How to Fill Out and Submit Florida Form RT-6 (Formerly UCT-6)

Florida Form RT-6, the Employer’s Quarterly Report, is how every Florida employer with an active reemployment tax account reports wages and pays reemployment tax to the Department of Revenue. You file one for every quarter your account is open, even quarters with no wages and no tax owed. The form has a summary section at the top and an employee detail section below; the tax you owe is your total taxable wages multiplied by your assigned rate.

Who Has to File

If you pay wages for work performed in Florida and hold a reemployment tax account, you file the RT-6 quarterly. Employers with 10 or more employees in any quarter of the prior state fiscal year (July 1 through June 30) must file and pay online through the Department’s e-Services portal. Everyone else can file on paper; the Department mails a blank RT-6 each quarter to employers who aren’t required to file electronically.

A zero-wage quarter still requires a report. Skipping one triggers the same late-filing penalty as missing a quarter with wages.¹

If you don’t yet have a Florida reemployment tax account number, register through the Florida Business Tax Application on the Department of Revenue’s website or file a paper Form DR-1.² You need your FEIN to register. Once approved, the Department assigns your RT account number and your starting tax rate.

What to Gather Before You Start

Pull these items from your payroll records before you open the form:

Your RT account number (assigned when you registered) and your FEIN.³
The quarter and year you’re reporting.
A roster of every employee who worked for you or received pay during the quarter, with full name and Social Security number.
Gross wages per employee for the quarter, before deductions. This includes salaries, commissions, bonuses, vacation and sick pay, back pay awards, and the cash value of non-cash compensation. Tips count as wages when the employee reports them in writing at $20 or more per month.⁴
Year-to-date wages per employee, so you can tell who has already hit the $7,000 taxable wage cap in a prior quarter of the same calendar year.
Your assigned tax rate. New employers start at 2.7% (0.0270) for their first 10 quarters. Later, the Department calculates an experience rate. The rate is printed on the mailed RT-6 and auto-populates in e-Services.⁵

Verify every Social Security number. A valid SSN cannot start with 9, 000, or 666; the middle two digits cannot be 00; the last four cannot be 0000. An ITIN is not a substitute. An incorrect SSN makes the report “erroneous,” which carries its own penalty of $50 or 10% of tax due, whichever is greater, up to $300 per report.¹

Calculating Taxable Wages and Tax Due

Florida taxes only the first $7,000 of wages you pay each employee in a calendar year.⁶ Anything above that per-employee cap is “excess wages” and drops out of the calculation.

For each employee, the math falls into one of three cases:

Not yet at $7,000 this year: the whole quarter’s gross wages are taxable, up to whatever room is left before the cap.
Crosses $7,000 mid-quarter: only the portion of wages that brought the employee to $7,000 is taxable. Everything above is excess.
Already passed $7,000 in a prior quarter: taxable wages this quarter are zero. All of it is excess.

Add taxable wages across all employees for your quarterly total. Multiply that by your rate to get tax due. On $35,000 in taxable wages at 2.7%, you owe $945.

If you took over a business from a predecessor during the calendar year, count wages that predecessor paid your employees toward their $7,000 caps.⁴

Filling Out the RT-6 Line by Line

The summary section sits at the top of the form. The employee detail section runs below it. Here’s what each line asks for.⁴

Summary Section

Line 1, number of employees: three numbers, one for each month of the quarter. Count full-time and part-time employees who worked or received pay during the pay period that includes the 12th of that month.
Line 2, gross wages: total gross wages paid to all employees this quarter, before deductions. This figure also appears on the payment coupon.
Line 3, excess wages: the portion of wages exceeding $7,000 per employee per calendar year.
Line 4, taxable wages: Line 2 minus Line 3. This must equal the sum of individual taxable wages in the detail section.
Line 5, tax due: Line 4 multiplied by your tax rate.
Line 6, penalty: if the report is late, $25 for each 30-day period (or fraction) it is delinquent.
Line 7, interest: if tax on Line 5 wasn’t paid by the end of the month after the quarter, enter the interest owed.
Line 8, installment fee: enter $5 only if you’re paying quarterly tax in installments and filing on time. The fee applies once per calendar year with the first installment. Otherwise leave blank.
Line 9a, total amount due: add Lines 5, 6, 7, and 8. If the total is less than $1, file the report with no payment.
Line 9b, amount remitted now: the full amount from Line 9a, unless you elected installments (in which case, this quarter’s installment).

Employee Detail Section

Line 10, Social Security number: the nine-digit SSN for each employee. Don’t drop leading zeros.
Line 11, name: last name first, then first name and middle initial.
Line 12a, gross wages per employee: the employee’s total gross wages for the quarter.
Line 12b, taxable wages per employee: the portion falling within the first $7,000 paid this calendar year, minus anything already reported for the same employee in a prior quarter.
Line 13a, total gross wages: sum of Line 12a. Must match Line 2.
Line 13b, total taxable wages: sum of Line 12b. Must match Line 4.

The mistake to watch for is miscalculating excess wages for someone who crossed the $7,000 line mid-quarter. Track each employee’s year-to-date wages and count only the piece that falls under the cap.

How to Submit and Pay

You have two paths.

Electronic Filing

Log in to the Department’s e-Services File and Pay portal at floridarevenue.com. You can either enter the data manually or upload a pre-formatted wage file. After verifying the numbers, submit and print the confirmation. ACH debit (direct withdrawal from your business bank account) is the simplest payment. Credit card payments are accepted but carry a service fee.¹

Paper Filing

If you aren’t required to file electronically, complete the paper RT-6 you received (or download it from the Department’s forms library) and mail it with a check to:³

Reemployment Tax
Florida Department of Revenue
5050 W Tennessee St
Tallahassee, FL 32399-0180

Make the check payable to the Florida Department of Revenue and put your RT account number on it.

Deadlines and Late-Filing Penalties

The RT-6 and any payment are due by the last day of the month following the quarter:⁴

Q1 (January–March): April 30
Q2 (April–June): July 31
Q3 (July–September): October 31
Q4 (October–December): January 31

Miss a deadline and penalties accumulate:

Late filing: $25 for every 30 days, or fraction thereof, the report is overdue.⁷
Interest on unpaid tax: Florida’s floating rate, equal to the adjusted prime rate plus four percentage points, capped at 1% per month.⁸
Erroneous or incomplete report: $50 or 10% of any tax due, whichever is greater, up to $300 per report. The Department may waive this if you file a corrected report within 30 days of the penalty notice, but the waiver is available only once in any 12-month period.¹

The late-filing penalty applies even when no tax is owed. A zero-wage quarter filed two months late still costs $50.

Correcting a Report You Already Filed

If you find an error after submitting, you can correct it. Electronic filers use the same e-Services File and Pay portal and choose the option to correct a previously submitted report. Paper filers use Form RT-8A, Correction to Employer’s Quarterly or Annual Domestic Report, from the Department’s website.¹

Common corrections include adding or reducing wages, adding or removing workers, fixing an SSN, and adjusting out-of-state wage allocations. If you’re fixing an SSN, correct every quarter in that calendar year where the worker had wages. If the correction produces additional tax, pay it along with any interest that has accrued. The Department can require corrections going back up to five years.

A Note for Nonprofit Employers

Nonprofits aren’t locked into the standard tax-rate method. They can elect instead to reimburse the Florida Unemployment Compensation Trust Fund dollar-for-dollar for benefits paid to former employees. The election is made on Form RT-28 and must stay in place for at least two years. New employers choosing reimbursement file RT-28 within 30 days of the liability notice; switching methods later requires filing RT-28 by December 1 of the year before the change takes effect. Two or more nonprofits can also elect group reimbursement, sharing benefit costs proportionally by wages paid.⁹ Certain religious-organization workers are exempt from reemployment tax coverage entirely, including employees of churches and church-operated organizations, ordained ministers performing ministerial duties, and workers in sheltered rehabilitation facilities.

1
Florida Department of Revenue. Reemployment Tax Report and Payment Information
2
Florida Department of Revenue. Account Management and Registration
3
Florida Department of Revenue. Florida RT-6 Form – Employer’s Quarterly Report
4
Florida Department of Revenue. Employer’s Quarterly Report Instructions
5
Florida Department of Revenue. Reemployment Tax Rate Information
6
Florida Legislature. Florida Code 443.1217 – Wages
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Florida Legislature. Florida Code 443.141 – Collection of Contributions and Reimbursements
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Florida Legislature. Florida Code 213.235 – Interest Rates
9
Florida Department of Revenue. Information for Nonprofit Organizations