A client never sent your 1099. What now?

Short answer: report the income anyway, from your own records, and file on time.

The longer answer explains why that is not merely the safe option but the correct one, and what to do if the client got it wrong rather than simply forgot.

The form is not the income

A 1099-NEC is an information return. Its job is to tell the IRS what a business paid you, so they can check your reporting is plausible.

It does not create the income, define it, or determine whether it is taxable. You are required to report everything you earned — whether a form arrived, arrived late, arrived wrong, or never arrived at all.

“I never got a 1099” is not a position that survives an audit, and it is not a defence anyone has succeeded with.

Why forms go missing

Usually something mundane:

• You were paid under the reporting threshold. No form is required. The income is still taxable. That threshold just rose sharply: it is $600 for payments made during 2025, and $2,000 for payments made from 1 January 2026, indexed for inflation after that. So expect noticeably fewer forms to arrive for 2026 than for 2025, for exactly the same work.
• You were paid by card or through a platform. Payments via credit card, PayPal, Stripe or similar should be reported by the platform on a 1099-K, not by the client on a 1099-NEC. A missing 1099-NEC here is correct behaviour, not an error.
• They sent it to an old address, or an email you no longer read.
• The client is small and did not know they had to. Very common.
• They filed late. The deadline is 31 January; plenty miss it.

Note that the first two are not mistakes at all. In many cases the missing form is the system working as designed.

What to do

1. Check your own records. Invoices and bank deposits are the authoritative figure. If you have a separate business account this takes minutes.

2. Report the total on Schedule C, line 1 — the full amount you were paid, documented or not.

3. Do not wait. People delay filing hoping a form appears. It rarely does, and the deadline does not move.

4. Ask, if it is worth asking. “Could you confirm the total you paid me in 2026, for my records?” is a reasonable email and often produces the number the same day.

If the amounts disagree

Sometimes a form arrives and the figure is wrong. Usually one of two causes:

Timing. You invoiced in December, they paid in January. You count it when the money arrived; they may have recorded it when issued. A mismatch of dates, not amounts.

Gross versus net. They report what they paid; you received it after platform fees. This is exactly why gross receipts should be reported gross, with fees deducted separately as an expense — the totals then reconcile.

If a form genuinely overstates what you received, ask for a corrected 1099. If they refuse, report your actual income, keep documentation of the correct figure, and be ready to explain. Do not quietly report less than the form the IRS holds without a record of why.

The IRS may already know

Worth understanding before deciding this is low-risk.

The IRS runs automated matching between information returns it receives and what taxpayers report. Under-reporting against forms on file triggers a CP2000 notice — an automated proposed adjustment, typically arriving a year or more later with tax, penalties and interest attached.

Note the asymmetry: they may hold a form you never saw. Your copy going astray says nothing about theirs.

If you already filed and left something out

File Form 1040-X. You generally have three years from the original filing date.

Amending voluntarily is far better than waiting to be found. It limits interest and avoids accuracy-related penalties that can apply once the IRS raises it first.

Preventing it next year

The fix is bookkeeping, not chasing paperwork:

• A separate business bank account — your deposits become your income record
• Keep every invoice you send (ours is free if you need one: invoice generator)
• Reconcile monthly, not in April

Do that and the January post becomes a cross-check rather than your source of truth — which is all it was ever meant to be.

Once you know your real total, the calculator below shows what it costs and what to set aside from each payment.