The payment itself is the easy part. If you have the number and a bank account, Tuesday takes ten minutes.
Monday is worth more, because two of the three moves below stop being available once the date passes, and all three are the reason next quarter is less unpleasant than this one.
Tax Disclaimer: This article provides educational information based on IRS guidance and IRC § 6654 and is not tax advice. Consult a certified CPA or tax professional for individual advice.
One: raise withholding, if there are any wages in the household
This is the only move on the list that reaches backwards.
Tax withheld from wages is treated as paid in equal parts across all four due dates, whatever date it actually came out of the paycheck (26 U.S. Code § 6654(g)). An estimated payment is credited to the quarter you send it in. Withholding is credited to the whole year.
Which means a W-4 change filed this week still counts against April and June. A cheque written tomorrow does not, and that asymmetry is the single most useful thing in the estimated tax rules. The full catch-up mechanics are here.
The lever weakens every fortnight. It works by moving extra tax out of the pay periods that remain in 2026, so the fewer of those left, the larger each one has to be to cover the same shortfall. Doing it in mid-September spreads the load over roughly seven or eight remaining fortnightly runs. Doing it in late November spreads it over two.
If a spouse holds a W-2 and you do not, this still applies. It is household withholding against household liability on a joint return.
Two: enrol in EFTPS now, for January rather than for tomorrow
EFTPS cannot help you on Tuesday and it is the right answer for the fifteenth of January. Both facts come from the same feature.
Enrolment is slow: “New enrollments for EFTPS can take up to five business days to process” (IRS: EFTPS), and the credential travels by post, arriving “in five to seven business days at your IRS address of record” (EFTPS). Starting today produces nothing usable tomorrow.
Start it today and the PIN lands in late September, which leaves nearly four months before the Q4 instalment on April 15, 2026; June 15, 2026; September 15, 2026; and January 15, 2027. Once you have it, all four 2027 payments can be scheduled at once, up to 365 days out, and the deadline stops being a thing you remember and starts being a thing that already happened.
One trap to carry into January rather than discover in it. The EFTPS cutoff is a full day earlier than Direct Pay’s: payments “must be scheduled by 8 p.m. ET the day before the due date to be received timely by the IRS” (EFTPS). If you enrol now, your January deadline is the fourteenth, not the fifteenth. Both clocks are laid out here.
Three: check the state, because nothing you worked out federally answers it
State estimated tax runs on state thresholds and state schedules, and they do not copy the federal calendar.
California asks for nothing on September 15, because its third instalment is zero percent of the year’s requirement. New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania each want a third instalment on the same Tuesday, at income thresholds far below the federal $1,000 floor. The four are broken down here.
Do this today rather than tomorrow for a practical reason. State portals are separate systems with their own registrations, and discovering at 7 p.m. tomorrow that your state needs an account you do not have is a worse evening than discovering it now.
And while the file is open
Two small things that cost nothing today and save an hour later.
Confirm the address the IRS has for you, because it is the field that automatic disaster relief runs on, and postponements for federally declared disaster areas are keyed to it rather than to anything you file.
Then write down what you actually sent and against which quarter. Come April, the difference between a clean return and an afternoon of bank-statement archaeology is a four-line note made while you still remember.
The bottom line
Tomorrow is one task. Today is the day the structural fixes are still available.
Raise the withholding while there are pay periods left to spread it across, since it is the only mechanism that repairs a quarter that has already closed. Start the EFTPS enrolment on the understanding that it is a January tool, not a September one. Check the state before the portals matter. Then tomorrow, with the number already settled from the two routes to sizing it, the payment is a ten-minute job and the quarter is finished properly rather than merely survived.
