My wife and I worked in AR for first two months. Then I moved to CA in March while she stayed in AR and worked there. How should we file our state returns?

[ThomasM125 · Accepted solution]

You can file your federal return as married-joint, which will probably be better for you as far as your federal taxes are concerned. You will have to file as married-separate on your state returns, however, since your resident status is different.

The only way to do this in TurboTax is to file as married joint on one program to generate your federal return, then prepare two more federal returns to generate your separate state returns.

You can do this more easily in the desktop version of TurboTax, since you can file multiple returns using one program, as opposed to needing to set up and pay for three different returns in the desktop version of TurboTax.

[amirr01]

Thanks for your reply. So do you mean that we should file 3 state returns? one for my AR, one for my CA and another one for her AR?

[ThomasM125]

Yes, that would be the correct thing to do, file three state returns. You could actually file as married-joint in Arkansas since you both lived there, but you may pay less tax if you filed separately.