Three hundred dollars doesn't sound like the kind of number that turns a company into a New York State employer of record, but it is. Not per worker — total, every form of pay handed to everyone on the crew combined, inside one calendar quarter. The moment that combined total hits $300, the state considers the business liable for Unemployment Insurance, and liable retroactively to the first day of whichever quarter the threshold was crossed in, not the day it actually happened. It also doesn't have to be the company's first quarter in business, and it doesn't accumulate across quarters — a slow $250 quarter followed by a $310 quarter still trips the wire in that second quarter alone; nothing carries over. A contractor who pays nobody from January through June and finally puts someone on payroll in August is just as liable, starting July 1, as one who's been running payroll since incorporation.

That's a different system from the one covered in installment five. Workers' Compensation, disability benefits and Paid Family Leave insure a worker hurt or sidelined by illness on the job. Unemployment Insurance is unrelated coverage administered by a different part of state government, funding benefits for a worker who loses the job through no fault of their own — laid off, not fired for cause. Same crew, two separate obligations, two separate registration trails. Squaring away Workers' Comp didn't touch this one.

The form that puts a construction business on New York's radar for it is Form NYS-100, New York State Employer Registration for Unemployment Insurance, Withholding, and Wage Reporting, jointly issued by the Department of Labor's Unemployment Insurance Division and the Department of Taxation and Finance. Filing it once does two things simultaneously: it registers the business as liable for UI contributions, and it registers the business to withhold New York State income tax from paychecks. One form, filed once, covers both obligations under a single registration number — and the same joint filing is what puts a contractor into the system that later collects New York City and Yonkers withholding too, through the quarterly return that follows.

DOL requires an FEIN before this form can be filed at all, so installment two's paperwork has to already be in hand. For an ordinary business employer — general contractor, sub, sole proprietor with a crew — DOL's own instructions route the filing online through New York Business Express, not the mail. A paper NYS-100 still exists and can be mailed instead. Household employers of domestic help and agricultural employers register online too, through their own dedicated New York Business Express pages — agricultural employers use a separate version of the form, NYS-100AG, but it's the same online portal, not a separate system. Only nonprofit 501(c)(3)s, government employers and Indian tribes are told online registration isn't available to them at all; they file on paper and can call the Employer Hotline at (888) 899-8810 with questions. A construction company doesn't fall into any of those excluded categories, so Business Express is the path.

The $300 figure is the general-business number, and it isn't the only one on the books, worth a line even though it isn't the one that governs a construction payroll. A household employer's threshold is $500 in cash wages in a quarter. A nonprofit's is $1,000 in cash remuneration in a quarter, or four or more workers on payroll in at least one day in each of 20 different weeks in a year, whichever comes first. Agricultural employers were folded into the same $300 rule as general business as of January 1, 2020, though they still register on a different DOL form (NYS-100AG) rather than the general-business NYS-100. None of that changes the number a construction employer actually watches: $300, aggregate, one quarter, and the business is in.

What DOL's own registration guidance does not do is attach a specific number of days to the paperwork itself — that's worth saying plainly rather than repeating a figure lifted from a payroll-service blog with no citation behind it. Liability doesn't wait on the form. It attaches automatically the moment the $300 mark is paid, filed or not. What is specific, and published, is the cost of falling behind once that liability exists: unpaid UI contributions draw interest at 12% a year, and a quarterly return that never gets filed draws a penalty of $50 per employee or $1,000, whichever is larger, capped at $10,000 for that quarter — with escalating late-filing penalties layered on top of that if a return eventually shows up but not on time. The paperwork isn't optional busywork with a grace period attached; the state's own math starts running the day the threshold is crossed.

Registration is a one-time event. What follows it isn't. Every liable employer files Form NYS-45, the Quarterly Combined Withholding, Wage Reporting and Unemployment Insurance Return, four times a year — due April 30, July 31, October 31 and January 31 for the quarter just closed — reporting wage detail for every covered employee and calculating the UI contribution owed on top of the state, city and Yonkers withholding already pulled from paychecks. It's filed electronically; paper is no longer the default. And a quarter with zero payroll still gets a return — DOL wants the empty filing, not silence.

The number that actually belongs in a labor-cost estimate is the new-employer UI rate, and it resets every year with the health of the state's UI Trust Fund, which is exactly why it's worth checking fresh rather than remembering from a prior job. For 2026, New York's new-employer normal contribution rate is 3.4%, which combines with an additional subsidiary-rate component and a flat 0.075% Re-employment Services Fund charge — applied to every employer account regardless of experience — for a published total new-employer rate of 4.1%. That applies to the first $17,600 of each covered employee's wages for the year, also a figure that moves annually. A new employer stays on that flat rate for a minimum of five calendar quarters of liability measured against the state's annual rate-computation date of December 31, which in practice runs close to two full rate years before DOL starts pricing the account on the contractor's own layoff history instead of the flat new-employer number.

None of this is a substitute for whoever actually runs the company's payroll tax filings once real checks start going out, but the mechanics are worth knowing before that first one does.

That closes Phase 1. A New York construction business that's worked through all six of these — the entity itself, the EIN, sales tax authority, a DBA if the trade name isn't the legal name, Workers' Comp and disability coverage, and now UI registration — legally exists and can legally put people on payroll. None of it, on its own, authorizes a single permit application or a DOB filing. Phase 2 starts there: what a legally formed, fully staffed construction business is actually licensed to build.