Paying talent and the 1099-NEC threshold

When your agency collects from the brand, the talent’s share becomes owed when the brand’s payment arrives, and your management agreement says how soon you pay it: a set number of days after the brand pays, or on a fixed day each month. Pay from money the brand has actually paid. Paying a share before the brand pays is an advance, and should be agreed and recorded as one.

1. Record the brand payment on its invoice as soon as it reaches your bank.
2. Work out the talent’s share and anything deducted from it, as in Commission splits and talent statements.
3. Pay the talent from your bank on or before the due date.
4. Record the payout with the date the money left your bank and the amount sent.
5. Send a statement with the payout, so the talent can match it to their bank.

When a talent is owed money from several agreements, pay it in one transfer and record that one payout against each agreement it covers, so the talent sees one payment in their bank and one line per agreement on their statement.

The payout date matters twice: for your talent, who is waiting for it, and at the end of the year, because tax reporting counts payments by the date you made them.

Before you pay a talent for the first time, get a Form W-9 from whoever you are paying. It gives you their legal name, their tax classification and their taxpayer identification number, which you need if you have to file a Form 1099-NEC for them. Ask again when anything changes, such as a talent who starts billing through a company.

• Pay the person or the company, and know which. Many talent are paid through a loan-out company. The name on the W-9 is the one that goes on any form you file, and it should match the name on your payouts.
• Keep tax forms somewhere secure. A W-9 holds a Social Security or employer identification number; keep it where your agency keeps its other confidential financial records, not in a shared spreadsheet or an email thread.
• Write down who you owe and who you paid for every payout, so the year’s totals come from your records rather than from memory.

Form 1099-NEC reports nonemployee compensation. According to the IRS, you file one for each person you paid, in the course of your business, for services by someone who isn’t your employee, when your payments to them for the year reach the threshold. For payments made through Dec 31, 2025, the threshold is $600.00. For payments made after that date, it is $2,000.00, under the 2025 law the IRS calls the One, Big, Beautiful Bill, and the IRS says the amount will be adjusted for inflation from 2027.

The IRS lists four conditions, all of which must be true:

• you made the payment to someone who is not your employee;
• you made it for services in the course of your trade or business;
• you made it to an individual, a partnership, an estate or, in some cases, a corporation;
• your payments to that payee for the year total the threshold or more.

Payments to a corporation, including an LLC taxed as a C or S corporation, are generally not reported on Form 1099-NEC, with exceptions such as fees paid to attorneys. Payments you make by credit card, or through a payment network that reports them itself, are reported by that company on Form 1099-K and not by you on Form 1099-NEC. And if you withheld federal income tax from a payee under the backup withholding rules, the IRS asks you to report it whatever the amount.

Whether a talent’s share, an advance or a reimbursed expense counts as their compensation depends on how your agency and the talent are set up. That is the question to take to your tax professional, with your payout records.

The threshold applies to the total you paid a payee in the calendar year, whatever agreements the money came from:

Talia Brooks was paid $900.00, $650.00 and $300.00: $1,850.00. Paid in 2026, that is under $2,000.00, so no form is due for her for 2026 unless you pay her more before the year ends. The same payouts made in 2025 were over $600.00, so a form was due for 2025.

Owen Reyes is paid through a single-member LLC, which the IRS usually treats like its owner unless it has chosen to be taxed as a corporation; the W-9 says which. Nia Okafor’s loan-out company is taxed as an S corporation, so payments to it are generally not reported on Form 1099-NEC, however large. Both are exactly the cases to confirm with your tax professional.

The date you pay decides the year. Pay a talent $1,500.00 on Dec 30, 2025 and another $1,500.00 on Jan 5, 2026, and the first payout counts toward 2025, where $1,500.00 is over the $600.00 threshold, while the second counts toward 2026, where it is under $2,000.00 on its own. What the brand paid, and when the work was done, don’t change which year a payout belongs to.

Form 1099-NEC goes to the IRS and to each payee by January 31 of the following year, and there is no automatic extension. When January 31 falls on a weekend or a legal holiday, the IRS accepts the next business day: Jan 31, 2026 was a Saturday, so forms for 2025 were due Feb 2, 2026, and Jan 31, 2027 is a Sunday, so forms for 2026 are due Feb 1, 2027. Some states ask for a copy too.

A routine for early January:

1. Record every payout of the year with its real date, including the last ones in December.
2. Export the year’s payouts and total them by payee, the person or company you paid, not by talent name.
3. Compare each total with the threshold for that year, and set aside payees that are corporations.
4. Check each payee against the W-9 you hold, and ask for any that are missing.
5. Give the totals to whoever files for your agency, or file them yourself, and send each payee their copy.

Start in the first week of January: a missing W-9 or an unrecorded December payout takes longer to fix than the filing itself.

Revarden records what each talent is owed from the brand payments you record, the payouts you make from your own bank, and the advances, expenses and holdbacks in between, with their dates. It prints talent statements and exports every payout, so the year’s totals come from the same records your team works from all year.

Revarden doesn’t pay anyone, collect W-9 forms, keep talent tax identification numbers, or prepare, file or send Forms 1099. A talent statement is a record of what was paid and owed, not a tax form.