2026 Pre-filing for 1099 and W-2: What’s New This Year on TaxBandits

reading time: 14 minute(s)

Every tax season follows the same pattern. Forms pile up in December, deadlines creep closer in January, and somewhere in that rush, a typo slips through, or a TIN gets mismatched. By the time anyone notices, the form’s already been sent.

As of October 1, 2026, TaxBandits has opened prefiling for 2026 W-2 and 1099 forms, well ahead of the IRS’s own filing window for the 2027 season. Alongside that, a batch of new forms and features have landed too. Here’s what’s changed and why it matters.

File your forms early. Stay ahead

The benefit of prefiling isn’t just the early start. It’s what that early start buys you: room to breathe and a process that stays flexible until the moment it matters.

Here’s how that plays out:

• File your forms now, while you have time to think them through instead of rushing.
• Review and edit anytime before transmission; no need to get it perfect on the first try.
• Nothing goes to the IRS yet. Your forms sit ready, not submitted.
• Transmission happens automatically the moment the IRS opens for the 2026 season; no extra step is needed from you.

So if you catch a wrong TIN in November or realize an amount is off in December, you’re not scrambling to file a correction after the fact. You get to fix it on your own time.

For a business running payroll across multiple states, or a tax pro managing filings for a dozen clients, that’s the difference between spotting an error calmly and discovering it after the form’s already out the door.

New forms now supported

TaxBandits didn’t just add one or two obscure forms this year. The list is long, and a handful of them cover situations a lot of filers run into without realizing there’s a specific form for it. 

Here are some of the new forms available:

Form	What it reports
1098-VLI	Vehicle loan interest on qualifying auto loans
1099-CAP	Payments to shareholders from a corporate control or capital structure change
1099-SB	Sale of a life insurance contract interest
1097-BTC	Bond tax credits distributed to bondholders
W-2GU	Wages for employees in Guam
W-2AS	Wages for employees in American Samoa
W-2VI	Wages for employees in the U.S. Virgin Islands

The FIRE to IRIS shift

Starting with the 2027 filing season, the IRS is retiring the system that’s handled information return transmission for decades and moving everything to a new one.

That’s not a small technical update. It’s the IRS replacing the backbone of how information returns get submitted, and every filer who uses FIRE will eventually have to make the switch, whether through their own software or a provider.

TaxBandits made that move three years ago. So while a lot of the industry is about to go through a transition, your filing experience stays exactly the same. You’re not adjusting to new file formats or relearning a transmission process in the middle of a filing season. It already happened, quietly, well before anyone needed to think about it. Learn more about how TaxBandits simplifies this transition

The features that actually save time

New forms get the headlines, but the features below are what actually change your day-to-day filing. Each one targets a specific kind of friction, duplicate paperwork, repetitive data entry, or a cluttered dashboard, and removes it.

1099 aggregation

Say you paid a contractor through three separate transactions over the year, maybe a few one-off projects billed separately. Without aggregation, that’s three separate 1099 forms for the same person, each one a little redundant and a little more to keep track of.

Aggregation combines those eligible transactions into a single form.

1099 consolidation

Sometimes a single recipient ends up with more than one 1099 of the same type from the same payer, say a vendor you’ve paid under two different contracts over the year, each one tracked separately on your end.

Consolidation combines those into a single copy for that recipient, instead of sending them multiple forms of the same type that really should’ve been one. Fewer duplicate copies means less confusion for the recipient and less paperwork for you to manage on your side.

Custom Dashboard

Customization lets you set your dashboard to show filing status, client groups, or whatever metric you check first every morning, right where you’ll see it immediately. It’s a small change, but it adds up over weeks of repeated logins, less time spent hunting, more time spent actually working.

AI custom reports

Standard reports cover the basics, but they rarely match what you actually need to pull on a given day. Maybe you want a breakdown of filings by client, or a quick look at which forms are still pending review, and building that manually usually means exporting data and reshaping it yourself.

AI custom reports skip that step. Describe the report you need, and it’s generated on the spot, no manual filtering or spreadsheet work required. 

Pre-file now, adjust later if you need to

Prefiling isn’t about rushing. It’s about giving yourself room to slow down while the deadline’s still far off. File your 2026 W-2s and 1099s now, make any corrections while you have time to catch them, and let your forms go out automatically once the IRS starts accepting them for the season.

Start prefiling with TaxBandits and get ahead of a season that always moves faster once it actually starts.