If you’ve been following along since our July post on PBJ submission changes, you know that August 17, 2026 marked the official cutover — all Payroll-Based Journal (PBJ) staffing data must now be submitted through iQIES. QIES stopped accepting PBJ records after August 14 at 11:59 PM EST.
On September 11, 2026, CMS issued a revised version of QSO-26-12-NH with updated details now that the transition has occurred. Here’s what you need to know.
The Basics Remain
The core PBJ requirements remain the same. Quarterly deadlines and reporting requirements are unchanged. What changed is where you submit your PBJ data – and now that the August cutover occurred, the revised QSO Memo focuses on what you need to know about now: access, roles and reports.
You’ll need:
- to set up your iQIES access, if you haven’t done that already.
- A HARP account with a role request submitted to iQIES and approved by your facility’s Provider Security Official (PSO).
Every facility needs to have at least one PSO to manage user access – including vendors, if you are using them. Vendors are required to separately access each facility that they represent using the facility’s CMS Certification Number (CCN).
Here’s something worth noting from the revised QSO Memo: if you don’t log in to iQIES for 60 days, you’ll lose your access. Build a habit of logging in regularly, not just when a submission deadline is coming to avoid last minute access issues.
Beginning August 17, all PBJ reports are available in iQIES, and the CASPER Reporting application has been decommissioned — with two limited exceptions for validation reports tied to submissions made in QIES. The reports will look a little different, but the underlying data is the same, and ten years of PBJ history has been migrated into iQIES. That’s a lot of staffing history in one place.
There are some specific differences between how certain reports functioned in CASPER and how they work in iQIES. The revised memo walks through each one, so if your team is running reports regularly, you should definitely read all the details. Also note that submission IDs are sequenced differently between the two systems, which matters if you’re pulling reports that span both periods.
The Bigger Picture
As we noted back in July, the consolidation of PBJ data into iQIES means that the information regulators use to evaluate staffing — the same data that feeds Five-Star ratings on Nursing Home Compare — is now more centralized and more accessible. That’s a good thing for your own reporting and analysis. It also means that data quality matters more than ever. Audit what you’re submitting. Errors that were easy to overlook in QIES aren’t less visible in the modernized iQIES system.
Read the full revised Memo (QSO-26-12-NH) on the CMS.gov website. Note that the PBJ Manual and PBJ FAQs document have also been updated, per the memo.
