Wrong allowance on CA's Withholding Certificate

[David_RCG]

Hi everyone,

I'm sorry for what must sound like an easy question. Long story short, I got a new job last year and selected the wrong number of state allowances while filling out the company's elections during my first week.

While I correctly selected "single" for federal elections (0 allowances), I selected "head of household" for state elections. This wasn't so much an oversight but more of a confusion when reading "single or married (with two or more incomes)". Since I only have one income, I thought this didn't apply, but I now see how I read that wrong.

This means that I've been benefiting from 1 allowance for state tax ever since I joined in September. I just corrected that back to "single" and 0 allowances, but I'm wondering if I need to do anything else other than that.

While filing last month, the tax returns were correctly filed as single for both federal and state (I assume because TurboTax does a good job at preventing wrong filing status by asking those initial questions), so I believe my taxes were filed properly.

My question is: at the end of the day, does the IRS calculate total withholding vs. tax due for my filing status in the returns regardless of that mistake with allowances? I still got a nice return, so I'm just making sure that I don't need to amend the returns themselves, just the state withholding moving forward.

Thank you!

[ThomasM125]

The allowances you choose for your payroll affects the amount of tax that is withheld for income taxes. When you prepare your income tax return, you get credit for the amount of tax withheld from your pay, but the allowances you claimed are not a factor in how your income tax is calculated. So, the mistake you made in choosing the correct number of allowances for your payroll will not affect the calculation of your income tax. You do not need to amend your tax return.

[David_RCG]

Thanks for confirming, Thomas. That's what I thought, but I can sleep a bit better now.