The moment you hire someone who is not on payroll, you inherit a small paperwork problem: before you pay them, you are supposed to have a tax form on file that establishes who they are and whether you have to withhold anything. Which form depends entirely on the contractor, not on you — and the three you will meet almost every time are the W-9, the W-8BEN, and the W-8BEN-E. Sending the wrong one costs you a round trip at best and a withholding problem at worst. This is not tax advice; the IRS form pages and your own accountant are the authority. What follows is the practical decision.
Send a W-9 to any US person or US entity. Send a W-8BEN to a foreign individual, and a W-8BEN-E to a foreign company. All three are collected by you, the payer, and kept in your records — you do not file them with the IRS. Without a valid form, US-source payments can carry a default 30% withholding.
Which form goes to which contractor?
The split is by who the contractor is, in two steps.
- Are they a US person? That means a US citizen, a US resident alien, or an entity organised in the US. If yes, the answer is Form W-9, Request for Taxpayer Identification Number and Certification. Nothing else applies.
- If not, are they a person or a company? A foreign individual gives you Form W-8BEN. A foreign entity — a limited company, a GmbH, an SARL, a Pty Ltd — gives you Form W-8BEN-E, which is the same idea across eight pages instead of one.
Two edge cases are worth knowing exist so you can recognise them rather than guess: a foreign contractor whose income is effectively connected with a US trade or business uses W-8ECI, and an intermediary or flow-through entity uses W-8IMY. If a contractor hands you one of those unprompted, they usually have a reason — send it to your accountant rather than rejecting it.
Why does it matter if I collect the wrong one?
Two different consequences, depending on the direction of the mistake.
Collecting a W-9 from someone who is not a US person means you have a certification that is simply untrue, and you have skipped the withholding analysis entirely. Collecting nothing at all from a foreign contractor is worse: US-source payments of the kind covered by these rules default to 30% withholding when there is no valid W-8 on file. A treaty between the US and the contractor's country may reduce that rate, but only if the contractor claims it on the form — which is precisely what Part II of the W-8BEN is for, and why the foreign tax ID number line matters so much. We wrote about that line in detail in W-8BEN line 6a: the foreign tax ID number.
The direction people underestimate is the third one: collecting the right form, late. If the form is not in hand when you pay, you are making the withholding decision without the document that supports it.
Do I file these with the IRS?
No. This surprises people every year. The W-9 and the W-8 series are given to you, the withholding agent, and you keep them. They are the evidence behind what you do report — the 1099-NEC you issue to a US contractor, or the 1042-S you may have to issue for a foreign one. That is exactly why the retention discipline matters more than the filing discipline: nobody chases you for the form until something needs to be substantiated, and by then the contractor may be long gone.
How long is each form good for?
A W-9 does not expire on a schedule. You refresh it when something changes — a new name, a new TIN, a change of entity type, or a contractor who moves from sole proprietor to LLC.
A W-8BEN or W-8BEN-E does age out. As a general rule it stays valid from the date it is signed through the end of the third following calendar year, unless a change in circumstances makes the information wrong sooner — in which case it stops being valid immediately, not at year end. Practically: a W-8BEN signed in March 2026 carries you to 31 December 2029, and a contractor who changes tax residence in 2027 needs a fresh one that year.
That expiry is the reason to keep contractor tax forms somewhere that can regenerate them, rather than in an email thread. Re-collecting a W-8BEN in year four is the same nine boxes of the same information you already had.
How do I collect these without a round of emails per contractor?
The workflow that actually holds up at ten or fifty contractors is the same one that holds up at two, just written down:
- Ask the classification question in onboarding, not at payment time. "Are you a US person? Individual or company?" decides the form before anyone is waiting on money.
- Keep the contractor's details once. Legal name, address, country of tax residence and tax ID go into the same record that feeds the contractor agreement, the service agreement, and the invoices. In Filly that record is a client profile, and the same profile fills a W-9 this month and the W-8BEN renewal three years from now.
- Send it for signature rather than as an attachment. Filly generates a no-login e-sign link, so a contractor in another timezone signs from a phone without creating an account or installing a PDF editor.
- Batch the renewals. If you are re-collecting W-8BENs at year end, that is the same form for many people — the case for filling the same form for a list of contractors rather than one at a time.
Filly's free plan covers 3 forms, 5 clients and 10 fills a month with no card, which is enough to run one onboarding cycle and see whether the profile-once approach holds for your setup.
FAQ
A contractor lives abroad but has a US green card. W-9 or W-8BEN?
W-9. Lawful permanent residents are US persons for these purposes regardless of where they physically live, so the "certificate of foreign status" route does not apply to them. Location is not the test; status is.
The contractor has no US tax ID. Can they still give me a W-8BEN?
Yes — a US number is not required to complete a W-8BEN. Line 5 is where a US SSN or ITIN goes if one exists, and it is often left blank. Line 6a takes the tax ID from the contractor's own country instead, which is the number the treaty claim usually depends on. See our walkthrough of filling Form W-8BEN.
What is a "certificate of foreign status"?
It is the plain-English name for what the W-8 series does: the form is the contractor's signed statement that they are not a US person, and it is what lets you treat the payment under the foreign rules rather than the domestic ones. When a payment platform asks for "your certificate of foreign status", it is asking for a W-8BEN or W-8BEN-E.
The contractor is a one-person foreign company. W-8BEN or W-8BEN-E?
If you are contracting with and paying the company, it is a W-8BEN-E even when the company has exactly one human in it. If you are contracting with the person directly, it is a W-8BEN. Follow the entity you are actually paying, which is usually the one named on the invoice.
Where should these forms live once signed?
Anywhere you can find them under audit and refresh them on expiry — which rules out an inbox. Keep them with the contractor record they belong to, alongside the agreement and the invoice history, so the whole relationship is one lookup rather than three.
A contractor sent back a scanned W-8BEN with no form fields. Can I still work with it?
Yes, but treat it as an image, not data. Filly runs OCR on scanned forms so a flat scan can still be read and re-filled rather than retyped — the same problem we cover in filling a PDF that will not let you type.