Comment by crznthndr

5 months ago

Additional limitations if your household wages are more than $125,000

You can’t use Direct File if:

If your wages are more than $200,000 ($168,600 if you had more than one employer).

You file as Married Filing Jointly, and your spouse’s wages are more than $200,000 ($168,600 if your spouse had more than one employer).

You file as Married Filing Jointly, and you and your spouse's wages are more than $250,000.

You file as Married Filing Separately, and your wages are more than $125,000.

8 comments

crznthndr

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underyx  5 months ago

Why are these restrictions in place?

  • dmoy  5 months ago

    Eyeballing it, I bet those specific restrictions are in place because:

    $168.6k is suspiciously the same as the (2024) social security cap, so they probably didn't handle that edge case.

    $250k is the start of NIIT, so they probably didn't handle that case either.

  • jljljl  5 months ago

    Direct File was rolled out gradually as a pilot program. It was also only available for taxpayers in 12 states.

    My guess: since the tax code is so complicated, they probably wanted to support the simplest and most common filing cases in the first release. Handling all the edge cases would delay the launch, and prevent them from collecting feedback. If the feedback and demand was positive for v1, they could expand the surface area in the future.

    Unfortunately, it didn't last long enough