Who Can I Claim as a Dependent - Beginners Guide for Filing Taxes

Hi, my name is Loma. This free IRS Interactive Assistant helps you figure out whether or not you're able to claim a dependent. So if you ever have any questions, you would just go to this website and answer the questions to help you determine whether or not you can claim a dependent. That way you can be sure that you're claiming a dependent the correct way. This Interactive Assistant doesn't ask you any personal questions, so you can fill it out without them knowing who who you are. It's simply there to help you figure out your situation and give you some guidance. As you see right here, it only takes you a few minutes to answer the questions that they have to help you determine whether or not you can claim a dependent. We're going to click on Begin to get started, and the first question here is, who may I claim as a dependent? It's going to ask you the following set of questions to determine whether or not you can claim a dependent. So we're going to click Continue here. The first question asks is, what tax year are you talking about? So you get to choose between any of the last 3 years, 2019, 2020, and 2021. We're gonna choose 2021 here for this example. Here it's gonna ask you about your marital status on the last day of 2021. For Jane, we're gonna put she was single, unmarried, or legally separated, and click Continue. Next question asks whether or not you provided your own support, and it's asking you specifically whether or not you provided more than half of your own support for 2021. For this answer, we're gonna say yes. And click continue. The next question asks about people in your household. They want to know who lived with you during 2021, who your child is, or whom you provided any financial support to during 2021. They do not want you to include your spouse if you're married. So click add here. You have a dependent, you're going to add that here. For the sake of our example, I'm going to add Sally's name here for Jane's dependent. If you have another dependent, you would click add here, but if you only have one dependent, you won't need to add another one here, and you'll just click continue. The next question is going to ask if your dependent is married. So in this question, It's asking, is Sally married? And she is not. It's asking if she's a citizen and she is a citizen. The next question asks if Sally provided more than half of her own support during 2021. For the sake of our example, Sally did not. We're gonna assume she is a child. And so her mother Jane is the one who supported more than half of her own support. The answer here is no and click continue. The next question asks about Sally's information. One is a relationship question. The option that we're gonna choose is biological child, which means that Jane actually gave birth to this child. It is her own child. Then it asks for her birth date, and we're going to enter that information here and click Continue. Then it asks if Sally's other legal parent is alive. For the sake of this example, we're going to answer yes and click Continue. It asks next if the parents were ever married. For the sake of this example, we're going to say no, they were not ever married. The question is going to be kind of tricky, so you want to make sure you read it correctly, read it twice if you need to. The question here is asking whether or not the parents lived apart from each other the last 6 months of 2021. And so for the sake of this example, we're going to say yes, they did live apart, which means they did not lived together during the last 6 months of 2021 and click continue here. But if in your situation you live with the child's other parent at any time during the last 6 months of the last year, then you would need to click no here. But in our example, we're going to click yes because Sally's father did not live with Sally's mother Jane at all during the last 6 months of 2021. The next question asks, what state was Sally's primary residence located in? So we're going to choose Texas here. The next question asks whether or not Sally, the dependent, had majority status granted. So if your dependent is an actual dependent, this would not apply to you, and the answer would be no here, and you'd click continue. The next question is regarding the support that was provided and asks, did you and/or the other parent provide over half of his or her support? The answer is yes. This question is trying to determine if you and/or the other parent provided over half of Sally's support. The answer is yes here because Jane did. The next question asks whether or not Sally was in your custody and/or the other parent's custody for more than half of 2021? The answer is yes here. And then the next question asks about the number of nights. So during 2021, did Sally live with you for an equal number or a greater number or less number of nights than with the other parent? The answer here we're going to choose is a greater number of nights. We're going to assume that the dependent lives with the mother all year long. The next question wants to know whether or not you signed off any paperwork that says that you are not going to claim the dependent for 2021. The The answer here is no, we didn't sign off on that. And the question after that asks about whether or not Sally has a valid Social Security number. The answer is yes for that. And that was the last question to determine whether or not Sally can be Jane's dependent. And based on the answers that we provided, it concludes here that Sally can be Jane's dependent. Click the link to get a free tax lesson.