Skilled nursing facilities have exactly 31 days to complete their transition to CMS's iQIES platform before the agency retires the legacy Payroll-Based Journal (PBJ) portal on August 17, 2026. For Directors of Nursing and MDS coordinators who rely on PBJ submissions to feed their facility's staffing star rating on Care Compare, this is not a soft deadline — facilities that submit data through the old portal after the cutover date will see those submissions rejected, and missing data translates directly into star rating penalties that appear publicly within weeks.
What Is PBJ and Why It Matters
The Payroll-Based Journal is CMS's mandatory staffing data collection program for Medicare- and Medicaid-certified nursing homes. Facilities report actual hours worked by every nurse and nurse aide on every shift, submitted electronically each quarter. That data feeds directly into the staffing domain of the Nursing Home Care Compare five-star rating system — one of the three pillars alongside health inspection results and quality measures.
Poor or missing PBJ data is the fastest way to tank a facility's staffing star rating. A one-star staffing rating is visible to every family researching nursing homes on Medicare.gov, and lower ratings correlate with reduced occupancy and, increasingly, with state survey scrutiny. Facilities that fall below minimum staffing thresholds defined by CMS's 2024 staffing rule face additional compliance pressure. The integrity of this data pipeline is not an administrative abstraction — it is the public face of a facility's nursing staff.
What Changes on August 17
CMS is consolidating its quality data ecosystem into the Internet Quality Improvement & Evaluation System (iQIES), the same platform that already handles MDS submissions, CASPER reporting, and Five-Star data queries. The PBJ migration is the final major data stream moving onto iQIES, completing a multi-year consolidation effort that centralizes all nursing home quality data into a single portal and unified user account structure.
After August 17, the dedicated PBJ submission portal at PBJ.cms.gov will be decommissioned. All quarterly staffing data, as well as any corrections or late submissions, must be filed through the iQIES facility portal instead. The underlying data format — QIES-specified XML with the same staffing category codes — does not change, meaning facilities using certified payroll software should need only a URL and authentication update, not a data restructure. Manual submitters using the browser upload tool will need to log into iQIES rather than the standalone PBJ portal.
The Action Checklist for DONs and Admins
- Verify iQIES access now. Every person who currently submits PBJ data must have an active iQIES account with the correct facility-level permissions. The CASPER/iQIES account your MDS coordinator uses may not automatically have PBJ submission rights — verify this in the iQIES user management console before July 31.
- Contact your RHSC if there are gaps. Regional Help and Support Centers (RHSCs) handle iQIES account provisioning and facility enrollment. If your facility is not yet enrolled in iQIES, or if existing accounts lack PBJ permissions, submit a ticket now — processing backlogs increase as the August deadline approaches.
- Update your payroll software endpoint. If your HR or payroll system submits PBJ data via automated batch upload, update the submission endpoint URL to point to iQIES. Contact your software vendor for the exact configuration steps — most vendors have already issued migration guides.
- Run a test submission before August 1. CMS has kept a parallel-accept window open where iQIES will accept PBJ data concurrently with the legacy portal. Use this window to complete at least one test submission in iQIES and confirm the data is received and acknowledged correctly before the legacy portal closes.
- Archive your legacy submission history. Download any historical PBJ submission records from the legacy portal before August 17. Once the portal is decommissioned, legacy submission archives may not be immediately accessible through iQIES — confirmed historical data should live in your facility's own records.
- Notify your backup submitter. Make sure at least two staff members have iQIES credentials and know how to submit PBJ data. Sole-submitter dependency is a common failure point, especially during staff turnover at the deadline.
I've seen facilities scramble on MDS-related iQIES transitions before, and the common failure mode is always the same: IT or HR assumes clinical already handled credentials, clinical assumes IT handled it, and nobody verifies until the system rejects the first upload. Get in front of this now. Log into iQIES, navigate to the PBJ section, and confirm you can see your facility's staffing calendar. If you hit an access error, you have four weeks to fix it. If you wait until August 16, you don't.
What Happens If You Miss the Transition
Submissions filed to the legacy PBJ portal after August 17 will not be processed. From CMS's standpoint, those hours never happened. For the affected quarterly period, the facility will appear to have submitted incomplete staffing data, which triggers a staffing domain penalty in Care Compare. Facilities can file corrected data through iQIES after the fact, but corrections take several weeks to propagate through CMS systems and update the public-facing star rating — meaning there will be a visible period of degraded ratings even if the underlying data is eventually corrected.
CMS has not announced any grace-period waiver or penalty-abatement window for migration-related submission failures. Treat August 17 as a hard wall.