Why is my 401 solo retirement "catch up" contribution for people 50 or older of $6000 not showing up in the self employed total amount? My employer matching is $43,304.

[dmertz]

Why do you think it's not showing up in the total?  A regular elective deferral of $19,000 plus a $6,000 catch-up plus a $43,304 employer contribution would be way over the maximum permissible total of $62,000 for employee and employer contributions combined for someone over age 50.  If you use the Maximize function in TurboTax, TurboTax would calculate a regular elective deferral of $19,000, a catch-up of $6,000, leaving a maximum permissible employer contribution of $37,000, assuming that you have a minimum of somewhere around $196,000 of net profit.

To see if the $6,000 is in the total you could try temporarily changing your year of birth in TurboTax to 1980 to make TurboTax think you are under age 50 and see if your self-employed retirement deduction drops.

[Coco2222]

Where did you get the $19000 deferral number?  (I never included $19000 in my question.) My combined matching profit sharing number is $43,304.

FIY, I spoke to Turbo Tax specialist and the specialist told me that there is a bug in the Turbo Tax system.  There is no  way for Turbo Tax software to add the "catch up for people 50 and older contribution to the total Solo 401 K contribution.  I was advised that I would have to print out the form and manually add the $6000  Solo 401 K catch up amount to the printed form, but that Turbo Tax could not do the final tax calculations for me. So it would be a total waste of my time to use Turbo Tax for a Solo 401 K catch up contribution. I wish that Turbo Tax would post that information to the public, but I am guessing that they want to keep it hidden so as to not scare potential users away.

[dmertz]

"There is no  way for Turbo Tax software to add the "catch up for people 50 and older contribution to the total Solo 401 K contribution."

That sounds like nonsense to me.  I've never found that to be the case; I've never had any trouble entering catch-up contributions in the box provided for entering catch-up contributions.  What TurboTax seems unable to do is accommodate special catch-up contributions to 403(b) and 457(b) plans, but these don't apply to a 401(k).  It seems that the TurboTax representative was confused and might have been thinking about these special catch-up contributions.

I don't know why you would treat any of your elective deferral as catch-up if you have not already made the full $19,000 of regular elective deferral for 2019.  That's why I assumed that you had also had made a $19,000 regular elective deferral.  Or did you make an elective deferral of $12,696 so that your total regular contributions is $56,000?  If you use TurboTax's Maximize function for an individual 401(k) contribution, 2019 TurboTax allocates the first $19,000 of net earnings first to the regular elective deferral, the next $37,000 to the employer contribution and the last $6,000 to the catch-up elective deferrals by implementing the worksheet in Chapter 5 of IRS Pub 560.

Are you a sole proprietor reporting on Schedule C or F or a partner in a partnership who receives a Schedule K-1 (Form 1065)?  In the case where you are allocating retirement contributions reported with code R in box 13 of a Schedule K-1 (Form 1065), you just allocate between elective deferrals and employer contributions without separating elective deferrals into regular and catch-up elective deferrals.