Honorarium
A voluntary payment made to a guest speaker, panelist, or volunteer professional for services, where no fee was formally required or negotiated.
A nonprofit that invites a keynote speaker to its annual conference and offers $500 “as a thank-you” rather than a negotiated fee is paying an honorarium. The distinction from a standard contractor fee is mostly about tone and expectation — the recipient didn’t require payment as a condition of participating — but the tax treatment is identical.
Honorariums of $600 or more paid to a U.S. individual in a calendar year trigger the same 1099-NEC reporting requirement as any other independent contractor payment, which means collecting a completed W-9 form before the check goes out, not after.
Because honorarium payments are easy to treat informally — a quick check written at an event, with no purchase order or contract on file — they’re a common gap in nonprofit expense documentation. Routing them through the same accounts-payable process as any other vendor payment closes that gap.