Hiring your first employee in New Jersey

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

New Jersey uses one form, the NJ-REG, to open every state business account at once: withholding and sales tax with the Division of Taxation, and unemployment, workforce development, temporary disability and family leave with the Department of Labor. There is no fee for the NJ-REG itself. If you form or foreign-qualify an entity first, you must still file the NJ-REG within 60 days of that entity filing, so do not treat the certificate of authority as the end of the job.

Does New Jersey require income tax withholding?

Yes. You register with the New Jersey Division of Taxation, file form nj-reg at least 15 business days before you commence business, and within 60 days of forming a new entity.

If someone is your employee for federal tax purposes they are your employee here, and you must withhold from residents and from nonresidents working or teleworking in the state for their own convenience. Pennsylvania residents are the one reciprocity exception and must file a certificate of nonresidence to stop the withholding. A trap that catches new employers: if you pay an unregistered unincorporated contractor in New Jersey you must withhold 7% of the payment. The state also warns you can be held personally responsible for amounts you should have withheld.

What unemployment insurance does New Jersey charge a new employer?

A new New Jersey employer pays 2.6825% on the first $44,800 each employee earns, so roughly $1,202 per employee in the first year. You become a covered employer once you employ anyone and pay $1,000 or more in wages in a calendar year. The 2.6825% figure is only the unemployment piece: a new employer also pays 0.5% disability and 0.1175% workforce development, for a combined employer rate of about 3.3%. New employer rates run on a fiscal year from July to June and apply for your first three calendar years, while the wage base changes on a calendar year, which is why the two dates never line up. The employer wage base is $44,800 for 2026 and rises to $46,400 for 2027, far above the $7,000 federal base most out-of-state employers are used to.

Do you need workers compensation insurance in New Jersey?

Yes, from your first employee. New Jersey sets no headcount to reach, so there is no free window before coverage is required.

• corporations
• limited liability companies
• partnerships
• sole proprietorships with any employee other than the principal owner
• nonprofit organizations

Every New Jersey employer not covered by a federal program must carry coverage or be approved to self-insure, and there is no small-employer exemption. Corporate officers who perform services count as employees, so a one-person corporation still needs a policy, while partners and LLC members are excluded for themselves but must insure anyone else. Going uninsured is a criminal offense if willful, with penalties up to $5,000 for the first ten days plus up to $5,000 for each additional ten-day period, and you become directly liable for the full cost of any injury.

How quickly must you report a new hire in New Jersey?

Within 20 days of the hire, rehire or return to work; employers transmitting electronically report every 15 days instead. Reports go to the New Jersey Department of Human Services, New Hire Operations Center.

You must report every new hire, rehire and return to work within 20 days, and also anyone you contract with for compensation, including workers paid on a 1099 and people engaged through ride-share or delivery platforms. A first violation gets a written warning, then civil penalties up to $25 per violation, rising to $500 where employer and worker conspired to withhold or falsify the report.

Does New Jersey have paid family leave or state disability insurance?

Family Leave Insurance is funded entirely by worker payroll deductions, so the employer rate is zero, but you are legally responsible for taking the deduction and showing it on the payslip. For 2026 the worker rate is 0.23% on the first $171,100 of wages, a much higher cap than the $44,800 employer base, so a well paid employee keeps contributing all year. Any employer subject to the unemployment law is automatically subject to family leave and temporary disability, so the same trigger of one employee and $1,000 in annual wages applies.

Do you need a sales tax permit in New Jersey?

There is no fee to file the NJ-REG, and the permit it produces is called a Certificate of Authority. File at least 15 days before your first taxable sale, because the certificate is what legally lets you collect. A remote seller who crosses the economic threshold gets up to 30 days to register and start collecting. A remote seller selling only through marketplaces still has to register once over the threshold, but can ask to be placed on a non-reporting basis.

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

New Jersey put the collection duty on the marketplace facilitator for every marketplace transaction, regardless of whether the individual seller is above or below the economic threshold. If all your New Jersey sales go through a marketplace, you do not collect on those sales yourself. The catch is the threshold math: if you sell both on your own website and through marketplaces, you must count both channels together when testing whether you have crossed into a registration obligation.

If your sales drop, when can you stop collecting?

New Jersey does not let you stop collecting the moment your sales fall off. Once a remote seller meets the threshold, the collection obligation continues for that year and the next, so a single strong year drags a full following year of collecting and filing behind it. Plan on staying registered and filing returns, including zero returns, through that trailing period rather than closing the account as soon as volume drops.

Does New Jersey charge a tax on revenue rather than profit?

New Jersey has no general gross receipts tax, so there is nothing comparable to the Ohio or Oregon commercial activity tax or the Washington business and occupation tax. Business income is reached through the Corporation Business Tax and the Gross Income Tax instead. A few narrow industry levies do use a gross receipts base, notably on petroleum products, so a fuel or energy business should check its own sector rules.

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

$100 for a foreign LLC certificate of registration and $100 for a foreign corporation or limited partnership certificate of authority. Foreign LLP registration is also $100.

Qualifying an out-of-state entity costs $100 whether you are an LLC or a corporation. That filing is only half the job, because you must still file the NJ-REG within 60 days of the entity filing to actually open your tax and payroll accounts. Budget for the exit as well: cancelling a foreign LLC registration later costs $125, which is more than getting in.

Where these figures come from

Every number on this page was read on New Jersey'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.