Recently married non-resident of California. Do I have to file CA income tax return?

[ruttitutti]

I was recently married in March 2017. I am an OR resident and the husband was a CA resident. He later became an OR resident in July 2017. 

He has no income from OR and I have no income from CA. 

CA requires that he file taxes (obviously since he has CA income and was a partial CA resident in 2017), likely will be married filed separately.

1) Do I have to file for CA taxes as well? Even if I’m a non-resident with zero CA income?

2) If “yes” to the first question, then can we file CA as married filing separately and OR as married filing jointly?

Thanks 

[TomD8]

California requires that you use the same filing status on your CA return that you use on your federal return.  Assuming that you file MFJ on your federal return, you would file California Form 540NR (the form for CA non-residents and part-year residents), using filing status MFJ.  Since you were never a CA resident, CA will not tax your OR-source income.  (That income, of course, is taxable by OR.)

(Note: California is a community property state.  Any income your husband earned after becoming married and while still domiciled in CA , would be considered community property income and thus split equally between the two spouses.  Therefore you might technically have some CA-source income even though you never lived or worked in CA.)

[ruttitutti]

Thanks for the response TomD8, you bring up a great point about community property state.

I remembers there were two caveats to filing differently than federal returns for CA.

1) One spouse is active military or
2) One spouse was a nonresident for the entire year and had no income
from California sources during the tax year.

The second exception above does not apply if the spouse with California source income is domiciled in a community property state, unless the income is separate income.

So that would mean I may have community income when my husband worked in CA from the time we were married to the time he quit his job (March to June 2017)?

And I’m unclear if we have separate incomes as defined by CA

[TomD8]

"If the spouse earning the  California source income is domiciled in a community property state,  community income will be split equally between the spouses . Both spouses will have California source income and they will not qualify for the nonresident spouse exception."  Page 3, California Form 540NR instruction booklet.  
<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="https://www.ftb.ca.gov/forms/2016/16_540nrbk.pdf">https://www.ftb.ca.gov/forms/2016/16_540nrbk.pdf</...>