EFW2 File Preflight: Encoding, Record Length and Totals

Save the payroll export, generator version, tax year, creation time and intended employer reports before editing anything. Give the generated file a versioned name. Record its byte size and, if your tools support it, a SHA-256 checksum. A checksum is an internal identity control, not an SSA filing requirement.

Download the applicable edition from SSA's specification index. The 2026 layout adds Treasury Tipped Occupation Codes and new optional employee money fields. A generator that passed last year may need a mapping update. Check the year inside each RE employer record, not just the filename. Distinguish the wages' tax year from the year the upload occurs.

Section 7.3 of the 2026 EFW2 specification requires the ASCII-1 character set and text format. SSA prefers a carriage return and line feed immediately after position 512. Those delimiter bytes are outside the 512-position record. Check for a byte order mark before RA, tabs inserted in fields, smart punctuation and an empty line before the first record.

Use a fixed-width viewer that preserves trailing spaces and shows positions. Do not open the file in a spreadsheet and save it back as a CSV. Count record length after recognizing the intended delimiter. A screen's soft wrap is only visual; an actual newline inside a name or address splits a record.

The required framework is RA submitter, RE employer, RW employees, RT totals and RF final. Optional RO records must immediately follow their related RW when their fields apply. State records have separate placement rules. Follow Section 3 and Appendix C when these records are present.

Check that the first record is RA, the last is RF, and no data follows RF. Close one employer report with its applicable total records before opening another RE. Count RW records within each report and across the file. Do not count an RO as another employee. Verify the organization and EIN required for each RA submitter and RE employer record. An employer submitting its own wages can correctly occupy both roles with the same EIN. When a payroll service prepares files for several businesses, check each employer record against the intended wage report rather than assuming the submitter identity belongs in every record.

This fictional domestic-wage example isolates one field from the 2026 RW layout. Positions 188 through 198 contain wages, tips and other compensation. The amount $42,315.27 becomes 00004231527: eleven characters, implied cents, no decimal point. This excerpt is not a complete uploadable record.

Recompute the corresponding RT total from emitted employee records, then compare it with the independent payroll control. Repeating the same total from the same export twice does not detect an omitted employee. Check other populated money fields separately; wages, withholding and tips are different controls.

Review SSA's rejection conditions in the specification's Important Notes. These include Medicare wages and tips below Social Security wages plus Social Security tips, and certain tax amounts with no corresponding wages. Investigate the payroll source when a relationship fails. Do not force a value to satisfy the edit without establishing which underlying amount is wrong.

Compare employee counts with the approved population, including terminated employees and separate payroll runs. A syntactically perfect file can omit a bonus run or include an employee twice. Review blank employer contact information and incorrect EINs before release. Obtain the payroll decision behind any unresolved tax treatment instead of making assumptions in the generator.

AccuWage Online checks formatted EFW2 and EFW2C files before submission. Select the original W-2 test type. Save results with the tested version. If a repair changes any byte, generate a new version, repeat the affected reconciliations and run another full test.

A successful test is not an SSA submission and does not verify employee names and SSNs. Hand off the tested file with its controls and unresolved exceptions clearly recorded. If compressing the release, SSA requires one wage data file per ZIP, not a bundle of separate employer files. Preserve the uncompressed file as the reference for later receipt and status reconciliation.