December 5, 2025

Starting on December 19, 2025, Check will begin rolling out a new, consistent format for tax documents. This will present all of the information needed for an employer to understand their filing in a cleaner and more consistent layout across agencies, which will reduce common questions about tax filings. The filing we do on behalf of employers will still be in the agency-approved format with all of the necessary information. The Filing API and Console experiences to access these documents will remain the same. You can read more and see examples in the Tax Documents FAQ help center article.

Partners can now download and preview tax variances for Q4 2025 using the Quarterly Variance Report in Console. This report was previously only available after the close of the quarter, but it will now be available to preview throughout the quarter and will be updated on a weekly basis.

Additionally, partners can also access a breakdown of tax variances for an individual company by employee and tax. This is available in Console by downloading a preview report of the “balancing payroll” for the company in Q4.

For instructions on accessing both of these reports, refer to our updated Balancing help center article.

As previously announced, California employers will be subject to a 1.2% Federal Unemployment Tax (FUTA) credit reduction for the 2025 tax year.

This FUTA credit reduction will be collected from California employers as part of Q4 balancing variances. We recommend that partners use the newly available quarterly variance reports mentioned above to preview variance amounts across employers and alert California employers that they may receive a large tax variance after the end of Q4 due to this FUTA credit reduction.

For more information, refer to our FUTA tax guide.

Beginning January 1, 2026, catch-up contributions to 401k, 403b, and 457 plans will be required to be made as Roth contributions if the employee meets a certain threshold of FICA taxable wages in 2025. This requirement was introduced by the Secure 2.0 Act, section 603.

This requirement is now supported in Check and will be applied on payrolls with payday of January 1st, 2026 or later. Refer to our guide to our Help Center for more information about how this requirement is implemented.

Effective Friday, Check is improving how we handle Electronic Federal Tax Payment System (EFTPS) registration failures to remove the dependency between tax payment remittance and overall payroll approvals.

Currently, an EFTPS failure prompts a Check Operator to send partners a Zendesk notification to resolve the reason the EFTPS registration failed within a 10-business-day window. If it remains unresolved after 10 business days, we block all payroll approvals for that company.

Going forward, we're no longer blocking payroll runs for unresolved EFTPS issues. Instead, we will block federal tax payments until the issue is resolved. You'll continue to receive a Zendesk notification with the same instructions for correcting the EFTPS registration. By making this change, we're allowing employers to run payroll even with a failed EFTPS registration.