Form 1099 Reporting Requirements As Of: Fill & Download for Free

Presumably, over the past tax year, Uber paid you less than $400 in incentives and Uber-funded refunds, and processed on your behalf less than $20,000 in third party payments from fewer than 200 payors. This means that you didn’t reach the reporting thresholds for either Form 1099-MISC or Form 1099-K. Uber only sends you a Form 1099 when is legally required to do so.You are still required to report and pay taxes on your taxable income, whether or not you receive a Form 1099 that reflects that income.

IRS Publication 17, http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p17.pdf, tells you everything that you'd ever want to know about the deductions and credits that are available to the US taxpayer.Writeoffs fall into several different categories:1. so-called "above the line" deductions, available to everybody regardless of whether or not they itemize. These appear on lines 23-36 of Form 1040 (see http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1040.pdf), and include such things as qualifying educator expenses, contributions to an IRA, moving expenses, and student loan interest.2. itemized deductions, which are taken on Schedule A (see http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1040sa.pdf) when they exceed the standard deduction, or when married filing separately and the spouse also itemizes. These include medical expenses exceeding 7.5% of adjusted gross income, state and local taxes paid, qualifying mortgage interest, investment interest, charitable contributions, casualty and theft losses, job hunting expenses and other miscellaneous deductions (including tax prep fees!) in excess of 2% of adjusted gross income, and other miscellaneous deductions that you can take regardless of income.3. tax credits. These reduce your tax directly, rather than being written off against your income. Some of these are nonrefundable (which means you don't get them if you have no tax liability), including credit for child and dependent care expenses, the Lifetime Learning credit, credit for retirement savings (the so-called "saver's credit" available to low-income earners with contributions to an IRS or 401k), and credit for energy-efficient improvements to your primary residence. Others are refundable, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Making Work Pay credit, which means you get it whether you have any tax liability or not. Some are both - the American Opportunity Credit, which is an education credit available to certain college students, has a nonrefundable and a refundable component, as does the child tax credit.There may also be additional writeoffs available on your state taxes; for example, in North Carolina unpaid volunteer firefighters and rescue squad workers are entitled to a deduction of $250 if they spent a minimum amount of time in training during the year, and you are also allowed a deduction for contributions to a North Carolina 529 plan. Check with a tax professional in your local area or visit your state's Web site; most if not all have state tax information online.EDIT: The title of the question was changed since I wrote the answer three years ago, so I am editing my answer to extend it to the title change.There is no such thing as a "1099 tax" - just as there is no such thing as "being paid on a 1099" or "being paid on a W-2" for that matter. There are a variety of Forms 1099, and they are information returns that a payor submits to the IRS to report certain types of payments, with a copy provided to the payee. For example, interest paid on a financial account is reported by the financial institution to the account owner on Form 1099-INT - but whether and to what extent that interest is taxable depends on the type of interest income that is being reported. Similar, dividend payments are reported on Form 1099-DIV - but the tax treatment of that income depends on the type of dividend income that is reported.And certain types of miscellaneous payments - including payments to nonemployees for services rendered to a business - are reported by the business on Form 1099-MISC. The tax treatment of income reported on Form 1099-MISC depends on the type of income that is being reported on the form (which is used for many other types of payments besides compensation to nonemployees for services rendered).When people talk about "1099 tax" and "being paid on a 1099", they are talking about a very specific type of income - nonemployee compensation that is often (but not always required to be) reported in Box 7 of Form 1099-MISC. My answer here is limited to that specific reporting combination and should not be taken as applicable to any other income reported on Form 1099-MISC, or to any other income reported on any other Form 1099.Nonemployee compensation reported in Box 7 of Form 1099-MISC is treated as self-employment income by the recipient. It should be reported on Schedule C (Form 1040), Profit or Loss From Business, along with all other income from the same trade or business that is not reported on a Form 1099-MISC. Against that income, the recipient can deduct expenses that arise in the course of conducting that trade or business and that directly relate to the generation of that income; see Deducting Business Expenses and IRS Publication 535 (2012), Business Expenses for a fuller discussion.

You will get a 1099-MISC from Uber if and only if you received $600 or more in Uber-funded payments over the course of the last calendar year.Note that most of what you get paid while driving for Uber is not Uber-funded, but is instead money paid to you by your customers, for whom Uber is acting as a broker. Such payments are not reportable on Form 1099-MISC; they’re instead reportable on Form 1099-K, which is only required if they total more than $20,000 and were received from more than 200 distinct individuals.Note that you are responsible for taxes on your entire net income whether or not it is reported on any variant of Form 1099.As to whether Uber will mail you the form: the law requires the payor to “provide” the form to the payee on or before January 31 of the subsequent tax year. The regulations don’t require that the method of provision be “by mail”, the way they do for W-2s; Uber can use alternative means to “provide” you with the form if you consent to such alternative means. The way Uber uses to do this is to make this information available to you online, via its provider portal. While the law requires that you consent to electronic delivery, Uber asks you to do so during its sign-up process. You can choose to opt out of electronic delivery, in which case they’ll mail you the form, but most people don’t do this.