Every filing, notice, posting, and review a Texas employer should have on the calendar this year — organized by quarter, filtered by headcount, with the owner named and the consequence explained in plain language.
Texas employers face three different kinds of deadline, and treating them as one list is why most compliance calendars quietly fail. Fixed federal filing dates — W-2s, 941s, ACA forms — rarely move, and a competent payroll provider usually handles them. Texas-specific dates — the quarterly TWC wage report, the March 1 EITC notice, the workers' compensation non-subscriber filing — belong to you, and providers often assume someone else has them. Event-triggered clocks — the ones that start the moment somebody is hired, quits, complains, or gets hurt — are where employers actually get caught, because nothing on a wall calendar warns you that a clock just started running.
This page covers all three. Items marked Legal deadline are fixed obligations. Items marked Recommended are the maintenance rhythm that keeps Texas employers out of trouble. Assign every item a named owner. Last updated August 1, 2026; agencies change dates and thresholds, so verify current-year specifics with the issuing agency or your advisor before relying on them. This is orientation, not legal advice.
Most compliance calendars hand you every deadline that exists and let you sort it out. That is backwards. Employment law switches on in steps as you grow, and the single most common failure we see is an employer following a policy set written at eight employees while operating at fifty-five.
| Headcount | What switches on at this size | Calendar items you now own |
|---|---|---|
| 1–10 | Fair Labor Standards Act wage and hour rules, the Equal Pay Act, Form I-9 verification, USERRA, the PUMP Act's nursing protections, the OSHA general duty clause, the Texas Payday Law, Texas new hire reporting, and — a point most small employers miss — Texas sexual harassment liability, which reaches employers with even one employee. | W-2 and 1099-NEC by January 31; Forms 940 and 941; quarterly TWC wage reports; the EITC notice by March 1; the workers' compensation non-subscriber filing window if you carry no coverage; annual poster audit. |
| 11–14 | OSHA injury and illness recordkeeping, unless your industry is partially exempt as low-hazard. | Everything above, plus maintaining the OSHA 300 log year-round and posting the 300A summary February 1 through April 30. |
| 15–19 | Title VII, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, GINA, and Chapter 21 of the Texas Labor Code. This is the largest single jump in exposure a growing Texas employer experiences. | Everything above, plus an annual review of accommodation records and the interactive process, and supervisor training that covers complaint handling rather than just conduct rules. |
| 20–49 | The Age Discrimination in Employment Act, protecting workers 40 and older, and federal COBRA continuation coverage if you sponsor a group health plan. | Everything above, plus COBRA election notices administered on their own event clocks and the annual open enrollment notice package. |
| 50–99 | The Family and Medical Leave Act, once you have 50 employees in 20 or more workweeks and the employee works at a site with 50 employees within 75 miles, plus the Affordable Care Act employer mandate at 50 full-time equivalents. | Everything above, plus Form 1095-C furnished to employees in early March and filed with the IRS by the end of March, Form 5500 for benefit plans by July 31, and the Medicare Part D creditable coverage notice by October 15. |
| 100+ | EEO-1 Component 1 demographic reporting, and the federal WARN Act's 60-day notice obligation before a qualifying mass layoff or plant closing. | Everything above, plus the EEO-1 filing during the window the EEOC opens each year, and a WARN analysis before any large-scale separation event — not after the decision is announced. |
Scroll the table sideways on smaller screens. Federal contractors pick up EEO-1 reporting at 50 employees when holding a contract of $50,000 or more, regardless of the 100-employee rule.
The heaviest quarter of the year, and the one where a missed item is most likely to be discovered by someone outside your organization.
Nothing is filed on this date, which is why it gets skipped, and why it belongs at the top of the list. Your obligations for the year are largely determined by what your headcount did last year: ACA applicable large employer status is based on the prior year's average full-time equivalents, and several discrimination statutes count employees across 20 or more calendar weeks. Growth that happened quietly in October decides what you owe in March.
The date most employers already know. The part worth attention this year: for tax year 2026, employers need payroll systems that can isolate qualified overtime premium pay for reporting purposes under the 2025 federal tax law. Ask your provider in writing how they are handling it now, not in December. If your answer to "which of these workers should have received a W-2 instead of a 1099" is uncertain, resolve that before you file rather than after — issuing a 1099 to a misclassified worker documents the misclassification.
Quarterly Form 941 filings continue on April 30, July 31, and October 31. Form 940 is annual. These are the items providers reliably handle; the failure mode here is not the filing, it is nobody reconciling the filings against your own payroll records until a discrepancy surfaces years later.
Employers subject to Texas unemployment tax file the quarterly wage report and pay contributions to the Texas Workforce Commission. Quarterly deadlines run January 31, April 30, July 31, and October 31. Because Texas has no state income tax withholding, this filing plus new hire reporting are the main recurring state payroll obligations for most employers — which is exactly why out-of-state payroll providers sometimes treat them as optional.
The summary of the prior year's work-related injuries and illnesses goes up where other employee notices are posted, and stays up for three full months. It applies to employers who had more than ten employees at any point in the previous year, unless the business sits in a partially exempt low-hazard industry. The underlying 300 log is retained for five years. A common error: posting the log itself instead of the 300A summary, which discloses individual injury details that were never meant for the break room wall.
Texas is the outlier state: most private employers may decline workers' compensation coverage entirely. Employers who decline — non-subscribers — must notify the Division of Workers' Compensation annually using Form DWC-005 during the designated window, post notice of non-coverage in the workplace, and give written notice to new hires. This is the single most-missed Texas-specific item we find in audits, usually at businesses that have been non-subscribers for years and assumed the original decision was permanent paperwork rather than an annual obligation.
An employee who claimed exemption from federal income tax withholding must submit a new W-4 each year. If they do not, the employer switches them to withholding at the default rate. Small, mechanical, and consistently forgotten — and it becomes a payroll dispute the moment the employee notices their net pay dropped.
Texas law requires employers to notify employees each year that they may qualify for the federal Earned Income Tax Credit. It is free to comply with, takes one email or one insert, and is skipped constantly — because it is a state notice obligation rather than a payroll filing, so payroll providers routinely leave it alone and assume the employer handles it. Pair it with W-2 distribution and it never gets missed again.
Two unrelated obligations that share a date. Establishments meeting OSHA's size and industry criteria submit their 300A data through the agency's online portal, and certain larger high-hazard establishments also submit case-level detail. Separately, applicable large employers furnish Form 1095-C to employees; recent federal law also permits furnishing on request if the employer posts a clear and conspicuous notice of that availability, which is a genuine administrative saving that most 50-to-99-employee organizations have not adopted yet.
Electronic filing is required once you cross a low aggregate return threshold, which in practice means nearly every applicable large employer files electronically. Penalties here run per return, in both directions — failure to file and failure to furnish are separate exposures on the same form.
Filing pressure drops. This is the quarter to fix the things Q1 exposed, while nobody is under a deadline.
Standard quarterly cycle. Also the last day the OSHA 300A summary must remain posted — take it down after April 30, keep the underlying log for five years.
Walk every location, including remote-heavy sites where the posters live on an intranet page nobody has opened since onboarding. Compare against current federal and Texas checklists and replace outdated versions. Posters are the cheapest item on this page to fix and one of the most visible to an investigator, because a stale poster is physical evidence that compliance maintenance stopped at some identifiable point in time.
One deliberate pass through the handbook: PTO payout language, the at-will disclaimer, the AI use policy, break and timekeeping rules, complaint reporting channels, and anything last year's incidents exposed as unclear. The test is not whether the policy is well written. The test is whether your supervisors actually did what it says during the last twelve months. Where practice and paper diverge, one of them has to change — and it is usually cheaper to change the paper.
Private employers with 100 or more employees, and federal contractors with 50 or more employees holding a contract of $50,000 or more, file demographic workforce data. The EEOC sets the opening and closing dates each year rather than using a fixed statutory date, so confirm the current window rather than assuming last year's schedule repeats.
Sample or audit the full set for completeness, correct retention, and reverification dates. Two rules govern the cleanup: correct errors rather than replacing forms, and never backdate a correction. I-9 penalties are assessed per form, so a systemic habit — a missing signature block repeated across every hire for three years — multiplies into real money in a way a single error never does.
Benefit plan filings land here, and this is the right window for the two reviews that most affect next year's payroll budget.
Standard quarterly cycle.
Due the last day of the seventh month after the plan year ends, so July 31 for calendar-year plans, with an extension available to mid-October by filing Form 5558 before the deadline. Certain small plans are exempt depending on participant count and funding structure. Late Form 5500 penalties accrue daily, which makes this one of the few items where a two-week delay is materially expensive.
Verify that every salaried-exempt role still satisfies both the duties test and the salary basis test — especially after promotions, reorganizations, title inflation, or a raise given in lieu of overtime. The federal salary threshold returned to $684 per week ($35,568 annually) after the 2024 increase was vacated in litigation and the Department of Labor restored the prior figure by rule in 2026. Texas sets no separate state threshold, so the federal number governs here. Salary alone never creates an exemption; the duties test is where misclassification actually happens.
Annual documentation, complaint-handling, accommodation-request recognition, and AI-use training for everyone who manages people. This is not a compliance formality. The overwhelming majority of claims we see trace back to an untrained supervisor's first response — a promise of confidentiality that could not be kept, a dismissive reply to an accommodation request, a write-up composed after the termination decision was already made. Training is also evidence: it establishes that the organization set a standard, which matters when the defense turns on whether one supervisor's behavior was authorized.
Run incumbents against ranges and against new-hire offers before budget season locks next year's numbers. Compression is the quiet driver behind resignations that get explained away as "the labor market," and it is far cheaper to correct in a planned budget cycle than in a counteroffer.
For calendar-year plans that filed Form 5500 on time, the Summary Annual Report goes to participants within nine months of the plan year end. If the 5500 was extended, this date shifts accordingly.
Benefits notices cluster here, and December is your last chance to fix payroll data before it hardens into a W-2.
Employers sponsoring group health plans must tell Medicare-eligible participants whether the plan's prescription drug coverage is creditable, before the Medicare annual enrollment period opens. A separate disclosure goes to CMS after the plan year begins. Small employers routinely miss this one because they assume it only applies to organizations with retirees — it applies based on participant Medicare eligibility, which includes working spouses and employees on disability.
The final date for plans that filed a timely extension request in July.
Standard quarterly cycle.
Subscribers confirm coverage is current and postings are in place. Non-subscribers confirm the workplace notice, the new-hire written notices, and that the annual DWC filing actually went in last spring. Texas political subdivisions do not have this choice — cities, counties, and districts must extend workers' compensation benefits, whether through a pool, self-insurance, or a policy.
Distribute required plan notices with enrollment materials — the Summary of Benefits and Coverage, CHIP notice, Women's Health and Cancer Rights notice, and the notice of exchange availability among them. Confirm COBRA administration is functioning for employers with 20 or more employees, and confirm that Texas state continuation coverage is being offered where the smaller-employer rules apply instead.
The highest-leverage hour of the year. Verify employee addresses before W-2s generate. Confirm that overtime premium tracking is producing the data you will need for reporting. Check that non-discretionary bonuses were folded into the regular rate for overtime purposes rather than paid alongside it — that single error is the most common source of unplanned back-wage liability we find. Confirm PTO carryover and payout handling matches your written policy, since Texas will enforce your policy as written even when the policy was written carelessly.
These clocks do not start on a date. They start when a person does something — gets hired, resigns, complains, or gets hurt. In our audit work, event-triggered deadlines account for far more employer exposure than the annual filings do, precisely because there is no reminder and no vendor watching them.
| The trigger | The clock | What it costs to miss |
|---|---|---|
| You hire someone | Form I-9 Section 1 by the first day of work for pay; Section 2 within three business days of the start date. New hire reported to the Texas new hire program within 20 calendar days. | Per-form penalties that compound across every hire made the same way. Late completion cannot be cured by backdating — that converts a paperwork violation into a far worse problem. |
| Someone is fired | Final pay within six calendar days of discharge under the Texas Payday Law. | A wage claim filed with the Texas Workforce Commission, plus the credibility damage of having gotten the easiest part of the separation wrong. |
| Someone resigns | Final pay on the next regularly scheduled payday. | Same exposure, different clock. Deductions from final pay generally require written authorization — withholding for unreturned equipment without it is a frequent and avoidable violation. |
| Someone requests leave for a health condition | FMLA eligibility notice and rights-and-responsibilities notice within five business days of the request; designation notice within five business days of having enough information to decide. | Interference claims. Employers lose FMLA cases on notice timing far more often than on the underlying leave decision. |
| Someone asks for an accommodation | No fixed statutory clock — but the interactive process must begin promptly and be documented as it happens. | Delay itself becomes the violation. "We were still thinking about it" reads, months later, as refusal. |
| A qualifying event hits a group health plan | Employer notifies the plan administrator within 30 days; the election notice goes out within 14 days after that, or within 44 days when the employer is the administrator. | Statutory penalties per day, per qualified beneficiary, plus responsibility for medical claims that should have been covered. |
| A serious workplace injury occurs | Report a work-related fatality to OSHA within 8 hours; an inpatient hospitalization, amputation, or loss of an eye within 24 hours. | Citations, and an inspection that begins with a violation already on the record. |
| An EEOC charge arrives | A position statement is typically requested within about 30 days. A litigation hold on all related records applies immediately, before you draft anything. | Spoliation exposure that is often worse than the original allegation, and a position statement you cannot later walk back. |
| An unemployment claim notice arrives | The employer response window stated on the TWC notice, commonly about 14 days. | Chargeback to your account and, worse, a factual record created in your absence that a plaintiff's attorney can later use. |
| A wage claim is filed | Respond by the date on the TWC notice. Employees generally have 180 days from the date the wages were due to file. | An adverse determination decided on the documents you failed to produce. |
Scroll sideways on smaller screens. Deadlines here are summarized for orientation; confirm the exact window that applies to your situation before acting.
The mental model most owners carry is an auditor knocking on the door. That is not how it works. Agencies do not have the resources to check whether you posted your EITC notice. What actually happens is that a single employee event — a wage claim, an unemployment appeal, a discrimination charge, an injury, an immigration audit notice — opens a window, and everything visible through that window gets examined. The missed deadline is rarely the case. It is the thing that makes the rest of your file look unreliable.
This is the part employers consistently underestimate. Most employment penalties are assessed per form, per employee, or per day. One flawed I-9 is a nuisance. The same flaw repeated across sixty hires because your onboarding template had a gap is a different order of magnitude. One employee misclassified as exempt is a back-wage calculation. A whole job family misclassified is that calculation multiplied by everyone who held the role, doubled by liquidated damages, and reaching back two years — three if the violation is found willful. Systemic errors are cheap to create and expensive to unwind, which is exactly the reverse of how they feel at the time.
A late Form 5500 has a daily penalty. A missed COBRA notice has a daily penalty plus responsibility for the claims. But in most engagements the direct penalty is not what hurts. It is the legal hours, the management time pulled into responding, the discovery that your files cannot substantiate your own decisions, and the settlement posture you are forced into because the documentation does not support the defense. Employers rarely lose because they were wrong. They lose because they cannot prove they were right.
We deliberately do not publish penalty amounts here. Most federal civil penalties adjust annually for inflation, and a number that is accurate today is quietly wrong within a year — which is worse than no number at all, because it gets planned around. What is stable is the structure: per-form, per-day, per-employee, with multipliers for willfulness and lookback periods measured in years. Plan against the structure. Verify the current figure with the agency or your advisor when you need it.
Almost every Texas employer we audit has a payroll provider and assumes that means compliance is covered. It covers about a third of this page. The gap is not random — the items providers do not touch are systematically the ones that carry the most exposure.
| Who | Usually owns | Does not own, whatever you assumed |
|---|---|---|
| Payroll provider | Forms 941, 940, W-2, 1099-NEC, quarterly TWC wage reports, tax deposits, wage statements. | Whether your exempt classifications are defensible. Whether the bonus was included in the regular rate. Whether the person receiving a 1099 should be on payroll. They process what you tell them. |
| Benefits broker | ACA reporting, Form 5500, open enrollment notices, Part D notice, COBRA administration if contracted. | FMLA notice timing, ADA accommodation decisions, and the interaction between leave, accommodation, and discipline — where the real claims live. |
| Bookkeeper or CPA | Reconciliation, tax filings, financial recordkeeping. | Poster currency, I-9 files, handbook alignment, personnel file contents, investigation quality. |
| Employment attorney | Defense once a claim exists; document review on request; high-stakes decisions. | The maintenance rhythm. Attorneys are retained after the clock has started, and they will tell you the same thing: this was cheaper six months ago. |
| The owner, by default | Everything nobody else claimed. | This is the failure mode. Not incompetence — capacity. Legally consequential decisions get made in the gaps between other jobs, without the time to check whether the file supports them. |
Scroll sideways on smaller screens.
Start from the headcount table above and delete everything that does not apply to you. A calendar containing items you do not owe teaches people to ignore the calendar. Twelve real obligations that are all genuinely yours will be followed. Forty items, half irrelevant, will not.
Put the deadline on a shared calendar with a reminder ten business days ahead, assigned to a named individual rather than a role or a distribution list. Shared ownership is no ownership. The pre-alert matters more than the deadline itself, because the deadline arrives on the day you have the least ability to act on it.
For each completed item, save one line and one artifact: what was filed or posted, on what date, by whom, with the confirmation or a photograph attached. This takes about ninety seconds per item and is the single highest-return habit on this page. When someone asks two years from now whether the 300A was posted, "we always do" is not an answer. A dated photo is.
One page, ten triggers, three lines each: who is notified, what goes out, and by when. Termination, resignation, leave request, accommodation request, complaint, injury, agency notice. This is the piece that converts a calendar into an actual system, because it covers the deadlines that no calendar can anticipate.
Headcount changes obligations. Reopen the threshold table each January against last year's actual numbers, add whatever switched on, and confirm that the owners you named are still employed and still hold the responsibility. Most compliance failures we find are not decisions. They are inherited assumptions nobody revisited.
Even at a handful of employees the recurring set is real: W-2s and 1099-NECs by January 31, Forms 940 and 941, quarterly TWC unemployment wage reports on January 31, April 30, July 31, and October 31, the Texas EITC notice by March 1, and the workers' compensation non-coverage filing in the spring window if you are a non-subscriber. Add an annual poster audit, an I-9 self-audit, and a handbook review, and you have covered most of what a small Texas employer owes.
If you had more than ten employees at any point in the previous calendar year and are not in a partially exempt low-hazard industry, yes — from February 1 through April 30, posted where other employee notices go. Post the 300A summary, not the 300 log itself; the log contains individual injury details that should not be on public display. Retain the log for five years.
Texas requires employers to notify employees annually, by March 1, that they may qualify for the federal Earned Income Tax Credit. It costs nothing and takes one communication. It is missed constantly because it is a state notice obligation rather than a payroll filing, so payroll providers typically leave it to the employer — and the employer assumes the provider handled it.
Both are due January 31 — W-2s to employees and the Social Security Administration, 1099-NECs to contractors and the IRS. For tax year 2026, confirm in advance that your payroll system can isolate qualified overtime premium pay for reporting under the 2025 federal tax law. Ask your provider in writing during the summer, not in December.
The quarterly wage report and unemployment tax payment to the Texas Workforce Commission, due January 31, April 30, July 31, and October 31. Texas has no state income tax withholding, so this filing and new hire reporting are the main recurring state obligations most employers carry.
Texas lets most private employers decline workers' compensation coverage. Those non-subscribers must notify the Division of Workers' Compensation each year using Form DWC-005 during the annual window, post notice of non-coverage in the workplace, and give written notice to new hires. It is the most frequently missed Texas-specific item we encounter, usually at businesses that treated the original opt-out as one-time paperwork. Start with what a non-subscriber is.
Six calendar days after an involuntary termination; the next regular payday after a resignation. It is event-triggered rather than calendar-driven, which is why it gets missed during exactly the separations that are already going badly. Deductions from final pay generally require written authorization. See the full answer or run the final paycheck deadline calculator.
By default the owner, which is the problem. Payroll providers handle filings but not classification, I-9 accuracy, poster currency, handbook alignment, FMLA and ADA notice timing, or documentation quality — and those orphaned items carry the largest exposure. Each one needs a named person, a date, and evidence it was completed. Our HR help for employers with no HR department exists for exactly this gap.
We build annual compliance rhythms for Texas employers: filings, notices, reviews, and training, owned and scheduled so nothing depends on someone remembering.
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