New Jersey Retired Form NJ-500: What QuickBooks Payroll Users Need to Know
New Jersey replaced Form NJ-500 with mandatory electronic filing after December 2008. QuickBooks users now remit monthly withholding through e-payment instead.
QuickBooks payroll users in New Jersey occasionally encounter references to Form NJ-500, the Monthly Remittance of Gross Income Tax Withheld, and wonder whether they still need to file it. The short answer is no — and they have not needed to for over fifteen years.
New Jersey discontinued Form NJ-500 effective January 2009. After December 2008, the state moved all gross income tax withholding remittances to electronic payment, eliminating the paper form entirely. Any QuickBooks guidance, help article, or community thread that still walks through filling out NJ-500 is describing a retired process. Following those steps today will not produce a submittable document because the state no longer accepts one.
What NJ-500 Was — and What Replaced It
Before its retirement, Form NJ-500 served employers not classified as weekly payers. Those businesses used the form to remit withholding tax for either of the first two months of a calendar quarter whenever the amount due for a given month reached $500 or more. The form was due by the 15th of the following month. If the monthly liability fell below $500, the employer could hold the amount and include it with the quarterly return instead.
Tax for the third month of each quarter was never filed on NJ-500. That amount was always remitted with the quarterly return — Form NJ-927 — regardless of the balance due.
All of that is now handled electronically. QuickBooks supports e-payment and e-filing for New Jersey withholding taxes, which is how current users should be submitting both monthly and quarterly remittances.
What QuickBooks Actually Supports Today
QuickBooks provides electronic filing for Form NJ-927, the quarterly withholding return. For employers who still file that form on paper, QuickBooks offers a summary report — sometimes labeled as a payroll report to assist in completing NJ-927 — that pulls the withholding figures stored in the company file. The report does not file anything on its own; it simply organizes the data so the numbers can be transcribed onto the official state form.
For monthly remittances that previously would have gone out on NJ-500, the current workflow is an electronic payment initiated through the e-payment setup in QuickBooks. Users who have not yet configured New Jersey as an e-pay recipient in their payroll setup will need to complete that step before a payment can be scheduled.
Why Outdated Guidance Keeps Circulating
Community threads and older help articles do not always get purged when a state retires a form. A user searching for “NJ-500” in QuickBooks may land on instructions describing pre-fill fields, scan-line formatting, and mailing addresses — all of which were relevant before 2009 and none of which apply now. The mailing address, the check-payable instructions, and the optical-scanner formatting notes belong to a process the state no longer runs.
This is a known frustration for payroll users managing state compliance: the software’s help text can lag behind regulatory changes, and community posts persist long after their shelf life. When a form has been retired for over a decade, any step-by-step walkthrough still describing it should be treated as historical reference only, not an active procedure.
What to Do Instead
If you are a New Jersey employer trying to remit monthly withholding tax:
- Confirm that your e-file and e-pay setup in QuickBooks includes New Jersey gross income tax withholding as an electronic recipient.
- Use the electronic payment workflow to submit monthly amounts when they meet the state’s threshold — the same function that NJ-500 once served on paper.
- Rely on Form NJ-927 for quarterly reporting, and use the QuickBooks summary report if you file that form manually.
- Disregard any instructions referencing Form NJ-500, its formatting rules, or its mailing address. The state will not process a paper NJ-500.
If you run into trouble configuring New Jersey e-payments or your withholding liabilities are not calculating as expected, the issue is with your payroll setup or tax table — not with a missing form. Verify that your state withholding items are mapped correctly and that your tax table is current. For broader help troubleshooting payroll liabilities or getting your withholding data summarized for reporting, our QuickBooks payroll resources cover the common sticking points.
The key takeaway: Form NJ-500 is retired. If a help article or forum answer tells you to print and mail it, that guidance is outdated and should not be followed.