W-4 Form: How to Fill It Out in 2022

If you’re filling out a Form W-4, you probably just started a new job. Or maybe you recently got married or had a baby. The W-4, also called the Employee’s Withholding Certificate, tells your employer how much federal income tax to withhold from your paycheck. If an employee already has a Form W-4 on file with their employer, they do not need to complete a new one each year, even when the IRS redesigns the form—as it did in 2020. Employers may continue to calculate income tax withholdings based on an employee’s most recent W-4. As of 2021, this section of the W-4 is no longer relevant.

The IRS tool is also a good option if you have privacy concerns — for example, if you don’t want your boss to know you’re working two jobs or have other sources of income. The tool will spit out an amount to report as “extra withholding” on Line 4 for these things, and your employer won’t have a clue what it’s for. how to fill out a w4 for dummies The tool doesn’t ask you to provide sensitive information such as your name, Social Security number, address or bank account numbers, either. And the IRS doesn’t save or record the information you enter in the tool. If your taxes are more complicated, it will probably take you more time to complete a W-4 form.

Need To Know: W-4 Form FAQs

If your objective is to engineer your paycheck withholdings so that you end up with a $0 tax bill when you file your annual return, then the accuracy of your W-4 is crucial. It also asks whether your circumstances warrant a larger or smaller amount of withholding. It allows you to indicate whether you have income from a second job or expect to have deductions that you will itemize in your tax return. Form W-4 had a complete makeover in 2020 and now has fewer lines to fill out.

This is the simplest online W-4 tool; use this for any filing status with 1 simultaneous job (you and/or your spouse each have one job at the given time). The total number of jobs for the year is not relevant. This https://www.bookstime.com/ tool does not lean on your previous tax return or future income estimates. Throughout each tax year, especially at the beginning, we encourage taxpayers to review and adjust their W-4 Form for each of their jobs.

How to Complete the New Form W-4

You can also include estimates for other tax credits in Step 3, such as education tax credits or the foreign tax credit. Anyone who has started a new job will know about filling out a W-4 form. Your new boss will use that information to calculate how much tax to withhold from your paycheck. The W-4 is for federal tax, but most states can use what you submit on the federal W-4 form for state taxes.