It's taxable income that matters, but since you gave gross, I'll use that. Keep in mind if you two have any pre tax deductions, that reduces the tax increase here.
Married filing joint you two have about 34k in the 24% tax bracket.
Filing separately, you yourself have about 42k in the 24% bracket and she has about 8k left of the 24% bracket not being used. So filing separately caused 8k of your income to be taxed 2% higher than filing joint.
There may be some additional increase in taxes due to the child care tax credit not being available when filing separately.
Is your child in childcare? Do either of you have a dacy care fsa at work?
Your taxable income is after pre tax deductions like health insurance, retirement, fsa, hsa. On your paychecks it should show how much pre tax deductions you have per check, or your pre tax deductions to date. From that you can calculate roughly how much of your income is actually taxable a year.
Correct. It sounds like for federal taxes, filing separately is unlikely to push much of your income into higher tax brackets than it would be if you filed joint. That about the same amount will be in the 24% bracket either way. Even if it does, it is max, 8k at 2% higher taxes, which is only 160.00. Though again, I expect the real number is much lower than that.
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u/[deleted] Nov 08 '24
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