Worker classification
New regulations become operative on 1 October 2026 — but the test itself has been New Jersey law since 1936, and the department says so in print. This page is written for a commercial buyer evaluating cleaning bids: what the adopted rule actually says, what was struck out of it before adoption, and three things this industry repeats about owner liability that the statutes and the Appellate Division do not support. Every document quoted was read on 6 September 2026.
Dates
Most coverage of this rulemaking gets the date wrong, and the error runs in a particular direction: it treats 1 October as when the rules take effect. They took effect on 1 June. October is when the department begins applying them, which is a different thing and a less dramatic one.
From the adoption notice itself: “The Department is not, through this rulemaking, ‘adopting’ or ‘codifying’ an ABC test… New Jersey's ABC test has been the test for independent contractor status pursuant to the State's Unemployment Compensation Law since 1936.” Ninety years. Anything describing this as New Jersey's new ABC-test law, or as a tightening of the standard, has the story wrong at the first sentence.
N.J.A.C. 12:11-1.2(a) places the burden on the putative employer. 12:11-1.2(b) sets out the structure: “As the ABC test is written in the conjunctive,” failing any single prong ends the analysis and the worker is an employee. There is no balancing across prongs and no making up for a weak prong with a strong one.
12:11-1.1(b) lists the statutes the rules govern, the sixth being the Call Center Jobs Act. Workers' compensation classification is not on that list and is analysed differently, which matters because the two are routinely spoken about as though they were one question. An added subsection (c) preserves statutory exemptions that already existed.
What the three prongs mean for a customer’s own liability, and why this company runs W-2 payroll because of them, is on our credentials page rather than restated here.
Adoption
Here is the number that should govern how anyone reads this rule against this industry. A full-text search of the 51,314-word adoption notice returns the word “cleaning” exactly twice — once inside the deleted dental example, and once inside a commenter’s quoted objection. “Janitorial” and “custodial” appear nowhere at all. Two things are true at once and both belong here. The department’s own release says it “removed specific examples from the proposed rules in direct response to the concerns voiced by the state’s business community.” And the Register classified those deletions as non-substantial precisely because they “do not significantly enlarge or curtail who and what will be affected… alter what is being prescribed, proscribed, or otherwise mandated.” The illustrations moved. The standards did not.
Prong B
12:11-1.4(a) is disjunctive: the service must be performed either outside the usual course of the business, or outside all the places of business of the enterprise. The department notes it is “simply a restatement of N.J.S.A. 43:21-19(i)(6)(B).” Read it as two doors, either of which is enough. For a cleaning company, cleaning is unambiguously the usual course of its business — so the first door is shut, and everything turns on the second.
In the rationale for removing the worked examples, the department wrote that the New Jersey Supreme Court “ruled that under Prong B of the ABC test a putative employer's ‘places of business’ includes more than just the putative employer's physical plant,” citing Carpet Remnant Warehouse v. New Jersey Department of Labor, 125 N.J. 567 (1991). Reading that to include a client's building, where the cleaning actually happens, is this company's reading of that case rather than anything the rule text says. The rule text on the point was struck.
12:11-1.4(e), added at adoption, addresses work performed remotely — “that is,” in the rule's own words, from the worker's personal residence. A cleaner standing inside a client's building is not performing remote work from home. The carve-out is real and it is simply about something else.
Paperwork
The fact pattern behind all four rows is East Bay Drywall, quoted inside the adoption notice: the workers bid the work, set the price, supplied their own materials and bore the risk of loss — and still failed. New Jersey asks a question the federal common-law analysis does not, so a worker can satisfy the IRS test and fail prong B on the same facts. These are questions to ask a bidder rather than accusations against one, and no competitor is named anywhere on this page.
Enforcement
Two counterweights, because the numbers above are easy to misuse. The July 2019 report of the Governor’s task force on misclassification named janitorial services second in a list of sectors where the practice is “especially prevalent” — that is real and it is seven years old. Against it: the department’s enforcement data for September 2023 to September 2025 puts construction at 36 percent of one public list and 20 percent of the other, with cleaning in neither top five, and that chart reflects general enforcement cases only. The adopted rule names no industry at all. Separately, a New Jersey janitorial settlement announced on 16 July 2026 came to $457,500 — $357,500 to 68 workers for unpaid overtime and unpaid travel time between cleaning sites, and $100,000 in fines and penalties — after an administrative law judge found in March 2026 that two commonly-owned companies were joint employers. That is a wage-and-hour and joint-employer case rather than a classification case, and it is offered as what enforcement in this vertical actually looks like. Travel time between sites is a real cost a compliant bid has to carry.
Continuity
N.J.S.A. 34:1A-1.17(c) requires a notification of intent at least seven days before an order issues. Seven days is the whole warning.
It requires cessation of business operations at one or more worksites, or across all of them. Requesting a hearing does not automatically stay it.
The order is effective against any successor entity with one or more of the same principals or officers.
That is the penalty for continuing to work after the order lands. It is a separate thing from the misclassification penalty, which is written as a ceiling — up to a maximum — rather than as a price.
Once the order is final, the affected workers are entitled to pay for the first ten days of work lost, from the employer rather than from the State. The contractor pays wages while producing no revenue.
There is a second, separate route into the same outcome. R.S. 34:15-79(a) and (e) provide that a knowing misrepresentation of employees as independent contractors, on a determination after investigation, triggers a stop-work order within 72 hours halting operations at every site where the violation occurred, and it too applies against a successor firm. Subsection (d) attaches its penalty after a failure of not less than ten consecutive days. The point of this section is not liability. It is continuity: the building goes uncleaned, mid-contract, with no transition and seven days’ warning. That is the practical reason a buyer cares how a contractor classifies its people, and it is why coverage on this site is stated as bound before the first shift rather than promised afterwards.
Corrections
This is usually cited to N.J.S.A. 34:11-67.1, and the Legislature specifically prevented that reading. The word “owner” was struck and “contractor” inserted throughout the bill before passage, with “contractor” defined as the party in direct contract with the owner. Several free legal databases still print the pre-amendment heading, which is where the claim keeps coming from. The section reaches contracts for construction, reconstruction, demolition, alteration, maintenance or repair. And a contractor that never subcontracts has no lower tier for any of it to reach.
R.S. 34:15-79(a) reaches “any contractor placing work with a subcontractor” — not a customer buying a service. Three published Appellate Division decisions say the opposite of the scare: Brygidyr v. Rieman, 31 N.J. Super. 450, 453 (App. Div. 1954); Martin v. Pollard, 271 N.J. Super. 551, 554-55 (App. Div. 1994); and Lesniewski v. W.B. Furze Corp., 308 N.J. Super. 270, 283 (App. Div. 1998). There is real exposure in this area and it is set out in the next section; it is simply not this one.
N.J.S.A. 34:11-58.2(b)(2) says the opposite in terms, expressly preserving a client's right to recover its expenses from the contractor. What genuinely cannot be shifted by contract are duties under the Worker Health and Safety Act and the Worker and Community Right to Know Act. Those two are worth knowing precisely because they are the real limit, and quoting a broader one obscures them.
The buyer
N.J.S.A. 34:11-58.2, added by P.L. 2019, c.374 and approved 20 January 2020, imposes joint and several liability on a client for a labor contractor's violations, expressly reaching misclassification and State employer tax laws — a defined term that includes the workers' compensation law. It is not waivable as against the worker or the State. Note the date: this has been law since January 2020 and has nothing to do with 1 October 2026.
The section defines a labor contractor by reference to supplying workers to perform labor within a client's “usual course of business,” which it defines by premises. No published New Jersey decision construing this section could be located. So whether an ordinary building-services vendor is a labor contractor to an office landlord is arguable and fact-specific, and this page does not answer it. The expansive reading is the one that sells cleaning contracts, which is exactly why it is not asserted here. Put it to your own counsel.
Subsection b(1) excludes homeowners and home-based business owners, so this is a commercial buyer's question rather than a household's. Subsection c, added by the same 2020 amendment, extends liability to an individual owner, director, officer or manager of the client. One further wrinkle worth a single sentence: the Prevailing Wage Act is excluded from the triggering State wage and hour laws, while P.L. 2005, c.379 is included.
Building and grounds cleaning is a designated classification placement under New Jersey's Temporary Workers' Bill of Rights, and a third-party client is jointly and severally responsible for the equal-pay section, with a duty to verify the firm's certification before contracting and again on 1 March and 1 September each year. The limit matters as much as the rule: that governs temporary help agencies supplying laborers, not a janitorial contractor performing a written scope under its own supervision.
One more mechanism worth putting to counsel rather than concluding here. Where a contractor carries no workers’ compensation, R.S. 34:15-120.2(b) has the Uninsured Employers’ Fund pay reasonable medical expenses and temporary disability — permanent disability is not among its listed benefit payments. And R.S. 34:15-8’s exclusive-remedy bar protects only those “in the same employ,” so a premises owner who is not the worker’s employer keeps no compensation immunity. That is tort exposure worth raising with your own counsel. It is not a settled conclusion and this page does not present it as one.
Procurement
The second half is the real question. Prong B offers two routes and a cleaning company is closed out of the first one by definition, so a bidder relying on 1099 status should be able to say which door they think is open.
12:11-1.5(f)2 is written for exactly that answer. It is a question about how the entities came to exist, not whether they exist.
12:11-1.5(g) treats required or encouraged coverage the same way. A folder of certificates is not the reassurance it looks like if the contractor asked for them as a condition of the work.
A real cost, and one a compliant bid has to carry. It is also the issue at the centre of a New Jersey janitorial settlement announced in July 2026.
Stop-work orders follow successor entities sharing principals or officers, so the answer bears on continuity rather than on character.
The Wage and Hour Administrative Lien and Liability list and the wage violation watchlist are both public and searchable. Ask us the same question — and read the last section of this page for what you will find and why.
Supervision is where prong A lives, and it is also the practical question about whether anyone is accountable at two in the morning.
Worth saying why this is a list of questions rather than a checklist. The adopted rule states at 12:11-1.3(e) and 12:11-1.5(d) that its factors “shall not be used as a checklist” — so publishing one would contradict the rule this page is explaining. One consequence for comparing bids, with no number attached: a bid carrying payroll taxes, workers’ compensation, earned sick leave and travel time is not comparable line for line with one that does not. How a commercial number is actually built is on what it costs.
This company
Zero clients, zero employees and no completed jobs.The company was formed in August 2026. Every person who works in a building goes on this company’s own W-2 payroll, never subcontracted and never paid cash — said accurately, that is the policy of a company that has hired nobody yet, not a description of a workforce. General liability, workers' compensation and the bond are bound before the first shift. No limits, no carrier and no effective date appear anywhere on this site until one exists.
And the thing worth stating before a reader can infer anything from it: search this company’s name on either public enforcement list, on the federal establishment search, or on the state’s proof-of-coverage search, and you will find nothing. Not because of a record, but because there are no employees, no wages, no worksite and no policy. An empty result is an absent record rather than a clean one. What is in force today, what binds before a first shift, and the free state lookups that check each of them are on the credentials page.
Sources
Read on 6 September 2026. Every document above is public and free, and every citation is given so each point can be checked rather than trusted. This page summarises public records and quotes them so they can be verified. It is not legal advice, and the two questions on it that are genuinely open — whether a building-services vendor is a labor contractor, and what premises-owner tort exposure looks like — are handed to your own counsel rather than answered here.
We will scope it, write the frequencies down, and give you one number with the scope attached. No charge. Call (201) 663-8828.
