How to Hire Employees in Georgia: The Complete Compliance Sequence

The first time I helped a founder put someone on payroll in Georgia, we lost two weeks to a wrong assumption. We registered with the Georgia Department of Labor, filed the paperwork, got an account number back, and treated that as the state registration. On the morning of the first pay run we learned that Georgia income tax withholding lives at an entirely different agency, with its own portal, its own account number, and no awareness that we had already registered somewhere else.

Georgia is a light-touch state for employers, and that is exactly what makes it easy to get wrong. There is no state paid family leave program, no state paid sick leave mandate, no state overtime statute, and no posted-salary requirement. Because so little is layered on top of federal law, founders assume the whole thing is federal. Then they meet the Georgia items that do exist: a ten-day new hire report, a workers compensation threshold that counts the owners, a physician panel that has to be posted before anyone gets hurt, and an E-Verify rule enforced through the business license.

This guide runs the sequence in the order the work actually happens, from the federal EIN through the ninetieth day, then covers the state rules that change how you run payroll, the city layer, the contractor trap, and the mistakes that cost the most. Every deadline and threshold below comes from a Georgia agency publication, and the source is named next to the number.

I built FirstHR because none of this should require a compliance background to execute. The steps below are the same steps our platform turns into tasks with dates on them: e-signature for the I-9 and the G-4, a reminder for the ten-day report, separate I-9 storage, and an onboarding plan generated from the job description rather than assembled by hand at midnight.

The Georgia Hiring Sequence at a Glance

Ten steps stand between an idea and a legally employed person in Georgia, and they are not interchangeable. The EIN gates both state registrations. The state registrations gate the first paycheck. The workers compensation decision has to be settled before the third regular worker starts, not after.

Read that table as a dependency chain rather than a checklist. Two of the ten items are federal and identical in every state. The other eight are where Georgia has its own answer, and each one is broken out below with the agency that owns it.

Step 1: Get Your Federal EIN

Apply for the federal Employer Identification Number first, because both Georgia registrations ask for it on the first screen. The IRS issues the number at the end of the online application session, so this is a same-day task rather than a waiting game. Without it there is no lawful way to deposit federal employment taxes.

If you formed an LLC or a corporation you probably already have one. If you have been operating as a sole proprietor and using your Social Security number for tax filings, you need an EIN before the first employee, since payroll tax reporting cannot run on a personal identifier.

Step 2: Open a Georgia Withholding Account With the Department of Revenue

Georgia income tax withholding is administered by the Department of Revenue, and you register through the Georgia Tax Center to receive a withholding payroll tax number. The Department of Revenue guidance on registering for a withholding payroll tax number states the obligation directly: employers are required to withhold Georgia income tax from the wages of residents for services performed inside or outside of this state and from nonresidents for services performed in Georgia. Domestic and household employees are included.

The department publishes a simple two-part screen for deciding whether you need the account. The residency question asks whether you have employees who are Georgia residents or whether the company itself is located in Georgia, with a resident defined as someone who has lived in Georgia for 183 days in the past year or who regularly lives in the state. The wage allocation question asks whether an employee can attribute more than five percent of wages, or more than $5,000, to Georgia.

Georgia levies a flat individual income tax, which keeps the arithmetic simple once the account exists. The withholding tables in the Department of Revenue Employer Tax Guide for 2026 apply a rate of 4.99 percent above each bracket floor. There are no local income taxes anywhere in Georgia, so the state rate is the only layer above federal withholding. Returns run on Form G-7, with the annual reconciliation on Form G-1003.

Step 3: Open an Unemployment Insurance Account With the Department of Labor

Unemployment insurance in Georgia is administered by the Georgia Department of Labor, and employers pay the entire cost. The GDOL unemployment taxes page routes new Georgia employers to an online application for a tax account, and the agency handbook confirms that employers who complete the online registration receive a tax account number immediately.

Liability is defined by two tests rather than by a headcount. The GDOL Employer Handbook states that a private employer is liable for unemployment taxes if it employs at least one individual for some portion of a day in 20 different calendar weeks in a calendar year, consecutive or not, or if total gross payroll for any calendar quarter reaches $1,500. You are also automatically liable if you are liable for federal unemployment tax, or if you acquired substantially all the assets of a business that was already a liable employer.

There is no separate countdown clock on the registration itself, which fools people into treating it as optional. The real deadline arrives through the reporting calendar: once liability is met at any point in a year, the handbook requires reports for every quarter in which employment occurred during that year, and the quarterly report is due at the end of the month following the quarter.

Step 4: Put Workers Compensation Coverage in Force

Georgia requires workers compensation coverage once you regularly employ three or more persons, and coverage is mandatory rather than elective. The State Board of Workers Compensation puts it in one sentence: every employer, individual, firm, association, or corporation regularly employing three or more persons, part-time or full time, shall provide workers compensation insurance coverage.

The counting rules are where small employers get surprised. Part-time people count as long as they work regularly, and a seasonal hire counts if you regularly staff up in that season. If the business is incorporated or is an LLC, the officers or members are counted as employees of the company. As many as five officers or members may exempt themselves by filing Form WC-10 with the carrier, but the Board states that those exemptions do not decrease the number of employees for threshold purposes.

What Coverage Obligates You to Post

Buying the policy is only half the step. The Board requires employers to post a notice reflecting compliance with the law, to post the Bill of Rights for the injured worker, and to post a panel of physicians in a conspicuous place. The insurance company name must be posted, or the certificate of self-insurance if you are approved to self-insure.

The panel comes in two forms. A traditional panel needs at least six non-associated physicians, must include an orthopedic physician, may draw no more than two from industrial clinics, and should include a minority physician where feasible. The alternative is a contract with a managed care organization certified by the Board. An employee may select any physician on the panel and may change once without approval. Failure to comply can leave the employee free to choose any physician at all, plus penalties and attorney fees against you.

Two more details worth knowing before you sign anything. Georgia has no state fund, so coverage comes from a licensed carrier or through approved self-insurance. And a contractor who sublets part of the work may be liable for coverage of the employees of a subcontractor that carries no policy, which makes certificate collection a real task rather than a formality. The broader picture on workers compensation insurance sits alongside the state rules in the Georgia compliance hub.

Step 5: Confirm Your E-Verify Obligation Before You Post the Job

Georgia enforces E-Verify through your business license rather than through a labor inspection, which is why the obligation is so easy to miss. The GDOL Employer Handbook states that Georgia law requires employers with more than ten employees to register and participate in E-Verify as a condition of obtaining or renewing a business license, and adds that some jurisdictions may require registration at lower employment levels.

The statutory framework is the Georgia Security and Immigration Compliance Act together with O.C.G.A. 36-60-6, and the count is measured against full-time employees working 35 or more hours per week. Employers below the threshold are not exempt from paperwork; they sign an affidavit of exemption when they obtain or renew the occupation tax certificate. Public employers and their contractors and subcontractors sit under a separate rule and must use E-Verify regardless of size.

Call your county or city licensing office before you post the role rather than after the offer. Enrollment in E-Verify is free, but it changes your Day 3 workflow, and discovering that at renewal time is a bad way to find out.

Step 6: Complete Form I-9 on the First Three Days

Form I-9 is federal, identical in Georgia and everywhere else, and split across two deadlines. The employee completes Section 1 no later than the first day of work. You complete Section 2 within three business days of the start date by physically examining original documents that establish identity and work authorization.

You may not tell the employee which documents to present. The choice belongs to the worker, from the lists on the form, and steering that choice is itself a violation. If E-Verify applies to you, the case is created from the completed I-9 rather than instead of it.

Section 2 is the deadline most often missed at small companies, and it is missed for a boring reason: the founder is doing the onboarding personally and the third business day arrives during a customer emergency. A calendar entry created at offer acceptance solves the problem more reliably than any amount of I-9 documentation knowledge.

Step 7: Collect Form W-4 and Form G-4 Before the First Paycheck

Georgia employees complete two withholding certificates, not one. The federal Form W-4 sets federal income tax withholding. Georgia Form G-4, the Employee Withholding Allowance Certificate, sets state income tax withholding, and the federal form carries no state election, so the G-4 has to be collected separately at hire.

Both belong in the pre-boarding packet with the direct deposit authorization and the handbook acknowledgment, because a missing certificate on payday means withholding at a default status and a correction that costs more staff time than the original collection would have. Employers should also know that a G-4 claiming an unusually large number of allowances or claiming exempt status has to be forwarded to the Department of Revenue rather than simply filed.

Step 8: File the New Hire Report Within Ten Days

Georgia requires every employer to report newly hired and rehired employees within ten days of the hire date. The authority is Georgia Statute 19-11-9.2 together with the federal Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, and reports go to the Georgia New Hire Reporting Program. The purpose is child support enforcement, which is why the state treats late reporting as a real problem rather than an administrative slip.

The definition of a reportable hire is wider than most employers assume. The GDOL Employer Handbook requires reporting of employees who work only one day and are terminated before the report is even filed; of rehires and recalled workers returning after a layoff, furlough, leave without pay, or termination; of employees who stayed on the payroll through a break in service and then came back; and of temporary staff, reported once by the agency that hired them.

Employers transmitting reports electronically or magnetically may batch them into two monthly transmissions instead of filing per hire, provided the transmissions fall no less than twelve and no more than sixteen days apart under 42 U.S.C. 653a. The same federal section permits states to assess a civil penalty of up to $25 per newly hired employee, and up to $500 where the failure results from a conspiracy between the employer and the employee.

Step 9: Post the Required State and Federal Notices

Georgia requires a specific poster set from two agencies, on top of the federal set, and the posters have to be up before the first employee starts work. The Department of Labor requires notices to be kept in places readily accessible to employees, and includes an unusual instruction: employers who are not liable for unemployment tax are not permitted to display the unemployment notices and must remove them if displayed.

GDOL posters are available in English and Spanish and can be downloaded free, and GDOL Mail Services will send an employer poster kit at no charge, covering everything the agency requires except the workers compensation posters. Do not pay a subscription vendor for documents the state gives away. One more Georgia item belongs in this step if you plan to hire a young worker: an Employment Certificate, commonly called a work permit, is required for every minor who has not reached the sixteenth birthday, and the employer must keep the issued copy on the premises where the work is performed for the whole of that employment.

Step 10: Run Day One Through Day Ninety

Compliance gets the person legally on payroll. Onboarding decides whether they are still there in a year. Gallup research finds that only 12 percent of employees strongly agree their organization does a great job of onboarding new hires, and the Work Institute has reported that a large share of first-year turnover happens in the earliest weeks, before the hire has produced anything.

Every step above should be finished before or on the first day so that day one is about the work and the people, not about paperwork. That is the practical argument for collecting the I-9 Section 1, the W-4, the G-4, and the direct deposit form digitally during pre-boarding.

This is the part of the sequence I built FirstHR for. The offer goes out with e-signature, the forms come back before day one, the deadlines carry reminders instead of living in your head, and a 30-60-90 day plan is generated from the job description rather than written from scratch at the end of a long week.

Georgia-Specific Rules That Change How You Run Payroll

Georgia layers less on top of federal law than most states, but the layer it does add lands in unexpected places: the pay calendar, the workers compensation count, and the exit paperwork. These are the rules that shape your employee handbook and your payroll calendar from the first hire.

Minimum Wage and Why the State Number Misleads

The Georgia Department of Labor minimum wage page states that the Georgia minimum wage is $5.15 per hour, and that with some limited exceptions the federal minimum wage rate applies. The state figure comes from O.C.G.A. 34-4-3 and carries no indexing mechanism, so it does not adjust for inflation and does not change on an annual schedule the way indexed states do.

In practice the federal $7.25 governs, because the Fair Labor Standards Act reaches essentially every employer with meaningful revenue or interstate activity. Georgia also preempts local wage ordinances under O.C.G.A. 34-4-3.1, so no city or county sets a different floor for private employers. Overtime follows federal rules as well, at one and one half times the regular rate above 40 hours in a week, with the white-collar exempt salary threshold at $684 per week, or $35,568 per year.

Two smaller Georgia rules deserve a place in the handbook even though they are not hiring steps. O.C.G.A. 34-1-6 requires paid break time of a reasonable duration and a private location that is not a restroom for an employee expressing breast milk, with an undue hardship exception for employers with fewer than 50 employees. And O.C.G.A. 34-1-3 makes it unlawful to discharge, discipline, or otherwise penalize an employee for attending a judicial proceeding under a subpoena or a summons for jury duty.

The Exit Document You Set Up During Onboarding

Georgia requires Form DOL-800, the separation notice, to be given to every separated employee on the last day of work, voluntary or involuntary, under GA Reg. 300-2-7-.06. It is easy to comply with and easy to forget, because the moment it is needed is never a calm one. Build the template while you are building the offer letter, and the final paycheck conversation becomes a form rather than a scramble.

City Requirements: Atlanta and Everywhere Else

State preemption keeps the city layer in Georgia unusually thin. O.C.G.A. 34-4-3.1 blocks cities and counties from setting a higher minimum wage or creating their own paid leave requirements for private employers, which removes the categories that dominate local ordinance activity in other states.

Atlanta is the one place where a private employer picks up an additional substantive obligation. The fair private employment article of the Atlanta human relations code, expanded by Ordinance 2022-38 (22-O-1748) on October 26, 2022, defines a covered employer as any person with ten or more employees and adds protected classes beyond state and federal law, including sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, and criminal history status. It also builds in a fair chance standard. An adverse decision based on criminal history is defensible only where it turns on four considerations, which are whether the applicant committed the offense, the nature and gravity of the offense, the time since the offense, and the nature of the job applied for. A complaint must be filed with the Atlanta Human Relations Commission within 180 days of the practice, and an aggrieved person may instead or additionally seek prosecution of the violation in Atlanta Municipal Court.

A number of Georgia cities and counties have also adopted ban-the-box policies, and those policies govern their own municipal hiring rather than private employers. If you run a background check process across multiple Georgia locations, the practical approach is a single fair chance workflow that satisfies Atlanta everywhere, rather than two versions of the same policy.

Employee or Independent Contractor Under Georgia Law

Georgia presumes employment. Under O.C.G.A. 34-8-35(f), services performed by an individual for wages are considered employment subject to unemployment insurance taxes unless and until the employer shows otherwise, which means the burden of proof sits with you rather than with the agency.

There are two ways to carry that burden. The first is a two-pronged test: the individual has been and will continue to be free from control or direction over the performance of the services, both under the contract and in fact, and the individual is customarily engaged in an independently established trade, occupation, profession, or business. The second is an IRS SS-8 determination that decided against employee status. Only one of the two routes has to succeed.

The GDOL Employer Handbook adds a warning that reads like it was written after a long audit: independent contractors are not independent just because that is what their employer calls them, because that is what they call themselves, or because they signed an agreement using the words. It also closes a favorite loophole by stating that holding a professional or occupational license is not sufficient for the second prong unless the person actually performs those licensed services for other clients in the same line of work.

The consequences compound in Georgia in a specific way. A reclassification produces back unemployment contributions with interest and penalties, and the same reclassified worker may push you past the three-person workers compensation threshold for the same period, turning one finding into two. When any prong of the test is arguable, hire the person as an employee. The full comparison lives in our guide to employee versus contractor classification.

The Mistakes That Cost Georgia Employers the Most

These five account for most of the avoidable pain I see at Georgia small businesses. Each one is a timing or counting error rather than a knowledge gap, which is why process beats expertise here.

The pattern is consistent. Nobody sets out to skip the panel of physicians or to miss the ten-day report. The founder gets busy, the third business day passes, the tenth day passes, and a compliance obligation quietly becomes a liability. That is an argument for putting dates on tasks, not for reading more about Georgia employment law.

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