Question

Hi. I'm a New Jersey resident filing married filing separately. For the NJ property tax paid entry, do I enter the entire property tax paid or the 1/2 I paid?

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
March 15, 2020
3 replies
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TurboTax Live Self Employed

rjs

Employee

If you and your spouse both lived in the home, you enter half of the total property tax.

J

JotikaT2

As rjs posted above, you would only be entitled to half of the deduction or credit if you lived in the same home.

Property tax credit

Property taxes

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C

Cipher00Author

Hi, all. Thanks to all who responded.

My apologies for the post, but the limit to the length of the question made the question a bit unclear. I was aware that in my simple situation I could only claim one-half of the property taxes paid. I was unsure about how TT handled the entry.

It turns out that in my simple case (married filing separately, own a single-family home with my spouse, and pay property taxes), I should enter the ENTIRE amount of property taxes paid. TT uses one-half for its calculation, which is correct. If I enter my half of the taxes paid, TT will use one-fourth of the property taxes paid, which is incorrect. I was confused when I found that the property tax deduction on my pro-forma married-filing-jointly return had a different deduction than the sum of the married-filing-separately deductions. My confusion led to my question.

Thanks again to all who took the time to answer.

S

superman23

New to TurboTax and not sure where to ask a question. I will ask it here and hope to get a reply. It's more of an observation.

For married filing separately returns, assuming taxpayer and spouse each claim half the property taxes paid, on the federal input I entered one half the taxes on each return. However, these amounts carry to NJ, and for the property tax credit/deduction, the program takes one half of that amount on each return. This incorrectly results in half the amount being used as a deduction on each taxpayer's NJ return. Therefore, it is necessary to delete the amount on the NJ property tax credit screen (which flowed from the federal return) and enter the TOTAL taxes paid (by both taxpayer and spouse) on the property on each of the taxpayer and spouse's return. I don't think the forms are clear about this. Agree? Thank you.

E

ErnieS0

You can claim on your New Jersey income tax return a property tax credit or deduction for your share of property tax paid @superman23.

TurboTax will carry the full amount you claimed to the NJ return (not half).

Check your entries. Did you check the question "Check this box if you share ownership of a principal residence with anyone other than your spouse?" This box should not be checked.

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