deposited but were paid directly to the IRS or paid with the return. |
| 15% | Amounts still unpaid more than 10 days after the first IRS notice, or after notice and demand for immediate payment, whichever is earlier. This one depends on an IRS notice date, so the calculator lists it here rather than computing it. |
The tiers do not stack. A deposit twenty days late is 10%, not 2 plus 5 plus 10 for 17%, which is the number you will see quoted if you read the wrong blog post. Interest does run on top of the penalty, so the real cost sits a little above the headline rate.
There is real slack in the rules if you know where it is. Under the accuracy-of-deposits rule, a shortfall is not penalized as long as it does not exceed the greater of $100 or 2% of the amount due and you make it up by the shortfall makeup date. Penalties are waived for reasonable cause, and Publication 15 also describes a waiver for an inadvertent miss in your first required-deposit quarter or right after your deposit frequency changes. None of that helps if you simply forgot, which is the argument for pinning the due date down in advance.
The penalty is charged against a deposit amount, and that amount comes straight off your payroll records. Every figure on this page starts life as a line on a pay stub: gross wages, withheld federal income tax, the employee and employer shares of Social Security and Medicare. If those records are clean and itemized per pay date, reconstructing a quarter's liability takes minutes. If they are not, it takes a weekend. Payslip44 builds that record line by line, with reusable employer, employee and item templates, per-line year-to-date amounts and decimal-precise money math, all on-device, and it exports to PDF, PNG, CSV or plain text. Download Payslip44 if you want the paperwork behind these dates to hold up.
This calculator is a scheduling aid built from IRS Publication 15, section 11, and IRS Notice 931. It is not tax advice. Form 943, 944, 945 and CT-1 filers, agents with an approved Form 2678, successor employers and certified professional employer organizations follow different rules, and state deposit schedules are separate from all of this.
Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions about payroll tax deposit schedule calculator
Am I a monthly or a semiweekly depositor?
Add line 12 from the four Forms 941 you filed in the lookback period: July 1 two years before the deposit year through June 30 of the year before. $50,000 or less makes you a monthly schedule depositor, and more than $50,000 makes you semiweekly. For 2026, that window is July 1, 2024 through June 30, 2025.
When are payroll taxes due after a payday?
Monthly depositors have until the 15th of the next month to cover everything paid in a calendar month. Semiweekly depositors pay by the following Wednesday for Wednesday, Thursday and Friday paydays, and by the following Friday for Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday paydays. Either way, if the due date falls on a weekend or a District of Columbia legal holiday, it moves to the next banking day.
What is the $100,000 next-day deposit rule?
If your federal employment tax liability reaches $100,000 or more on any single day in a deposit period, that amount is due by the close of the next banking day, no matter which schedule you are on. Measure it before reducing the liability for nonrefundable credits. A monthly depositor who hits it becomes semiweekly from the next day, for the rest of that year and all of the next.
Does my pay frequency decide my deposit schedule?
No. Publication 15 is blunt about it: the terms "monthly schedule depositor" and "semiweekly schedule depositor" say nothing about how often you run payroll. A company that pays once a month can be a semiweekly depositor, and it will make exactly one deposit a month, just on the semiweekly timetable. The pay frequency converter handles the payroll cadence question separately.
What happens if my deposit due date falls on a holiday?
It moves to the next banking day. "Legal holiday" here means a legal holiday in the District of Columbia, and statewide holidays do not count. Semiweekly depositors get a bonus: you always have at least three banking days after the period closes, so a Friday payday before a Monday holiday moves the deposit from Wednesday to Thursday.
Can I skip deposits and just pay with Form 941?
Only if your total Form 941 liability for either the current or the prior quarter is under $2,500 and you did not incur a $100,000 next-day obligation during the quarter. If you are not certain the quarter will land under $2,500, deposit on schedule, because guessing wrong costs a failure-to-deposit penalty.
What is the penalty for depositing payroll taxes late?
It is 2% for one to five days late, 5% for six to fifteen, and 10% at sixteen days or more. It climbs to 15% once an amount is still unpaid more than ten days after the first IRS notice. The tiers do not stack, so a deposit twenty days late is 10% and not 17%, and interest accrues on top.
Can my deposit schedule change in the middle of the year?
Only through the $100,000 next-day rule. Your schedule is locked in before January 1 from the lookback period, and nothing you report during the year changes it, not even a Form 941-X that corrects a lookback quarter. But cross $100,000 in a single day as a monthly depositor and you are semiweekly from the next day through the end of the following year.