Form W-4, Employee's Withholding Certificate

7 Jun 2022 · 3 min

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3:16

Donna Bordeaux walks through Form W-4 and how to adjust your payroll withholding. The form changed after 2020 and ditched allowances, so focus on Steps 2, 3, and 4. Use the IRS withholding estimator and your pay stub to dial in the right amount.

Questions this video answers

Donna Bordeaux (aka "Donna Genie").

June 7, 2022.

Tell the employee to fill out a new W-4; do not perform tax calculations or adjust withholding for them.

Step 2 (multiple jobs), Step 3 (dependents), and Step 4 (additional flat withholding/self-employment).

Compare change in pay stub withholding, multiply by remaining pay periods, iterate as needed; optionally use the IRS withholding estimator.

Chapters

I've had several people recently ask about their payroll withholding or an employee has asked their employer about withholding on their checks being different than it was in prior years. This often happens right after tax filing when people realize they either owed a lot of money or got a lot back, they want to adjust their withholdings. First off, as an employer, your job is to tell your employee to fill out a new W4. Do not try to do tax calculations for them or adjust their withholdings for them. They must be in charge of this themselves. If you screw it up, you could be on the hook for a balance due that they make to the irs. So don't jump in that pool. Ask the employee to fill out their new W4. Now, if you're in the boat of looking at your W4 and you're confused, there's a logical reason why in 2020, after the IRS had to eliminate the personal exemption from the tax code based on the tax law that changed, they updated the W4. So the W4 no longer asks how many allowances do you have in the same way that it did before when it really kind of related to people like how many kids do you have? How many people are filing on your return Now? There are a couple of different sections of the W4 that you need to be aware of if you want to make changes. First off, in step two of the W4, read those instructions very carefully. That's just asking if you or your spouse each have jobs and that's trying to figure out how the withholding should work. Should we assume that you both have the same salary ish of a job? But the more important part is looking at section 4. If you're self employed or if you'd like to have extra withholding withheld, you'll list just a flat amount there. You can also look at section three to determine how many dependents you have and try to adjust the withholdings. The easiest way I suggest is look at what your shortfall was or your overage. File a new W4 and look at the change from one pay stub to another. Multiply that out by the number of remaining weeks of the year and see how close you come. You may have to make a couple of iterations to get this just the way you want it. The IRS also has a calculator on its website that you can run some preliminary calculations with. Not sure how helpful it'll be, but you can give that a shot too. I'm Donna Bordeaux with pyopaccounting.com Please follow us on Facebook and Instagram. Make sure you check out our blog and our website from the link below. Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell to be notified when we post. To contact me, email me@donna accounting.com.