Form 945-A Instructions: Semiweekly Deposits, Deadlines, and Penalties

Form 945-A, the Annual Record of Federal Tax Liability, is where you record the exact date every non-payroll federal income tax liability arose during the year, so the IRS can match those dates against your deposits. You attach it to Form 945. You must file it if you’re a semiweekly schedule depositor, or if you’re a monthly depositor who accumulated $100,000 or more in liability on any single day during the year. If your total Form 945 liability for the year is under $2,500, you skip Form 945-A entirely.¹

The form covers non-payroll withholding: pensions, annuities, IRAs, gambling winnings, military retirement pay, Indian gaming profits, backup withholding, and certain government payments where the recipient elected voluntary withholding.² Backup withholding runs at a flat 24% when a payee fails to provide a correct taxpayer identification number or the IRS notifies you of underreporting.

How You Got Classified as a Semiweekly Depositor

Your deposit schedule for the current year depends on the lookback period, which is the second calendar year before it. For 2026, the lookback year is 2024.³ If the total non-payroll withholding on your 2024 Form 945 was $50,000 or less, you’re a monthly depositor for 2026. If it exceeded $50,000, you’re a semiweekly depositor for all of 2026 and Form 945-A is required.

New payers with no lookback-period return are treated as having zero liability and start as monthly depositors.³ A monthly depositor who hits $100,000 in accumulated liability on any single day becomes a semiweekly depositor immediately. That status runs through the rest of that year and the entire year that follows, and Form 945-A is required for the full year in which the trigger occurred.²

Filling In the Daily Liability Entries

The form is organized by month, with a daily grid inside each month. Enter the dollar amount of tax withheld on each calendar date the withholding actually occurred. The critical point: the date is the date the payment was made to the recipient, not the date you sent the deposit to the Treasury. Mixing those up is the most common error, and it feeds directly into penalty calculations.

Once the daily entries are filled in, the monthly totals go on Lines A through L, and those add up to Line M, your total annual liability. Line M must exactly equal Line 3 on Form 945.⁴ A mismatch triggers IRS correspondence and often a penalty recalculation.

If you were a monthly depositor for the entire year and never tripped the $100,000 threshold, you generally use the Monthly Summary section on Form 945 itself and don’t file Form 945-A at all.

Deposit Timing Rules Behind the Entries

The dates you record on Form 945-A drive your deposit deadlines. For semiweekly depositors:

Liability on Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday: deposit by the following Wednesday.
Liability on Saturday, Sunday, Monday, or Tuesday: deposit by the following Friday.⁵

If a deposit due date falls on a banking holiday, you get until the next business day. The $100,000 next-day rule overrides everything else: once accumulated liability reaches $100,000 on any day, the deposit is due by the close of the next business day.⁶

All federal tax deposits must be made electronically. EFTPS is the most common route, and enrollment can take up to five business days, so set it up before your first deposit is due.⁷

Deadline and Submission

Form 945-A is filed as an attachment to Form 945. The standard deadline is January 31 of the year following the tax year. If every deposit was made on time and in full during the year, the deadline extends to February 10.⁸ Weekend or federal holiday deadlines shift to the next business day.

The IRS encourages electronic filing of Form 945, and any balance due can be paid through electronic funds withdrawal in the same transaction. Balance-due payments should be submitted electronically rather than by check.⁹

Penalties and Why an Accurate 945-A Protects You

Late-deposit penalties climb quickly:

1 to 5 calendar days late: 2% of the unpaid deposit.
6 to 15 calendar days late: 5%.
More than 15 days late: 10%.
More than 10 days after the first IRS notice: 15%.¹⁰

If Form 945-A is missing, incomplete, or inconsistent, the IRS can’t match your deposits to specific liability dates. It falls back on an averaging method: total annual tax gets divided into equal chunks across the year, and for semiweekly depositors that liability is split equally across the first four Wednesdays of each month.¹¹ That artificial schedule usually makes on-time deposits look late, and the penalty comes out higher than what you would have owed with an accurate 945-A.

Correcting the Form

If the only errors involve the liability dates or amounts on Form 945-A, and the tax totals on Form 945 are right, you do not file Form 945-X. Use the correction procedures in the Form 945-A instructions instead.¹² Form 945-X is for changes to the actual tax withheld, not timing.

When you do file Form 945-X to correct a tax amount, and it’s filed after the due date of the return for the period in which you discovered the error, attach an amended Form 945-A to the corrected return.¹² Doing so can reduce or eliminate an averaging-method penalty. Prior-period adjustments on Form 945-X should not change the liability figures on your current-year Form 945-A.²

Recordkeeping

Keep everything that supports the daily entries for at least four years after filing: payment records, withholding calculations, deposit confirmations.¹³ If the IRS questions a deposit’s timing, you have to show the liability dates match what you reported. Without the backup, you’re left with whatever the averaging method produces.

1
Internal Revenue Service. Form 945 – Annual Return of Withheld Federal Income Tax
2
Internal Revenue Service. Instructions for Form 945-A
3
eCFR. 26 CFR 31.6302-4 – Deposit Rules for Withheld Income Taxes
4
Internal Revenue Service. Form 945-A – Annual Record of Federal Tax Liability
5
Internal Revenue Service. Employment Tax Due Dates
6
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 USC 6302 – Mode or Time of Collection
7
Internal Revenue Service. EFTPS: The Electronic Federal Tax Payment System
8
Internal Revenue Service. Important Backup Withholding Deadlines
9
Internal Revenue Service. Instructions for Form 945
10
Internal Revenue Service. Failure to Deposit Penalty
11
Internal Revenue Service. IRM 20.1.4 Failure to Deposit Penalty
12
Internal Revenue Service. Instructions for Form 945-X
13
Internal Revenue Service. Employment Tax Recordkeeping