Which tax option is best for married couple earning 28k each

Sammett

Hello,

We are married and each of us earn 28k for a year. Seperate or joint? Which one should we choose to avoid more tax cut? I guess seperate would be better but I am not sure. Can you help me to decide please? Thanks in advance.

wench

Go for joint. At that salary level there probably isn't any difference, but it will never be worse than single, and can make life easier later.

dudara

Moved from the Help desk to the Taxation forum

dudara

namenotavailablE

I'd second what wench said- 'joint assessment' is the way to go but at the specific salary values it isn't of any additional value.

It's advantageous if one person is above €34550 and the other below.

Sammett

I've found a tax calculator and as far as I understand if we choose single we would save 2.640 euro for a year. Is this correct or am I missing something because you both advice joint assesment?

I cannot post links or images as I am a new user it says. So if you search for "tax world ie joint tax comparison tool" you can see the calculation. Thanks for your help. Appreciated.

namenotavailablE

That calculator url]https://www.taxworld.ie/joint-tax-comparison-tool/[/url seems to have an error.

It is taxing the 'increase' (€13200, where you enter €28000 for both higher and lower earner) at the higher 40% rate under the joint assessment option. If you refer to the 'tax rates and bands' table shown on this page url]https://revenue.ie/en/personal-tax-credits-reliefs-and-exemptions/tax-relief-charts/index.aspx[/url you can see that a jointly assessed couple are taxed at 20% on the first €42800 of income with the possibility of increasing that by up to €24800 [in 2017] at 20%. Any amount over the sum of €42800 + increase is taxed at 40%.
The taxworld calculator is applying the 40% rate instead instead of the 20% rate- seems to be a bug, I'd guess.