Quarterly Payments, Not Just an April Deadline
If you worked a W-2 job before, you're used to taxes disappearing from every paycheck automatically. As a freelancer, nobody withholds anything, so the IRS expects you to send in payments yourself, four times a year, using Form 1040-ES. This isn't optional if you expect to owe $1,000 or more in tax for the year, which almost every full-time freelancer does.
On top of those four payments, you still file one annual tax return (Form 1040 with Schedule C and Schedule SE) by April 15, which reconciles what you actually earned against what you already paid. Think of the quarterly payments as installments and the April filing as the final settlement.
The Actual Due Dates
The quarters aren't evenly split like calendar quarters, they follow the IRS's own schedule:
- Q1 (Jan through March income): due April 15
- Q2 (April through May income): due June 15
- Q3 (June through August income): due September 15
- Q4 (September through December income): due January 15 of the following year
If a due date falls on a weekend or holiday, it shifts to the next business day. Mark these on your calendar the same way you'd mark a client deadline, because the IRS doesn't send reminders.
Why You Owe So Much More Than Employees Expect
As a W-2 employee, your employer paid half of your Social Security and Medicare taxes and you never saw it. As a freelancer, you're both the employee and the employer, so you owe the full 15.3% self-employment tax on top of regular income tax. That's why a freelancer earning the same gross income as a salaried employee often owes a noticeably bigger tax bill, and why quarterly payments exist: to spread that bill out instead of hitting you with one number in April that you didn't save for.
A rough rule many freelancers use is to set aside 25 to 30 percent of every payment they receive the moment it lands, moving it into a separate savings account earmarked for taxes. That way, when a quarterly deadline arrives, the money is already sitting there instead of competing with rent.
What Happens If You Skip a Quarter
Missing a quarterly payment doesn't erase the tax owed, it just triggers an underpayment penalty calculated by the IRS based on how late and how underpaid you were. The penalty is separate from the tax itself and grows the longer the shortfall goes unpaid. Freelancers who pay everything in one lump sum every April instead of quarterly almost always end up paying this penalty, even if they eventually pay the full amount owed.
If your income is uneven (feast one month, famine the next), you can use the annualized income installment method on Form 2210 to match payments to when you actually earned the money, rather than paying an even fourth each quarter.