What is Payroll-Based Journal (PBJ) Reporting?

PBJ, or Payroll-Based Journal, is the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) system that requires skilled nursing and long-term care facilities to submit staffing and payroll data every quarter, based on payroll and other auditable records.

What is the purpose of PBJ reporting?

CMS created PBJ under Section 6106 of the Affordable Care Act to collect auditable staffing data straight from a facility’s own payroll and time records, rather than relying on self-reported estimates. Every quarter, long-term care and skilled nursing facilities submit hours worked and paid for each employee, broken out by job title, along with data on agency and contract staff. CMS combines this with resident census data to calculate a facility’s staffing levels and feeds the result directly into the Five-Star Quality Rating System that families use to compare nursing homes.

The first mandatory reporting period began July 1, 2016, and PBJ has only become more central to how CMS evaluates facilities since then.

Who has to submit PBJ data

All Medicare & Medicaid-certified long-term care and skilled nursing facilities must submit PBJ data. Swing-bed hospitals are excluded. You have to report both your own employees and any agency or contract staff working in the facility, since CMS treats both as part of the actual staffing picture.

What goes into a PBJ report

Each quarterly Payroll-Based Journal submission needs, for every employee:

• A unique, anonymized employee ID (no Social Security numbers)
• Hours worked and paid, per day
• A standardized CMS job title code
• Pay type: exempt, non-exempt or contract
• Hire and termination dates

Paid and unpaid breaks don’t count toward reported hours. Facilities can submit data manually or through an automated XML file generated by payroll or time-tracking software, and CMS allows both methods to be used in the same quarter if needed.

The 40 CMS job title codes for PBJ reporting

CMS defines 40 standardized job title codes for PBJ. The most commonly reported are Registered Nurse (RN), Licensed Practical/Vocational Nurse (LPN) and Certified Nurse Aide (CNA) roles, but the full list covers clinical, therapy, social work and support positions:

PBJ deadlines and the move to iQIES

PBJ submissions are due 45 days after the end of each fiscal quarter, by 11:59 PM ET. For the quarter running July 1 through September 30, 2026, that puts the deadline at November 14, 2026.]

Two changes around PBJ reporting are worth knowing heading into the rest of 2026. First, CMS updated its PBJ data specifications to version 4.10.0, effective April 1, 2026. Files submitted in older XML formats get rejected outright, and the new spec also caps reported hours at 22.5 per employee ID per day. Second, and bigger, CMS is retiring its legacy QIES submission system in favor of iQIES. The April 1 through June 30, 2026 quarter, due August 14, 2026, is the last one submitted through the old QIES system. Every quarter after that, starting with July 1 through September 30, 2026 (due November 14, 2026), has to go through iQIES instead.

What happens if you miss a PBJ deadline

A missed or late submission triggers an automatic one-star staffing rating under the CMS Five-Star Quality Rating System, regardless of what your actual staffing levels look like. That’s a direct, immediate consequence tied specifically to the paperwork, separate from any penalty tied to understaffing itself.

Understaffing is its own, larger enforcement issue. CMS uses PBJ data during annual surveys to check compliance with staffing standards, and facilities found in violation, particularly at the immediate jeopardy level, can face civil monetary penalties in the $8,500 to $10,000 per day range. That figure applies to serious health and safety deficiencies generally, not to PBJ paperwork specifically, but PBJ data is increasingly what puts a facility on a surveyor’s radar in the first place.

What happens if PBJ data is inaccurate?

Misclassified or poorly tracked agency hours distort two things at once: your PBJ file, and your actual labor budget, since agency labor isn’t a marginal expense. An HHS analysis of PBJ data found contract labor costing up to 75% more per hour than directly employed staff in 2021, and a 2023 Health Affairs study found that premium had eased to 50 to 60% by 2022. Get that classification wrong, and you lose an accurate read on where your money is actually going, on top of whatever compliance risk it creates.

How Fingercheck handles PBJ reporting

Fingercheck added PBJ reporting to the platform so facilities aren’t rebuilding this report from scratch every quarter. It doesn’t submit PBJ data to CMS on your behalf, but it formats and builds the exact report you need from data you’re already generating, in four steps.

1. Map your jobs to CMS codes, once. Import your facility’s existing job titles and match each one to the corresponding CMS job title code. This is a one-time setup, not something you redo every quarter.
2. Employees clock in under the mapped job. As staff work their shifts, hours get tied to the correct CMS code automatically, based on the job they clocked in under.
3. Run the PBJ report at quarter-end. From the REPORTS tab, open the custom report builder and select the “EMPH – Paid Hours” data source built specifically for PBJ. It already includes every required field, including state facility ID, employee ID, hire and termination dates, work type code, pay type code, work date, hours and job title code, in the layout CMS expects. Like any custom report, you choose an export format, such as PDF, Excel or CSV, before running it. The exact setup is documented in the PBJ reporting help article.
4. Submit it through CMS yourself. You simply upload the generated file through the CMS portal. Fingercheck prepares the audit-ready data; it doesn’t file it for you.

Getting the data right from the start

Beyond generating the report itself, two other core parts of the Fingercheck platform help keep your underlying data accurate before submission day.

Healthcare Scheduling tracks Hours Per Patient Day (HPPD) targets and census-based staffing tiers in real time. It enforces the right RN, LPN and CNA skill mix, so understaffing gets caught before it shows up in a quarterly PBJ file rather than after. See our scheduling and labor cost guide for more on managing labor costs across a mixed SNF or LTC staff.

Time tracking uses geofencing and anti-buddy-punch photo verification at clock-in, ensuring the hours behind your PBJ numbers reflect who actually worked on-site, not just who was scheduled.

Fingercheck and any related entities do not offer tax, accounting or legal advice. This content is for informational purposes only and shouldn’t be considered a source of tax, legal or accounting advice. Consult your tax, legal and accounting advisors before undertaking any related activities or transactions.

Rickie Mixon Rickie is the SEO and AI Manager at Fingercheck, where she tracks the evolving world of Payroll, HR tech and LLMs. A seasoned B2B SaaS strategist and a lifelong nerd, she's driven by an endless curiosity to understand how things work. Off the clock, she's usually sharing fun facts or walking her dogs.

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