MFS Community Property State Income (Differences Btwn Federal and State)

Forum|Forum|2 months ago
March 22, 2026
1 reply
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Hi all, getting really confused here and looking for some support around two questions.

Question 1: My spouse and I live in CA and are MFS (the good ol student loans like many others have discussed). We calculated all of our communal property income/taxes, so form 8958 looks ready to go. However, that form automatically pulls from our W2 Box 1's since it is at the federal level. I kept reading that you need to manually input Box16 (CA wages) for the state return and recalculate, but can't for the life of me find where to update that information. If someone can point us in the right direction, we'd greatly appreciate it. Once we are able to update that info, do we use the same method to caluclate communal income/taxes? Total income (Box 16) + other income streams / 2 - (our respective incomes) and report as addition or subtraction. And for taxes total CA taxes / 2 - (our respective CA taxes), report as addition or subtraction?

Question 2: My spouse made it through Turbo Tax checks for both federal and state without any problems and can e-file. However, I keep getting "the return has withholding from a source other than Forms W2, W2G, 1099R, 1099G, 1099INT, 1099DIV, 1099B, 1099MISC, 529B, and 593" and can see that in forms mode, my "EF info wks" has line item 5 checked as yes, which is causing the above issue. Obviously, I can't uncheck it on my own, so I went down a rabbit hole looking for 592B 593 because in Form 540 "B", it kept giving me an error when Turo Tax would check the CA return and would tell me to put 0. I wanted to delete forms, but since they don't exist I can't. At my ends wits at this point! Please help if you have run into this issue!

Thanks a bunch in advance.

RobertB4444

Level 15

All of the information for both returns should be done in the W2 forms. You don't need to put the information anywhere else and if any adjustments need to be made you go back to the W2s and make them there.

Did you change jobs this year? If you have more than one W2 and the total amount of Social Security wages between the two W2s is greater than $176,100 then the additional Social Security taxes that were taken out of your check are returned to you as withholding on your tax return using form 1040 Schedule 3 line 11. Is there an amount there?

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