Joint assessment or stay seperate

Hi,

Does anyone know if my wife & I are better off being assessed jointly for taxes or would we be better off staying assessed as two single people.

Only got married last year & never got around to telling the tax office.

It depends on your earnings - if you are both earning over €32k (or €34K in Jan) then you are both in the higher tax bracket already.

It is beneficial if one of you is earning less than this.

MsGinger said:

It is beneficial if one of you is earning less than this.

Click to expand...

This is a good rule of thumb in general, but not always this simple.

If the couple own a property and one of them is a FTB while the other is not: gains can be made from TRS at FTB rates on the FTBs share of the mortgage through seperate assessment.

As stated above, the only real advantage to combined assessment is where one spouse can transfer credits to the other (so one spouse on a lower rate of tax to the other).

With the details you provided nobody could give you an answer to the question.

I'm happy enough with the rule of thumb replies.

Thanks.

If Frash doesn't mind, I'm going to gate-crash his thread with a query, hope someone can help.

I'm married 5 years and just last year asked revenue to jointly assess us, before that we were treated as singles. We earn roughly about the same each (€35k for me plus about €4k from rental property and him about €37k). For the last tax year when I submitted my Form 12 for the investment property I ended up getting my biggest tax bill since buying the apartment 5 years ago despite also handing in some large medical expenses on a Med1 so I can only assume this was as a result of myself and my husband being jointly assessed.

Problem is, my husband works for a small family business, all his tax is paid and all above aboard from what I can see but anytime there's favourable changes he doesn't get them in his salary if you know what I mean, he gets the same every single week regardless. I'm probably not explaining properly what I want to know but because of that are we better off being assessed separately as a married couple? Also, I was on maternity leave for 6 months of this tax year, under joint assessment are we losing out now because of the way his family pay him? Hope that makes sense?!

Thanks

There's seperate assessment and assessment as a single person. I understand that the latter option means that you will be assessed the same way that you were prior to marriage, but what are the implications of the former option?

My wife and I are assessed as single people; we both earn the same amount, approximately (and are both in the higher bracket) - how would seperate assessment as a married couple work out for us? How many tax credits would we each get? What would be the standard-rate cut-off?

Have you read the [broken link removed] or any of the many existing on this topic?