Does an agency 1099 its creators?

Every tax article about this industry is written for the creator. Almost none are written for the agency, which is the party that actually has a filing obligation — and whether you have one depends entirely on which direction the money moves.

This is the mechanical version. It is not tax advice, and the last section says what to take to your accountant.

First: which way does the money go?

There are two shapes, and they produce opposite answers.

• The platform pays the creator, and you collect your commission from them. You are not paying the creator anything. You are being paid by them. You do not issue them a 1099.
• The platform pays you, and you pay the creator their share. Now you are paying a contractor in the course of your trade or business, and that is the classic 1099-NEC situation.

Most agencies do not notice they are in the second shape until somebody asks. If a payout lands in your account and you send part of it on, you are the payer. That is the whole test.

The threshold changed, and this is the part most likely to be out of date

The $600 threshold that applied for decades was raised. For tax years beginning after 2025 — so your 2026 filings onward — the 1099-NEC reporting threshold is $2,000. Below it, no form is required unless backup withholding was taken.

That last row catches people. If you withheld, you file, however small the payment.

Get the W-9 before you pay, not before you file

This is the single most common expensive mistake, and it is expensive in a specific way.

You need each payee's legal name and taxpayer identification number to file. If you collect it in January for the previous year, some percentage of your payees have moved on, changed numbers, or simply will not answer — and you are now filing forms you cannot complete, or not filing forms you were required to file.

Worse: if you did not have a TIN at the time of payment, you were required to apply backup withholding at the statutory rate and remit it. That is not something you can fix retroactively, because the money has already gone out in full.

Collect the W-9 at onboarding. Same session as the contract. It takes them two minutes and it is the difference between a filing and a problem.

Report what you actually paid

Not what they earned. Not the gross payout. The amount that left your account and went to them, in that calendar year.

• If you kept your commission before paying, you report the net amount you sent.
• If they paid you your commission separately, you did not pay them at all, and there is no form.
• Cash basis, by the date paid. A payment you sent on 31 December belongs to that year even if it lands on 2 January.

The payees people forget

Creators are the obvious ones. These are the ones agencies miss:

• Chatting agencies and chatters. If you pay a chatting team or an individual chatter, they are a contractor payee like any other.
• Overseas contractors. A subject of its own — paying chatters and VAs overseas. Different form entirely — a foreign person gives you a W-8, not a W-9, and the reporting is different. Do not put them on a 1099-NEC because they were the easiest place to put them.
• Yourself, if you are structured oddly. Payments to a corporation are generally exempt from 1099-NEC. Payments to an LLC depend on how that LLC is taxed, which is on the W-9.

Filing itself

Two dates worth having in your calendar:

• The IRS FIRE system closes on 19 November 2026.
• IRIS is the only e-file channel from 1 January 2027.

If your accountant has filed on FIRE for years, that is a migration they need to have planned, not discovered in January.

What to take to your accountant

Three questions, and they are the ones that actually determine your answer:

• In each of my creator relationships, who pays whom? Show them a real contract.
• For the ones where I pay them: do I have a W-9 dated before the first payment, and did I withhold where I did not?
• What is my total paid to each payee, by calendar year, on a cash basis?

If you can answer the third from a report rather than a spreadsheet reconstruction, the rest of this is an afternoon. If you cannot, that is the real problem and the tax question is a symptom of it.

This is not tax advice. Thresholds, forms and deadlines change, and the threshold above is the single most likely thing on this page to be out of date by the time you read it. Confirm your filing year's figures with a CPA before relying on any of it. OnlyFlow is a software vendor, not a 1099 payer — we do not file and we do not withhold; we produce the export your accountant files.