Iowa allows a tax credit of up to $250 for K-12 school-related expenses such as tuition, textbook purchases, and other school-related fees. The credit is 25% of up to $1,000 of expenses per child, so $250 per child is the maximum credit. Who claims the credit in cases of divorce or any other situation where […]
This is an optional additional tax, assessed by school districts and (some) county EMS agencies, and collected on Iowa tax returns.
Someone asked me recently if a married couple could file separate Iowa tax returns even if one spouse has no income. The answer is yes, but the only reason you’d want to do this would be to keep tax liabilities separate, because the ending tax liability would be the same under any of the filing statuses.
This post will focus on the “low-income exemption” on Iowa tax returns, and how various adjustments to Iowa income play into the exemption calculation.
While it’s annoying, it’s not “double taxation,” and there is a logical explanation for why Iowa makes you claim federal refunds as taxable income.
Iowa does not tax Social Security benefits. However, those benefits ARE included in several calculations. To find out how Social Security affects those calculations, you have to calculate your “reportable” Social Security benefits in Iowa.
Can a taxpayer claim a deduction in Iowa for contributions made to another state’s 529 plan? The short answer is no.
do amounts an employees’ puts into IPERS – the Iowa Public Employees Retirement System — count towards the retirement savers credit? The short answer is no, because IPERS is a defined benefit plan, not a defined contribution plan — even though employees do make contributions to IPERS.
Over the last few months I’ve been posting excerpts from a presentation I give about the “married filing separately” filing status on Iowa tax returns. We’ve reached the end of this series, and the parts are scattered across multiple months, so I am pulling together each post, with links, below.
Iowa’s taxation of married couples has quirks that can throw a taxpayer or tax preparer for a loop. This post will cover allocation of itemized deductions, and allocation of tax credits, when couples file separately in Iowa.