A payroll register is one record covering one pay period: a row per employee showing what they earned, what was withheld, and what they were actually paid, plus a totals row across the bottom.
That's the whole idea. It's an internal document — you don't file it with anyone. But nearly every number you *do* file (Form 941, Form 940, W-2s, your state's quarterly wage report) is built by stacking registers on top of each other.
What's actually on one
Per employee:
- Identifying info — name, employee number, pay period start and end, and the pay date
- Hours — regular, overtime, and any other category you pay (PTO, holiday, sick)
- Gross pay — wages, overtime, bonuses, commissions, tips, and any other compensation, before anything comes out
- Employee withholding — federal income tax, Social Security, Medicare, state income tax, any local tax
- Other deductions — health premiums, retirement contributions, garnishments, anything else you take out
- Net pay — what hit their account
- Employer-side taxes — the employer share of Social Security and Medicare, FUTA, and state unemployment
- Year-to-date columns for each of the above
The totals row is not decoration. It's what you compare against your bank statement and your general ledger.
Pay date is not period end
Federal employment taxes attach to the date wages are paid, not the dates worked. A pay period ending December 29 that pays on January 2 lands in the next tax year and the next quarter's Form 941.
If your register shows only the period end date, you will eventually cross a year boundary and get this wrong. Show both.
Why your accountant wants one
Reconciliation. Four quarters of registers should total to your four Forms 941 (or Form 944, if the IRS has you on annual filing), your W-2s, and the payroll expense in your general ledger. When they don't match, the register is where you find the break. Without one, an accountant is reverse-engineering payroll from bank withdrawals — slow, expensive, often wrong.
Deposit timing. Withheld federal income tax plus Social Security and Medicare get deposited on a monthly or semiweekly schedule, set before the year starts based on what you reported during a lookback period. For 2026 the lookback period is July 1, 2024 through June 30, 2025: $50,000 or less puts you on monthly, more than $50,000 on semiweekly. Separately, if your liability reaches $100,000 on any single day, that deposit is due the next business day (IRS Publication 15, 2026). Your register tells you the liability the day you run payroll, not three weeks later.
Audits and wage claims. In a wage-and-hour dispute or a state unemployment audit, the register plus time records is the evidence. Memory is not evidence.
Register vs. pay stub vs. earnings record
- Pay stub — one employee, one pay period. Given to the worker.
- Payroll register — all employees, one pay period. Internal.
- Employee earnings record — one employee, all periods, cumulative. This is what feeds the W-2.
All three should agree. If a stub says one thing and the register another, something upstream is broken.
The numbers it has to get right
Rates and thresholds change, so check current figures rather than trusting a blog post — including this one. For the 2026 tax year:
- Social Security — 6.2% from the employee and 6.2% from the employer, on wages up to that year's taxable maximum. For 2026 the maximum is $184,500, up from $176,100 in 2025 (IRS Topic No. 751; SSA contribution and benefit base). It moves almost every year; a register still running last year's cap stops withholding at the wrong point.
- Medicare — 1.45% each from employee and employer, with no wage cap.
- Additional Medicare Tax — 0.9% withheld on an employee's wages above $200,000 in a calendar year. Employee-only; there is no employer match. That threshold is set by statute and is not inflation-indexed, so unlike the Social Security base it does not move year to year (IRS Topic No. 751).
- FUTA — 6.0% on the first $7,000 of each employee's wages for the year, less a credit of up to 5.4% for state unemployment tax paid (IRS Publication 15, 2026). Most employees clear that base in Q1 — which is exactly why year-to-date columns matter.
- Federal income tax withholding — driven by the employee's Form W-4 and the withholding methods in IRS Publication 15-T, which is reissued annually. There is no single rate to quote.
- State and local — income tax withholding, unemployment insurance rates, and paid-leave contributions vary by state and change yearly. Your unemployment rate is assigned to you — get it from the state agency, don't guess.
If a payroll tool shows a rate without saying what year it's for, that's a warning sign.
How long to keep them
Two rules run in parallel; satisfy both:
- IRS — keep all records of employment taxes for at least four years after filing the 4th quarter return for the year (IRS, *Employment Tax Recordkeeping*).
- FLSA — keep payroll records at least three years; keep the records wage computations are based on — time cards, wage rate tables, work and time schedules, records of additions to or deductions from wages — at least two years (DOL Fact Sheet #21; 29 CFR Part 516).
Some states require longer. Registers are small files — keep seven years and stop thinking about it.
What a bad register looks like
- No year-to-date columns, so you can't see when someone crosses the Social Security wage base or clears the FUTA base
- No employer-tax columns, so accrued liability is invisible until the deposit clears
- No totals row
- Overwritten instead of versioned — if you correct a payroll, keep the original and the correction, both dated. A silently changed register is worth less in an audit than one with a visible fix
If you don't have one
A spreadsheet works. Running it every period and tying the totals to the bank matters more than the tool.
If you'd rather generate the underlying documents, UWageCo prepares payroll statements with year-to-date figures from the data you enter — the same per-employee numbers a register summarizes. Two things to be clear about: it prepares documents and does not file anything with the IRS or any state, so you or your accountant still file the returns; and every document carries a disclosure that the figures come from customer-supplied data that has not been independently verified. That disclosure is the point, not a technicality.
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*This is general information, not legal or tax advice. Payroll rules vary by state, by industry, and by how your workers are classified. For your own situation, talk to a CPA or payroll professional, or contact the IRS and your state labor and revenue agencies directly.*