Form 8850 due date and WOTC credit for one hire

A Kansas warehouse that hired a veteran on 2026-09-10 has until 2026-10-08 to get Form 8850 to its state workforce agency, and 5600 of credit rides on that one date. Day 29 is worth nothing.

That is the whole Work Opportunity Tax Credit problem in one line. The filing window is 28 calendar days from the employee's first day of work, it includes weekends and holidays, and it is the only part of the process that cannot be repaired later. There is no amended-return path back into a closed window.

Three numbers go wrong when people do this by hand.

The date. Twenty-eight days is not a month and not 30 days. A 2026-09-10 start is due 2026-10-08. Payroll calendars round to month ends, and that rounding is where credits die.

The hour band. Under 120 hours worked in year one, the credit is zero. From 120 to 399 hours it is 25 percent of qualified first-year wages. At 400 hours or more it is 40 percent. A hire at 415 hours sits in the 40 percent band, but 415 looks close enough to 400 that people hedge downward.

The wage cap. Qualified first-year wages are capped by certified target group: 6000 for most groups, 3000 for a summer youth employee, 10000 for a long-term family assistance recipient, 6000 and 14000 for unemployed veterans, and 12000 and 24000 for disabled veterans. Applying 40 percent to a full 18000 payroll figure produces 7200. Applying it to the 14000 veteran cap produces 5600. Only one of those survives review.

Then there is the thing that makes 2026 different. Authority to claim the credit lapsed for wages paid after 2025-12-31. Ask a chatbot about WOTC today and you get one of two wrong answers: a cheerful 9600 headline that ignores the lapse, or a flat "the credit expired, there is nothing to file." Both cost money. State workforce agencies are still accepting Form 8850 and holding submissions in queue, and prior lapses were restored retroactively for employers who had filed on time. The credit you can still lose today is the one whose 28-day window you let close while waiting for Congress.

So the tool prints the date and the lapse line next to each other. You type five things you already know from the offer letter and the timesheet: first day of work, today, the certified target group, first-year wages, hours in year one. You get eight back: the Form 8850 due date, days left, whether the window is open or closed, the credit rate, the group wage cap, qualified wages after the cap, the credit for that hire, and where the lapse leaves the claim.

Run it three times and you see why a rule of thumb does not work. The 2026-09-10 veteran hire at 415 hours and 18000 of wages: due 2026-10-08, 16 days left, 40 percent, 5600. A summer youth who started 2026-06-15 at 260 hours, checked on 2026-07-20: the deadline was 2026-07-13, the window closed 7 days ago, and the credit reads 0. A disabled veteran unemployed six months or more, started 2026-09-01, 900 hours, 31000 of wages, checked 2026-09-26: 3 days left, 40 percent against the 24000 cap, 9600.

Same tool, three answers, because the target group and the calendar do all the work.

Everything above is free and unlimited in the extension and on the web page. No watermark, no countdown, no lock after a number of runs. The 60 dollar key changes a different axis entirely: ownership and repetition. It keeps every hire you have checked and exports them as a dated CSV filing log for your accountant, and it sets a day-21 and day-27 alarm on each open window so the 28th day is never the day you find out.

For comparison, WOTC screening services are paid on contingency, typically 15 to 25 percent of every credit they capture. On a 5600 veteran credit that is 840 to 1400 out of a single hire.