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Level 2

Question

I am a part-year resident of PA but my husband is a PA resident. We'd like to file jointly for federal, can we file separately for PA? If so, how to do that in turbotax?

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
July 6, 2020
1 reply
0 views

I moved from PA to CA for a new job late 2019, my husband stayed in PA to finish his Phd.

We are filing jointly for federal tax.

For PA tax, seems that we can either file jointly as residents, or we can file separately.

However, when we were trying to file separately for PA tax in turbotax, it doesn't seem to allow me using different residency status for me and my husband.

Is that not allowed by PA return? Or it's turbo tax not supporting it?

TurboTax Premier Online

Employee Tax Expert

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It depends.

Filing as Married Filing Jointly usually provides the greatest tax benefits of the higher standard deduction and lower tax rates. 

However, both of these states do give you the option to file separately for state purposes. Since you have a different residency period for PA, you will be able to file separately there.

Generally, in California you need to file using the same filing status as you use for federal purposes.  However there is an exception if your nonresident spouse does not have any California source income.  Since this the case for you, you would be able to file as Married Filing Separately for California.

See the following link for instructions on how to prepare the Married Filing Separate returns for the states. You will need to create mock state returns using the instructions in the link below You will need to mail the state returns in as well.

How to File MFJ for Federal but separately for state

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ziziAuthor

Level 2

Thanks for the reply!

My husband actually has CA income from his internship.

I digged around a little bit into both state's policies. This is what I ended up doing:

CA:

as stated in https://www.ftb.ca.gov/file/personal/residency-status/part-year-and-nonresident.html

"A nonresident return is required when a resident spouse and a nonresident spouse wish to file a joint return."

Since my husband is not a CA resident, we filed jointly for a nonresident return.

PA:
as stated in https://www.revenue.pa.gov/FormsandPublications/FormsforIndividuals/PIT/Documents/dfo-02.pdf page 17.

"However, you can file jointly if you both elect to file as PA residents and meet all other requirements for filing jointly."

We elect to both file as PA residents and used our taxed paid to CA as credit.

Level 15

Glad you got it sorted out and were able to file your returns and claim your credits!

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