1099s for antique mall dealers: what changed, and the mistake most malls make

Filing season is the one time of year a mall’s record-keeping is graded. Most of the difficulty is not the arithmetic — it is that the numbers live in the wrong shape, and nobody notices until January.

What changed for 2026

The long-standing $600 reporting threshold rose to $2,000 for payments made after 31 December 2025.

^[1]

Two consequences that catch people out:

• The payment year decides the rule, not the filing year. Payments made during 2025 are still tested at $600 even though you file them in 2026. A system that applies one global threshold to every year will get one of those two seasons wrong.

• Fewer forms is not the same as less work. You still have to compute every dealer’s total to know who falls below the line, and you still want a W-9 on file before you find out.

The mistake: counting by booth instead of by person

This is the one worth checking tonight. In most mall systems, a booth is the unit of record — one row per booth, with the renter’s name attached to it. But the reporting obligation attaches to a person, not to a booth number.

A dealer who rents three booths under three numbers can show $900, $850 and $700 against those booths. Counted per booth under the old rule, that is three totals over $600 — three forms, or worse, three forms in three different names. Counted per person it is one recipient at $2,450. Under the new threshold the same dealer is three amounts under $2,000 and one person over it.

In Vintique this merge happens automatically: booth rows whose W-9 taxpayer IDs match are combined into a single recipient, the threshold is tested on the combined total, and the legal name from the W-9 goes on the form. Rows with no W-9 are never guessed at — they are surfaced to the operator as a suspected match to confirm, because a wrong merge is worse than a missed one.

What belongs in the box, and what does not

A dealer’s reportable total is what you actually paid them, which is narrower than what rang through the register on their booth:

• Start with their sales for the year, at the price the item actually sold for.

• Subtract discounts — the dealer was paid on the discounted price, not the tag price.

• Subtract your consignment fee. That share never reached the dealer; it is your revenue, not their compensation.

• Subtract returns that were clawed back from their payouts, in the year the money actually moved.

• Exclude sales tax entirely. Tax collected at the register is passed through to the state. It was never the dealer’s money and it is not compensation.

  ^[3]

Gift-card sales are also excluded — selling a gift card is not a sale of a dealer’s item. The redemption, when it happens against real stock, is.

Get the W-9s before you need them

Chasing a taxpayer ID in January from a dealer who left in August is the single most avoidable job in the mall’s year. Collect the W-9 at move-in, alongside the booth agreement, the same way you would collect a deposit.

^[2]

It is also the piece that unlocks everything above: without it you cannot merge a dealer’s booths correctly, cannot put a legal name on a form, and cannot tell whether the person is over the threshold at all.

Which year is a sale in?

A mall that closes at 9pm on 31 December has transactions either side of a boundary that matters. Decide — and write down — whether a sale belongs to the year by the mall’s local calendar day, and make sure the report, the payout and the form all use the same answer. Two surfaces disagreeing about the year boundary produces a discrepancy nobody can reconcile in April.

Returns have the same question with a sharper edge: a January refund of a December sale reduces the dealer’s total in the year the money moved, not the year the item sold.

The part that genuinely needs your accountant

Which form applies to consignment proceeds is not as settled as the confidence of most mall software suggests. Nonemployee compensation and payment-card / third-party network reporting describe different relationships, and a booth-based consignment arrangement has features of more than one.

^[1]

We hold a documented position on this and we are explicit in our own accounting notes that it deserves a professional review before filing season rather than after. If a vendor tells you the answer is obvious, ask them to put the reasoning in writing — and take that reasoning to your accountant, along with your actual dealer agreement, because the agreement is what characterises the relationship.

What is not in doubt is the record-keeping: per-person totals, W-9s on file, a consistent year boundary, and a number you can rebuild from the underlying sales. Get those right and the form choice is a conversation rather than a scramble.

If you are still assembling these totals by hand from booth reports, that is the thing worth changing first — see

vendor management for antique malls

for where dealer records ought to live, and

consignment fee structures

for how the fee that gets subtracted here is set in the first place.

Operators: how many of your dealers rent under more than one booth number — and does your current process know they are the same person?