Form W-9
United States income tax form
Form W-9 (officially, the "Request for Taxpayer Identification Number and Certification") is used in the United States income tax system by a third party who must file an information return with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). It requests the name, address, and taxpayer identification information of a taxpayer (in the form of a Social Security Number or Employer Identification Number).
The form is never actually sent to the IRS; it is maintained by the individual who files the information return for verification purposes. The information on the Form W-9 and the payment made are reported on a Form 1099.
Use cases
Business–contractor arrangement
Form W-9 is most commonly used in a business–contractor arrangement. Businesses can use Form W-9 to request information from contractors they hire. Payments to a contractor for services are reported on Form 1099-NEC. Nonemployee compensation was reported in box 7 of Form 1099-MISC through tax year 2019 and moved to Form 1099-NEC beginning with tax year 2020. The reporting threshold was $600 through the 2025 tax year. For tax years beginning after 2025 it increased to $2,000, and it may be adjusted for inflation beginning in calendar year 2027.
Avoiding backup withholding
Another purpose of Form W-9 is to help the payee avoid backup withholding.
“Form W-9” enters the record as united States income tax form. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Form, United and States can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Form W-9” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Form, United and States provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q25004922. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1099, 2019, 2020 and 2025.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Form W-9” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.