Florida Reemployment Tax: What One Employee Costs You, and When the RT-6 Is Due

You hired your first employee this year, and a letter from the Florida Department of Revenue says your business now owes reemployment tax. The letter names a rate, an account number and a form, which is the RT-6, and it explains none of them.

Reemployment tax is what Florida calls its unemployment insurance tax. The state renamed it in 2012. Your business pays it, your employees never pay a cent of it, and the money goes into a fund that pays people who lose a job through no fault of their own.

That form is the Employer's Quarterly Report. The one covering July through September is due October 31, and the last Florida deadline before it was the minimum wage increase at the end of September.

So let us walk through it in the order it actually happens to you. By the end you will know what one employee costs you in a year, when your business became liable, how to fill in the RT-6, what a late one costs, and what to do the morning a laid off worker files for benefits.

I am Dr. Michael Wendrow. I have run a chiropractic office in North Miami for more than 30 years, and I started Prime Time Business Network in 2012.

Key takeaways

What Florida reemployment tax is, and what one employee costs you

Here is how that $7,000 plays out over a year, because it is the part most owners get wrong. You hire somebody in January at $62,000 a year. You run payroll, and on each paycheck you add up what you have paid that person since January 1. You owe reemployment tax on every dollar until that running total reaches $7,000. Around the middle of February it does, and from that paycheck on you owe nothing more on that employee for the rest of the year.

Two things follow from that, and they are both good news. The bill is small, and almost all of it comes out of your first quarter, so put the money aside in January rather than spreading it across twelve months. Somebody who works part of the year and never reaches $7,000 costs you less again, because you only pay on the wages you actually paid them.

Your Florida reemployment tax rate is what changes that number more than anything else. The Department of Revenue publishes the band every year, and for 2026 it runs from 0.1% to 5.4% of that same $7,000. FloridaCommerce announced in May that roughly 65% of Florida employers would pay the lowest rate, the eleventh year in a row it has stayed there.

One note on the name before we go on. Older paperwork and most search results still say Florida unemployment tax. The Florida unemployment tax rate and the Florida unemployment tax form are this same rate and this same RT-6 under the name the state used before 2012. It is also the only one of the Florida employer taxes the state collects out of wages, because Florida has no state income tax to withhold. Everything else on the list of Florida payroll taxes for employers is federal: Social Security, Medicare and federal unemployment tax.

When your business became liable, and how to register

Florida decides this, not you, and it decides it by looking back over your payroll. Here is what the state checks. It looks at this calendar year and the one before it, and it asks three questions about your business. A yes to any one of them makes you a liable employer from that point on.

• Did you pay at least $1,500 in wages in a single calendar quarter? Two part time workers at $800 each gets you there.
• Did you have at least one employee for any part of a day in 20 different weeks inside the same calendar year? The weeks do not have to run together and it does not have to be the same person.
• Do you already owe federal unemployment tax?

Three kinds of employer are counted differently, and the numbers are far enough from the general rule to catch people out.

Your Florida reemployment tax registration is one form. You fill in the Florida Business Tax Application, which is Form DR-1. The Department opens a reemployment tax account for your business and sends you an account number. That number is the first thing every RT-6 asks for, so keep it where your payroll records are.

Count yourself while you are at it. The Employer Guide says an officer of a corporation who performs services for that corporation is an employee, whether or not the officer takes a salary.

What goes on the RT-6, and the October 31 deadline

Now the quarter ends and the form is in front of you. Here is what it asks for, line by line. You list every employee by name and Social Security number. Beside each name you put the gross wages you paid them in those three months. Then you put the excess wages. Those are the dollars you paid that person above the $7,000 limit. What is left over is the taxable wages, and your rate is applied to that figure.

Excess wages are the line people forget, and leaving them off makes you pay tax on the same money twice.

This quarter has a wrinkle, and it is worth setting a reminder over. October 31, 2026 is a Saturday. The banking system needs a working day to move your money, so the Employer Guide tells you that when a payment due date falls on a Saturday, Sunday or legal holiday, you start the electronic transaction on the business day before. Friday October 30 is your real deadline, and you want a confirmation number in hand by 5 p.m. Eastern.

The Department takes the Florida reemployment tax filing and the Florida reemployment tax payment on the same website, and the guide suggests sending the report early and setting the money to leave your account on the due date itself.

The Department wants a report every quarter regardless of employment activity. A quarter where everybody had already passed $7,000, and a quarter where you had nobody at all, both still get an RT-6 with zeros on it.

What a late RT-6 costs

Say the quarter got away from you. Here is what the Department does next, in that order. It charges a late filing penalty, then interest on the tax you still owe. If the report never arrives at all, it works out what it believes you owe and bills you for that, and an unpaid bill can become a lien on your property.

The Florida Legislature set the amounts in section 443.141, and the one everybody assumes is capped is not.

• A late report costs $25 for each 30 days, or part of 30 days, that it is late. The statute sets no maximum.
• A report that is wrong or incomplete costs $50 or 10% of the tax due, whichever is more, up to $300 for that report. This is the $300 that other articles attach to a late report. It belongs to this one instead.
• Tax you have not paid runs interest, which the statute holds at no more than 1% a month.

Your federal bill is the expensive part, and it is the one nobody warns you about. The IRS charges federal unemployment tax at 6.0% on the same first $7,000 of each employee's wages. Then it gives you a credit of up to 5.4% for the state tax you already paid, which brings your federal bill down to 0.6%, or $42 a person. The Form 940 instructions say that where you paid your state tax late, that credit falls to 90% of what it would have been. At the top of the band it moves your federal cost from $42 to about $80 for every employee on the payroll.

How one laid off employee raises your rate

This is the one that costs real money, and it starts with a letter you have 14 days to answer.

Here is the sequence. Somebody you let go files for reemployment assistance. The state looks at the claim and, if it pays out, charges those benefits against your account. When your next rate is worked out, the Department divides the benefits charged to your account by the taxable payroll you reported for the first seven of the last nine quarters. A few months of benefits set against a small payroll pushes that rate up, and it stays up for years.

Florida gives you three ways those charges stay off your account, all of them in section 443.131(3)(a).

• The person quit without good cause attributable to you.
• You fired the person for misconduct connected with the work.
• You let the person go under a written probation plan of 90 days or less that applies to a whole group of employees.

Relief from those charges is not automatic, and an employer who sits on the mail loses it. Section 443.151(3)(a) says you must answer the notice of claim within 14 days of the date it was mailed or delivered, and that an employer who answers late, or answers poorly, may not have its account relieved of the charges. Fourteen days, not twenty. The twenty day deadline belongs to a different letter, the rate notice that reaches you in December, and it is the time you get to argue the rate itself.

Which means the work happens long before the letter arrives. Open a file the day somebody leaves, while it is fresh, and put three things in it: the resignation letter, any written warnings, and the dates somebody stopped showing up. When the notice of claim comes, you are answering it that week instead of hunting for paper.

Common questions about Florida reemployment tax

Do I owe reemployment tax on a 1099 contractor? A Form 1099 is the tax form you hand somebody who is not on your payroll. You do not owe the tax if the person really is a contractor, and the paperwork is not what settles it. The Employer Guide says how the worker is treated, rather than a written contract or a Form 1099, determines employment status. A real independent contractor decides the methods, offers the same services to the public, and usually brings their own tools. A contract for labor only is normally treated as employment.

What if my employee also works somewhere else? You pay on the first $7,000 you pay them, and so does the other employer. The guide counts your $7,000 without regard to what the person earned anywhere else.

Do I keep filing after my last employee leaves? Yes, until the Department says otherwise. Your account is made inactive once you report zero gross wages for eight quarters in a row, or once you tell the Department payroll has stopped. Ending liability is a separate thing: you have to go a full calendar year without meeting any of the three tests, then apply by April 30 of the following year.

How our chapters help you settle a question like this

We built Prime Time Business Network so an owner never has to guess at a question another member answers for a living. We run fifteen chapters across Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach, and every chapter seats one business per category.

• The bookkeeper and the payroll person in our room hold their own category seats, so your question gets an answer rather than a sales call.
• Chapters meet every two weeks, in person and on video, so a question about a quarter end does not wait until the quarter has ended.
• The owners beside you file the same Florida paperwork you do, from the fictitious name registration to the annual resale certificate.
• When another member needs what you sell, they know which category seat you hold and send the work to you.

Bring the payroll questions to a room of owners

If you would rather work through the Florida filing calendar with owners who keep the same dates you do, find the chapter that fits your business category and ask Mark Hirsch whether that seat is open.