Hiring your first employee in Georgia

What do you have to register for before your first payroll?

Georgia runs one online registration that opens your withholding account and your sales and use tax account in the same session, with account numbers back by email in about fifteen minutes. That covers only the Department of Revenue side. Unemployment insurance is a completely separate registration at the Department of Labor, and workers compensation is not a state account at all because you buy it from a private insurer, so plan on three different agencies.

Does Georgia require income tax withholding?

Yes. You register with the Georgia Department of Revenue, before your first georgia payroll, at the georgia tax center.

Georgia publishes no grace period measured in days. The real deadline is mechanical: the Department will not accept a withholding payment without an account number, so if you run payroll before registering you cannot legally remit and the penalty clock is already running. Georgia is also mid-change on the rate itself, having cut the flat income tax rate for 2026 with a specific date before which employers must keep using the old rate, so check the current figure rather than assuming.

What unemployment insurance does Georgia charge a new employer?

A new Georgia employer pays 2.7% on the first $9,500 each employee earns, so roughly $257 per employee in the first year. A new Georgia employer is assigned a total rate of 2.7% on the first $9,500 of each employee's wages. Two details trip people up. First, 2.7% is the total and already includes the administrative assessment portion, which Georgia asks you to calculate as a separate line, so do not add a surcharge on top. Second, you become liable once you have one worker in 20 different calendar weeks in a year or a payroll of $1,500 in any single quarter, a low bar a part-time hire can cross without anyone noticing.

Do you need workers compensation insurance in Georgia?

Yes, once you reach 3 employees. Below that Georgia does not require it, but read the counting rules before assuming you are under the line, because who counts is rarely obvious.

Georgia requires coverage once you regularly employ three or more people, and part-timers count the same as full-timers. The counting rule is the trap: corporate officers and LLC members are treated as employees, and while up to five of them can exempt themselves from coverage, those exemptions do not reduce the headcount. So a two-owner LLC that hires one part-timer is at three and is covered, even if both owners opted themselves out. Going without is a misdemeanor, carries civil penalties of $500 to $5,000 per occurrence, and strips the tort immunity workers compensation normally buys you.

How quickly must you report a new hire in Georgia?

Within 10 days of the employee's hire date. Reports go to the Georgia New Hire Reporting Program.

Georgia gives you only 10 days, half the window most states allow, so this is the one to diarise if you are used to 20. Every new hire and rehire counts and no employers are exempt, so it catches you even with a single employee. It is easy to miss because it goes to a separate site rather than to the Department of Revenue or the Department of Labor, and nothing in your withholding or unemployment registration triggers it for you.

Does Georgia have paid family leave or state disability insurance?

No. Georgia runs no state paid family leave fund and no state disability insurance, so there is no payroll deduction of that kind and no extra account to open.

Georgia has no state disability insurance and no state paid family leave programme, so there is no payroll deduction of this kind and nothing extra to register for. If you are used to running payroll in a state like California or Delaware, this is one line item you will not have here.

Do you need a sales tax permit in Georgia?

The certificate of registration is free: the state's administrative rule says no fee is required for the original, and charges only $1 to reissue one that was revoked. Anyone meeting the definition of a dealer must register even if every sale is online, out of state, wholesale or exempt, so a business with no taxable sales at all can still owe a registration and returns. Two mechanics catch people later: the certificate is issued per place of business and is not transferable, and when you shut down or move counties you must return it for cancellation rather than letting it lapse.

Security deposits. There is no routine deposit, though a chronically delinquent dealer can be ordered to post a bond of $1,000 to $10,000.

Does a marketplace like Amazon or Etsy handle the tax for you?

Georgia treats a marketplace facilitator as a dealer in its own right, so the big platforms collect and remit Georgia state and local tax on the sales they facilitate, reporting under a dedicated account separate from their own direct sales. For you as a seller that means platform sales are generally handled without you, but it is not a blanket exemption: sales through your own website or any other channel are still yours to register for and remit.

If your sales drop, when can you stop collecting?

Georgia publishes no trailing nexus rule and no guidance on when a remote seller may stop collecting, so this is recorded as unknown rather than guessed. What the state does say has a tail built into it: the remote seller test is met if you exceed the threshold in the previous or the current calendar year. Read literally, a year in which you cross obliges you to keep collecting through the following calendar year even if that year's sales collapse. Because there is no published wind-down procedure, call the Department before you stop filing rather than going quiet.

Does Georgia charge a tax on revenue rather than profit?

Georgia has no state gross receipts or commerce tax. Do not read that as no local cost though: Georgia cities and counties levy their own occupation tax and business licence, often computed on gross receipts, and it is the local licence application that also triggers Georgia's E-Verify affidavit for employers with more than ten employees counted company-wide, not just Georgia ones.

Do you have to register your out-of-state company in Georgia?

$235 for both, made up of a $225 filing fee plus a $10 service charge, whether you file online or by mail. Expediting costs extra. All fees are non-refundable.

A foreign entity applies for a certificate of authority before expanding into Georgia and must appoint a registered agent physically located in the state. A foreign corporation additionally needs a certificate of existence from its home state no more than 90 days old, so order that before you start; foreign LLCs do not. After the initial filing you must file an annual registration between January 1 and April 1 every year, and missing it gets your certificate revoked, at which point you re-qualify and pay the full fee again.

Where these figures come from

Every number on this page was read on Georgia's own agency pages, its statute, or a current-year official form, and this record was last reviewed on 2026-09-08. Where a state's explainer page disagreed with its statute or its current form, we followed the statute or the form and said so in the relevant section, because a state's consumer-facing pages are often the last thing updated when a figure changes.

Anything we could not confirm on a primary source is left blank rather than estimated. A missing figure on this page means we could not verify it, not that it is zero.

This is general information, not legal or tax advice. Rules change and your circumstances matter. Confirm anything you are about to act on with the agency named beside it.