Freelancing and getting taxes taken out up front instead of end of year?
"It seems that you think you are freelancing, and they think you are an employee. What's bad for you, the tax office will also think you are an employee if they withhold tax for you. Alternatively, they think you are stupid, and they keep the money, but are actually not paying it to the tax office at all, in which case you will have a bad surprise when you do your tax returns.  First, I'd ask them for proof that they are indeed paying these taxes into some account related to you. I'd then ask a tax adviser for some serious advice. If they are acting out of incompetence and not out of malice, then you should be mostly fine, but your work there will count as employment.  Heaven knows why they treat you as an employee. Check your contract with them; whether it is between you and them or your company and them. It maybe that they never hired a contractor and believe that they have to pay employment tax. They don't. If your company sends them a bill, then they need to pay that bill, 100% of it, and that's it. Taxes are fully your business and your responsibility. As ""quid"" said, if they say they are withholding tax, then at the very least there must be a paystub that proves they have actually been paying these taxes. If they withhold taxes, and there is no paystub, then this looks like a criminal attempt to cheat you.  If they have actually paid taxes properly into your account, then they are merely creating a mess that can hopefully be fixed. But it is probably complicated enough that you need a tax advisor, even if you had none before, since instead of paying to your company, they paid some money to the company, and some to you personally." Maybe I can explain a little clearer: Your LLC is not a person, and cannot have taxes withheld on its behalf. Therefore, anyone paying your company should not withhold taxes. If they are paying you directly, and withholding taxes, they are treating you as an employee, and will probably issue a W2 instead of a 1099.  Put it this way: Your LLC is a separate company providing services to that company. They shouldn't withhold taxes any more than they would when paying their ISP, or power company.
Yes, you need to include income from your freelance work on your tax return.  In the eyes of the IRS, this is self-employment income from your sole-proprietorship business. The reason you don't see it mentioned in the 1040EZ instructions is that you can't use the 1040EZ form if you have self-employment income.  You'll need to use the full 1040 form.  Your business income and expenses will be reported on a Schedule C or Schedule C-EZ, and the result will end up on Line 12 of the 1040.  Take a look at the requirements at the top of the C-EZ form; you probably meet them and can use it instead of the more complicated C form. If you have any deductible business expenses related to your freelance business, this would be done on Schedule C or C-EZ. If your freelance income was more than $400, you'll also need to pay self-employment tax.  To do this, you file Schedule SE, and the tax from that schedule lands on form 1040 Line 57. This is how a consulting engagement in India works. If you are registered for Service Tax and have a service tax number, no tax is deducted at source and you have to pay 12.36% to service tax department during filing (once a quarter). If you do not have Service tax number i.e. not registered for service tax, the company is liable to deduct 10% at source and give the same to Income Tax Dept. and give you a Form-16 at the end of the financial year. If you fall in 10% tax bracket, no further tax liability, if you are in 30%, 20% more needs to be paid to Income Tax Dept.(calculate for 20% tax bracket). The tax slabs given above are fine. If you fail to pay the remainder tax (if applicable) Income Tax Dept. will send you a demand notice, politely asking you to pay at the end of the FY. I would suggest you talk to a CA, as there are implications of advance tax (on your consulting income) to be paid once a quarter. You can use the ITR 1 and declare the income from freelancing as income from other sources. As part of freelancing, certain expenses can be deducted provided they are directly related to work and have proper records. Please consult a CA who can advice you on how to do this. The Actual income shown should be less of the expenses. If you are in the US and a regular employee, this will have to show up on your year-end W2 form as income. If it doesn't, there is some funky accounting business going and you should probably consult a professional for advice. "I agree with some of the points of the other answers but why not avoid all the guesswork? I highly recommend you not charge him now. Wait until the end of the year when you have much more information about both of your companies and then you can run the numbers both ways and decide if it would benefit you (collectively). If either of your businesses runs on a cash basis and you decide to invoice, just make sure the check is deposited before Dec 31. Update: If you want to do this for 2016, at least your husband's business would have to be using an accrual basis (since it's too late to take the deduction on a cash basis). Simply run the numbers both ways and see if it helps you. If it doesn't help enough to warrant it for 2016 you could rerun the numbers near the end of 2017 to see if it helps then. Diclaimer: I think it's OK to do this type of manipulation for the scenario you described since you have done (or are doing) the work and you are charging a reasonable fee, but realize that you shouldn't manipulate the amount of the invoice, or fabricate invoices. For example, you shouldn't ever think about such things as: ""If I invoice $50K instead of $3K, will that help us?""" "We will bill our clients periodically and will get paid monthly. Who are ""we""? If you're not employed - you're not the one doing the work or billing the client. Would IRS care about this or this should be something written in the   policy of our company. For example: ""Every two months profits get   divided 50/50"" They won't. S-Corp is a pass-through entity. We plan to use Schedule K when filing taxes for 2015. I've never filled a schedule K before, will the profit distributions be reflected on this form? Yes, that is what it is for. We might need extra help in 2015, so we plan to hire an additional   employee (who will not be a shareholder). Will our tax liability go   down by doing this? Down in what sense? Payroll is deductible, if that's what you mean.  Are there certain other things that should be kept in mind to reduce the tax liability? Yes. Getting a proper tax adviser (EA/CPA licensed in your State) to explain to you what S-Corp is, how it works, how payroll works, how owner-shareholder is taxed etc etc." The only way you will incur underpayment penalties is if you withhold less than 90% of the current year's tax liability or 100% of last years tax liability (whichever is smaller).  So as long as your total tax liability last year (not what you paid at filing, but what you paid for the whole year) was more than $1,234, you should not have any penalty. What you pay (or get back) when you file will be your total tax liability less what was withheld. For example, you had $1,234 withheld from your pay for taxes.  If after deduction and other factors, your tax liability is $1,345, you will owe $111 when you file.  On the other hand, if your tax liability is only $1,000, you'll get a refund of $234 when you file, since you've had more withheld that what you owe. Since your income was only for part of the year, and tax tables assume that you make that much for the whole year, I would suspect that you over-withheld during your internship, which would offset the lack of withholding on the other $6,000 in income. HMRC calls it: Averaging for creators of literary or artistic works, and it is the averaging of your profits for 2 successive years. It's helpful in situations like you describe, where income can fluctuate wildly from year to year, the linked article has the full detail, but some of the requirements are: You can use averaging if: you’re self-employed or in a partnership, and the business started   before 6 April 2014 and didn’t end in the 2015 to 2016 tax year  your   profits are wholly or mainly from literary, dramatic, musical or   artistic works or from designs  you or your business partner (if you’re   in a partnership) created the works personally. Additionally: Check that your profit for the poorer year, minus any adjusted amounts, is less than 75% of the figure for your better year. If it is, you can use averaging. Then, check if the difference between your profits for the 2 years is more than 30% of your profit for the better year. If it is, work out the average by adding together the profits for the 2 years, and divide the total by 2. Depending on how much freelance work we're talking about you could set up a limited company, with you and your wife as directors. By invoicing all your work through the limited company (which could have many other benefits for you, an accountant/advisor would... well, advise...) it's the company earning the money, not you or her personally. You can then pay your wife up to £10,000 per year (as of writing this) without income tax kicking in. You would probably have to pay yourself a small amount to minimise exposure to HMRC's snooping, but possibly not... as far as I'm aware the rules do not state anything about working for free, for yourself - and I wouldn't worry about the ethics, you're already paying plenty into HMRC's bank account through your day job! Some good information here if you're interested: https://www.whitefieldtax.co.uk/web/psc-guide/pscguide-how-does-it-all-work-in-practice-salaries-and-dividends/ Your freelance income will not qualify you for the work-from-home deductions, for that you would need a T2200 form signed by your employer. But, you are allowed to be self employed as a sole-proprietorship while still being an employee of another company. If you take that route, you'll be able to write-off even more expenses than those you linked to. Things like a portion of your internet bill can be claimed, for example. But note that these deductions would only apply to offset the self-employment income, so if you're not earning very much from the freelance work, it might not be worth all the hassle. Filing taxes when self-employed is definitely more complicated, and many people will get professional tax preparation help - at least for the first time. This is wrong.  It should be  or  Now, to get back to self-employment tax.  Self-employment tax is weird.  It's a business tax.  From the IRS perspective, any self-employed person is a business.  So, take your income X and divide by 1.0765 (6.2% Social Security and 1.45% Medicare).  This gives your personal income.  Now, to calculate the tax that you have to pay, multiply that by .153 (since you have to pay both the worker and employer shares of the tax).   So new calculation  or they actually let you do  which is better for you (smaller).   And your other calculations change apace.   And like I said, you can simplify Q1se to  and your payment would be  Now, to get to the second quarter.  Like I said, I'd calculate the income through the second quarter.  So recalculate A based on your new numbers and use that to calculate Q2i.   or  Note that this includes income from both the first and second quarters.  We'll reduce to just the second quarter later.  This also has you paying for all of June even though you may not have been paid when you make the withholding payment.  That's what they want you to do.   But we aren't done yet.  Your actual payment should be  or  Because Q2ft and Q2se are what you owe for the year so far.  Q1ft + Q1se is what you've already paid.  So you subtract those from what you need to pay in the second quarter.  In future quarters, this would be  All that said, don't stress about it.  As a practical matter, so long as you don't owe $1000 or more when you file your actual tax return, they aren't going to care.  So just make sure that your total payments match by the payment you make January 15th.   I'm not going to try to calculate for the state.  For one thing, I don't know if your state uses Q1i or Q1pi as its base.  Different states may have different rules on that.  If you can't figure it out, just use Q1i, as that's the bigger one.  Fix it when you file your annual return.  The difference in withholding is going to be relatively small anyway, less than 1% of your income. I took littleadv's advice and talked to an accountant today. Regardless of method of payment, my US LLC does not have to withhold taxes or report the payment as payments to contractors (1099/1042(S)) to the IRS; it is simply a business expense.  He said this gets more complicated if the recipient is working in the US (regardless of nationality), but that is not my case You can and are supposed to report self-employment income on Schedule C (or C-EZ if eligible, which a programmer likely is) even when the payer isn't required to give you 1099-MISC (or 1099-K for a payment network now). From there, after deducting permitted expenses, it flows to 1040 (for income tax) and Schedule SE (for self-employment tax). See https://www.irs.gov/individuals/self-employed for some basics and lots of useful links. If this income is large enough your tax on it will be more than $1000, you may need to make quarterly estimated payments (OR if you also have a 'day job' have that employer increase your withholding) to avoid an underpayment penalty. But if this is the first year you have significant self-employment income (or other taxable but unwithheld income like realized capital gains) and your economic/tax situation is otherwise unchanged -- i.e. you have the same (or more) payroll income with the same (or more) withholding -- then there is a 'safe harbor': if your withholding plus estimated payments this year is too low to pay this year's tax but it is enough to pay last year's tax you escape the penalty. (You still need to pay the tax due, of course, so keep the funds available for that.) At the end of the first year when you prepare your return you will see how the numbers work out and can more easily do a good estimate for the following year(s). A single-member LLC or 'S' corp is usually disregarded for tax purposes, although you can elect otherwise, while a (traditional) 'C' corp is more complicated and AIUI out-of-scope for this Stack; see https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/business-structures for more. Not as you suggest. Since you are sole prop, you are taxed on a cash basis. Within reason, you can prepay vendors - so temp to hire through an agency might appear more attractive than direct hire. But there needs to be a justification other than avoidance of taxes. So pre-paying 100k on 12/25 would look fishy as fuck. Plus your quality of candidate will suffer if you need anything other than low skill labor.  Look at your other fully deductible expenses - anything you can prepay-prepay. For example, I set my liability insurance renewal January 15 to provide optionality. But it just shifts one year into another .. Means fuckall if you are in the same marginal bracket next year.  The IRS has also relaxed depreciation on office technology. Computers are now fully deductible rather than being capitalized.  @ 500k revenue you should have a CPA and legal counsel. Simply incorporating isn't tax magic. The purpose is to limit yourersonal liability, not a tax shelter - but shitty things happen once you have employees, don't create the potential for a disgruntled employee lawsuit put your shelter at risk of court judgment.  That said, assuming you aren't dumping a hypothetical on the Internet, congrats - for all the headaches, having employees is the ultimate leverage .. it's like a xerox machine for your labor (including loss of fidelity with each copy) .. Not correct. First - when you say they don't tax the reimbursement, they are classifying it in a way that makes it taxable to you (just not withholding tax at that time).  In effect, they are under-withholding, if these reimbursement are high enough, you'll have not just a tax bill, but penalties for not paying enough all year.  My reimbursements do not produce any kind of pay stub, they are a direct deposit, and are not added to my income, not as they occur, nor at year end on W2.  Have you asked them why they handle it this way? It's wrong, and it's costing you.