Estimated Taxes

This job is not withholding taxes from her pay. I have to do estimated taxes.

to in which to base the taxes from.

she had no income for the first 2 quarters. I am unsure how to start estimated taxes from the middle of the year.

Assuming she is paid weekly:

Take her gross pay, multiply it by the number of weeks she will be working this year. Add 10% of the amount.

Take a 2016 1040 form (or whatever you used to pay taxes in 2016). Fill out the tax form using your salary and all other income, each increased by

10%. Calculate the total tax for both of you. Subtract the tax you will have withheld this year (weekly tax paid multiplied by 52) to estimate the amount of tax her income.

Don't forget to do the state tax and any others you usually do.

/BAH

Is she an employee? If so, the company MUST withhold taxes unless her expected earnings are trivially small.

Employers love to claim that their employees are "independent contractors" so that they can avoid paying their share of Social Security and other taxes. Whether she's an employee, legally, is a complicated question. I'll assume she's not, just for this discussion.

I don't understand why that's an obstacle. Use your expected income and her expected income, and your expected deductions. Remember that to avoid a penalty you don't need to come out exactly right; you just need to owe less than $1000 more than your withholding. (There are other safe harbors, but in any case I doubt you'll want to have to come up with more than an extra $1000 at tax time.)

You need form 1040-ES from the IRS Web site. The worksheet on page 8 should not take you very long to fill out.

(It's a separate row in the table, not part of form 1040.) If she's not an employee, then she will have to pay Social Security tax of 2 times 7.65% times 92.35% of her earnings up to $127,200. This corresponds to the employer's and employee's shares. Include that in your estimate, on line 11 of the worksheet.

There are a couple of choices.

You can "annualize" (see Form 2210), where your June, September, and January payments are based on income through the end of May, August, and December.

Or -- and this is simpler -- if you're planning to file as married filing jointly, you can simply increase your own withholding so that by the end of the year enough will have been withheld to cover the tax on both your combined total income. The IRS considers withholding to have been paid evenly throughout the year, regardless of when it was actually paid, so then you would not need to make estimated payments.

Whether to file as married filing jointly, or married filing separately, is not always obvious. The IRS has a calculator at

to help you decide. (I haven't used it.) It may say "2016", but the answer should apply to 2017 as well. You'll want to decide again for 2018, assuming your wife keeps her job, because the answer may be different when she has a larger share of household income.

There's a full discussion of this issue in IRS Publication 15-A, which you can get here: