Updating W4 Form

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
May 24, 2023
1 reply
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How do I change my W4 so I don’t owe taxes for 2023?

FrankU201

Employee Tax Expert

Hi lbryant23,

You can use our W-4 calculator tool to calculate your W-4 numbers. You can print out a blank W-4 form and after you have filled it out, you will submit it to your employer's HR department.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) became law in late 2017 and significantly changed how the federal income tax system works. The TCJA made several changes, including

removing personal exemptions
increasing the standard deduction
making the child tax credit available to more people

However, the new tax changes don't always work well with the previous version of Form W-4.

The older version relied on calculating a number of allowances that were then used, along with any additional withholding amount desired, to figure out how much federal income tax to withhold from your paycheck.
The allowance system was tied to the use of exemptions and deductions on your tax return.

When these exemptions deductions were removed in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the Form W-4 no longer estimated the correct amount that needed to be withheld from paychecks as well as it used to.

The first step the IRS implemented was to change the withholding tables. Employers use these tables along with the information on your Form W-4 to calculate federal income tax withholding.