Deductions & credits
Feb 21, 2025: I agree with DaveF1006 and also with those that noted in past years of TurboTax's apparent confusion that Virginia does have both a car tax and a registration fee which is unnecessarily confusing those of us that like to just answer simple questions and move on. For my records, I would prefer to enter the car registration fee portion from my county's "Personal Property Tax Statement" on that line and have TurboTax determine that it won't apply to Federal tax because it's based on weight since I'm in Virginia; but DON'T DO THAT b/c TurboTax assumes the amount entered there is based on the value, so leave that line blank. I then usually enter the Personal Property Tax amounts where I open a TurboTax worksheet to list all my vehicles and use description line to list my vehicle names along with the equation 'Tax amount' - 'Car Tax Relief', then in the amount column, I manually calculate the actual amount paid. I close the little worksheet and TurboTax adds them up to fill in the line.
Unfortunately, for my 2024 taxes, TurboTax presently has a bug that came up where I can't get to the personal property tax entry, even after a) deleting & reloading TurboTax with their support and b) starting over with a new file (yes, from the beginning). TurboTax support officially recorded it as a bug after my call yesterday. Supposed to hear back in a few days from TurboTax and who knows if/when a fix will be released. I also found someone else reported the same bug 6 days ago in the community topics, to which I also added a comment. See below for the "bug" window that pops up saying you're screwed. Sure, I could also add the car tax to the 1040 form directly, but I'm unsure what happens with my override if the bug fix is released.
Fortunately, the average person like me will take the Federal Standard Deduction and the amount for this tax won't be used, but it most assuredly wrecks havoc with my record keeping! It also reduces credibility of the software. In lieu of a bug fix, I'll be adding my actual value based car tax to the 'Registration fee' line to get the tax to the Schedule A form for my records, as others noted, TurboTax just adds them all up and puts them on Schedule A, line 5c.
