If your facility submits Payroll-Based Journal data the same way it did last quarter, you have one submission left before that process stops working.
CMS is retiring the legacy QIES submission system for PBJ this summer. The quarter you're closing out right now — April 1 through June 30 — is the last one you'll ever submit through QIES, and it's due August 14. Starting August 17, 2026, all PBJ staffing data goes through iQIES, the internet-based platform CMS has already moved MDS and survey processes onto.
Most facilities we talk to know a change is coming. Far fewer have confirmed they can actually log in to the new system. Here's the full picture, and a checklist to run this week.
The transition timeline
| Date | What happens |
|---|---|
| April 1, 2026 | PBJ Data Specifications v4.10.0 enforced — older XML versions are rejected |
| August 14, 2026 | Final QIES submission deadline (Q3: April 1 – June 30 data) |
| August 17, 2026 | iQIES becomes the only way to submit PBJ data |
| November 14, 2026 | First deadline submitted entirely through iQIES (Q4: July 1 – September 30 data) |
Note what that last row means: the quarter you are working right now — July, August, September — is the first quarter that must go through iQIES. The hours your contract therapists and agency nurses are logging this week will be reported through a system many facilities haven't opened yet.
There's also a gap to plan for: during the cutover window (July 1 through August 16), expect Q4 submissions to be on hold — QIES is closing out and iQIES isn't open yet. If your team likes to file early in the quarter, this is the quarter that habit pauses.
What changed in the v4.10.0 data specifications
The new specification isn't just a version bump. Two changes are actively rejecting submissions that used to sail through:
Old XML versions are rejected outright. Any file submitted with a spec version other than 4.10.0 bounces. If your PBJ vendor or in-house export hasn't been updated, you'll find out at the worst possible time — the submission deadline.
The 22.5-hour daily cap is now enforced, not warned. No employee ID can be reported with more than 22.5 hours in a single day across all job titles. This used to be a policy-manual rule that generated warnings; now it's a hard validation. Facilities that reconcile agency invoices by hand hit this constantly — a duplicated invoice line or a shift keyed against the wrong date creates an impossible day, and the whole file fails.
The spec also finished retiring the old version-check edits: the legacy warnings (-1018/-1019) are gone, replaced by hard rejections keyed to the April 1 cutoff. In other words, the grace period where an outdated file still went through with a warning no longer exists anywhere in the pipeline.
Your iQIES readiness checklist
Run through this before August 14 — while the legacy system still works as a fallback:
- Confirm HARP credentials. iQIES access runs through HARP (HCQIS Access Roles and Profile). Every person who touches PBJ submissions needs their own account — shared logins don't carry over.
- Request the right iQIES roles. Your facility's iQIES Security Official has to approve PBJ submitter access. If you don't know who your Security Official is, that's the first thing to find out.
- Verify your export produces v4.10.0 XML. Ask your vendor directly, or check the version attribute in your last export file.
- Audit for impossible days. Query your last quarter for any employee ID exceeding 22.5 hours in a day. Every one of those is a guaranteed rejection under the new validation.
- Do a test submission early in the quarter. Don't let November 14 be the first time your team touches the new workflow.
The data problem underneath the system problem
Here's the uncomfortable truth the migration exposes: the submission system was never the hard part. The hard part is the data — specifically, the contract and agency hours that live in invoices, sign-in sheets, and someone's memory rather than in your payroll system.
We covered the full mechanics in our practical guide to PBJ reporting, but the short version: every contract provider already walks past your front desk. If check-in captures who they are, what role they're working, and exactly when they arrived and left, your PBJ data assembles itself — with a timestamped audit trail behind every hour.
That's how ArrivSure's healthcare module handles it. Providers check in at the kiosk, their visit is logged as a PBJ work entry with the correct CMS job code, they sign off on their own hours, and at quarter end you export a validation-clean, spec-current file instead of reconciling invoices against a clipboard.
One export replaces the quarterly spreadsheet scramble — every hour backed by a check-in record, every file validated against CMS's official schema before it downloads.
The facilities that will have a boring, uneventful iQIES transition are the ones whose underlying data is already clean. The migration is a good excuse to become one of them.
Want to see what a clean PBJ quarter looks like before the November deadline? Book a demo — most facilities are live within a day.