y Friday. You expect to pay your employee $1,900 or more for the year. You should withhold $7.65 from each $100 wage payment and pay your employee the remaining $92.35. The $7.65 is the sum of $6.20 ($100 x 6.2%) for your employee's share of Social Security tax and $1.45 ($100 x 1.45%) for your employee's share of Medicare tax (for wages under $200,000 for single filers). You will pay $7.65 you withhold with $7.65 from your own funds when you pay the taxes.
Not Withholding the Employee's Share
If you prefer to pay your employee's Social Security and Medicare taxes from your own funds, you do not have to withhold them from your employee's wages. The Social Security and Medicare taxes you pay to cover your employee's share must be included in the employee's wages for income tax purposes. However, they are not counted as Social Security and Medicare wages or as federal unemployment (FUTA) wages.
Example: You hire a household employee (who is an unrelated individual over age 18) to care for your child and agree to pay cash wages of $100 every Friday. You expect to pay your employee $1,900 or more for the year. You decide to pay your employee's share of Social Security and Medicare taxes from your own funds. You pay your employee $100 every Friday without withholding any Social Security or Medicare taxes. For each wage payment you will pay $15.30 when you pay the taxes. This is $7.65 ($6.20 for Social Security tax plus $1.45 for Medicare tax) to cover your employee's share plus the $7.65 for your share. For income tax purposes, your employee's wages each payday are $107.65 ($100 plus the $7.65 that you will pay to cover your employee's share of Social Security and Medicare taxes).
The federal unemployment tax is part of the federal and state program under the Federal Unemployment Tax Act (FUTA) that pays unemployment compensation to workers who lose their jobs. Like most employers, you may owe both the federal unemployment tax (the FUTA tax) and a state unemployment tax. Or, you may owe only the FUTA tax or only the state unemployment tax. To find out whether you will owe state unemployment tax, contact your state's unemployment tax agency. See the list of state unemployment agencies at the end of this Guide for the address.
The FUTA tax is 6.0% of your employee's FUTA wages. However, you may be able to take a credit of up to 5.4% against the FUTA tax, resulting in a net tax rate of 0.6%. Your credit for 2014 is limited unless you pay all the required contributions for 2014 to your state unemployment fund by April 15, 2015. The credit you can take for any contributions for 2014 that you pay after April 15, 2015, is limited to 90% of the credit that would have been allowable if the contributions were paid by April 15, 2015.
WARNING: Do not withhold the FUTA tax from your employee's wages. You must pay it from your own funds.
You figure the FUTA tax on the FUTA wages you pay. If you pay cash wages to all of your household employees totaling $1,000 or more in any calendar quarter of 2013 or 2014, the first $7,000 of cash wages you pay to each household employee in 2014 is FUTA wages. (A calendar quarter is January through March, April through June, July through September, or October through December.) If your employee's cash wages reach $7,000 during the year, do not figure the FUTA tax on any wages you pay that employee during the rest of the year. For a discussion of "cash wages," see the section on Social Security Wages, above.
If you pay less than $1,000 cash wages in each calendar quarter of 2014, but you had a household employee in 2013, the cash wages you pay in 2013 may still be FUTA wages. They are FUTA wages if the cash wages you paid to household employees in any calendar quarter of 2013 totaled $1,000 or more.
Do not count wages you pay to any of the following individuals as FUTA wages:
- Your spouse.
- Your child who is under age 21.
- Your parent.
Example: You hire a household employee (not related to you) on January 1, 2014, and agree to pay cash wages of $200 every Friday. During January, February, and March, you