My wife and I are active duty military. I am a resident of Iowa and her of Virginia. How do I file separate state returns online?

Here's a brief overview of the procedure, see the sections below for detailed steps:

1. Prepare one married filing jointly (MFJ) return to file with the IRS.
2. Prepare a mock married filing separate (MFS) return for each taxpayer. This is for your records only and will be used to generate separate state returns for each person. The mock federal returns are not filed.
3. Then, for the first taxpayer, label and use the first mock MFS federal return to prepare their state MFS return. Use only their income and their half of the deductions from the MFJ federal return.
   • This ensures that TurboTax only transfers the first taxpayer's income to their married filing separate state return.
4. File this MFS state return, not the mock federal return that it pulls the information from.
5. For the second taxpayer (spouse), label and use the second "mock" MFS federal return to prepare their state MFS return. Again, use only their income and their half of the deductions from the MFJ federal return.
6. File the second MFS state return, not the second mock federal return that it pulls the information from.

 

For more details, please refer to this help article.

Intuit can't program something to do that for us?  This is horribly complicated.

Yes, you are correct it is complicated and TurboTax can't know which income belongs to which spouse in which state.  Couple that with each state has its own rules for allowing a different filing status from the federal filing status.  Plus all the states begin with the Federal Adjusted Gross Income to calculate their state tax so the federal has to be done for each state.  

 

To simplify you might consider for the future changing resident states to be the same for both of you. 

 

See your finance/legal office for details on how to make that change. 

 

It could be even more simple if you both change to a state that does not have a state income tax.  If you are stationed in one of those states (Alaska, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and Wyoming) it's fairly easy to change your residence to that state.

 

 

 

 

 

 

So VA requires your federal tax form to be filed with it, so File the MFJ Federal return with the MFS State return?

 

BTW in the response to the other Kyle, it said that Turbo Tax doesn't know who to attribute income to, yet it does ask ask the question "Who's income is this? Spouse 1 or Spouse 2" for some forms of income. It is just inconsistent so it doesn't gather the total picture.

VA does not require/need a copy of your federal return. See page 7 of the VA instructions for "Assembling your return" for mailing.