When is the a-melding due each month?

How does the monthly a-melding cycle work?

Each calendar month of payroll gets its own report. The a-melding for month N covers the wages, benefits and tax withholding you handled during that month, and it is due by the 5th of the following month. January's payroll is reported by 5 February, June's by early July, and the loop repeats twelve times a year. Both the period and the deadline are properties of the calendar month, which is what makes the cycle straightforward to automate and to verify.

The cadence never bends to your payroll setup. Whether the month held one payment run or five, the reporting month is the same and so is its deadline: the monthly rhythm is fixed, not tied to how many times you paid. It also means you never owe more than one deadline per month, however busy the payroll calendar was.

The only thing that moves the date is the calendar itself. When the 5th falls on a weekend or a public holiday, the effective deadline becomes the next business day. Apier's deadline engine models exactly this rule: every calendar entry carries the effective date, and a shifted entry also carries the unadjusted legal date in a separate field, so an agent reading the data sees both the rule and the exception in the same row instead of having to rediscover Norwegian holidays on its own.

Who must file the a-melding?

The duty follows wage payments, not company form. An aksjeselskap with employees files every month, and so does any other entity that runs payroll: paying wages or benefits is what triggers the obligation. That framing matters for automation, because the question a system should ask is not "what kind of company is this" but "did this company pay anyone". The Skatteetaten reporting guide covers how the monthly duty fits into a wider reporting pipeline.

The mirror image also holds. A sole proprietorship (ENK) with no employees and no wage payments has no a-melding duty, and Apier's rulebook models that as an explicit rule rather than an absence: ask for such a company's obligations and the answer states that the a-melding is not required, instead of leaving you to guess from an empty list. An agent planning a compliance calendar can therefore distinguish a duty that does not exist from data that is missing.

What are the a-melding due dates in 2026?

Twelve deadlines land inside 2026, each covering the previous month's payroll. Eight sit on the plain 5th. Four shift: 7 April is the Easter shift for March payroll, and 6 July, 7 September and 7 December move off weekends for June, August and November payroll. The table lists every due date with the payroll month it covers, exactly as Apier's deadline engine computes them.

December 2026 payroll closes the loop on 5 January 2027, the same way December 2025 payroll came due on 5 January 2026. If you also handle VAT, note that MVA terminer run on a two-month rhythm with their own shift rules: the MVA deadline guide covers those dates, and the filing deadline overview puts both cycles on one page.

What happens if I miss a month?

A missed a-melding does not go unnoticed. Skatteetaten follows up on missing and late reports, and enforcement fees exist for employers who fail to deliver. This guide deliberately quotes no amounts or rates: they are set and revised by the authorities, they live outside Apier's rulebook, and any figure printed here would eventually be wrong. Verify the current consequences with Skatteetaten before relying on any number you find elsewhere.

The practical defence is to see the deadline coming rather than to study the fee schedule. The calendar is deterministic a full year out, so a scheduled job can pull it once and warn well ahead of each 5th; the deadline calculation guide shows that pattern end to end. Apier's role stops at the data: the endpoints below tell you when the report is due and whether the duty applies, and your payroll process delivers the report itself. Apier does not submit the a-melding.

Make the first call

The curl call fetches the full public deadline calendar for 2026 with no key: every a-melding date in this guide comes back as structured JSON with the effective date and, for shifted entries, the unadjusted legal date. The TypeScript sample asks the same question for one specific company, where the answer reflects its entity type and registered facts.

# Zero-auth: the full 2026 deadline calendar, a-melding dates included.
curl -s "https://www.apier.no/api/v1/public/deadlines?year=2026"

// Deadlines for one company, evaluated from its registered facts.
const res = await fetch(
  "https://www.apier.no/api/v1/company/999999999/deadlines?horizon_months=12",
  {
    headers: {
      Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.APIER_API_KEY}`,
    },
  },
);

if (!res.ok) {
  // Every non-2xx answers the same structured envelope.
  const { error_code, explanation } = await res.json();
  throw new Error(`${error_code}: ${explanation.summary}`);
}

const { data } = await res.json();
// Keep the monthly a-melding entries: each row carries the payroll
// month as period_label and the effective due date as due_at.
const amelding = data.deadlines.filter(
  (d) => d.obligation_id === "AMELDING_MONTHLY",
);
for (const entry of amelding) {
  console.log(entry.period_label, entry.due_at);
}

Frequently asked questions

Is the a-melding due the 5th working day or the 5th calendar day?

The calendar 5th. The a-melding for a payroll month is due on the 5th calendar day of the following month, and the date only moves when that 5th is not a business day: a weekend or public holiday pushes the deadline forward to the next business day. It is never counted as the fifth working day of the month. In 2026 the plain 5th holds for eight months, and the remaining four deadlines shift forward for exactly this reason.

Do I have to file for a month with no payroll?

The duty follows wage payments. An entity that pays no wages and no benefits, like a sole proprietorship with no employees, has no a-melding duty at all, and Apier models that as an explicit rule. What a registered employer should do in a single quiet month with no payments is a practice question this guide does not assert an answer to: verify your situation with Skatteetaten before skipping a month, because a missing report is followed up.

Which 2026 a-melding deadlines shift away from the 5th?

Four of the twelve. The March payroll report is due 7 April 2026 because of the Easter holidays. The June payroll report is due 6 July, the August report 7 September, and the November report 7 December, in each case because the 5th falls on a weekend. Every other month in 2026 keeps the plain 5th, and December 2026 payroll is due 5 January 2027. The deadline data marks shifted entries and includes the unadjusted legal date.

Does the a-melding ever move to a quarterly cadence?

Monthly is the cadence Apier's rulebook models, and this guide does not assert that any quarterly or other reduced schedule exists. If you believe your organisation qualifies for a special reporting arrangement, verify it directly with Skatteetaten rather than inferring it from a calendar. For planning purposes the safe assumption is twelve reports a year, each due the 5th of the following month with the business-day shift applied.

Where do I get the a-melding dates as machine-readable data?

Two endpoints. GET /api/v1/public/deadlines takes a year parameter, needs no API key, and returns the full calendar including every a-melding date with the effective deadline, the unadjusted legal date for shifted entries, and the period each report covers. GET /api/v1/company/{org}/deadlines answers for one specific company with an API key, so an ENK with no employees gets no a-melding rows at all. Both carry _meta provenance with rulebook_version and data_freshness.