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Abstract The spin supplementary conditions are constraints on spin degrees of freedom in classical relativity which restricts physical degrees of freedom to rotations. It is argued that the equivalent constraints in quantum field theory are the projection conditions on polarisation tensors, which remove timelike/longitudinal polarisations from the physical spectrum. The claim is supported by three examples of massive spinning particles coupled to electromagnetism: Dirac and Proca fields in quantum field theory, and 𝒩 = 1 worldline QFT for classical worldline theory. This suggests a resolution to the apparent discrepancy between effective field theory description of massive higher-spin fields [1, 2] and post-Newtonian effective field theory of spinning classical particles [3], where the former admits more unfixed parameters compared to the latter; the additional parameters are fixed by projection conditions and therefore are not tunable parameters.