I was wondering about that too. I took a closer look at what changes. When you increase a couple thousand in income the amount of tax credits and deductions curtail a noticeable amount. And if you are getting your health insurance with subsidies that couple thousand puts you further away from what you estimated when you applied for that subsidy. A couple thousand difference can give the illusion of a 350+ dollar difference easily with just the healthcare insurance subsidy issue. I imagine the further under 30,000 you are the more of an effect a couple thousand has.
I have a question regarding filing taxes for Mturk. What information do you have to put for the Business name and address?
I used Amazon Mechanical Turk as business name. I used my own address because that's where I work. If you prefer to use their address, you can Google that.
You put down your own address if you are working from home. If you put down Amazon's address you might get audited. Since this is self employment you can use your own name for the business and some sort of description of crowdsourcing and information processing as appropriate for the question.
Address - from the instructions to Schedule C: "If you conducted the business from your home located at the address shown on Form 1040, page 1, you do not have to complete this line" Name- from the actual form: "Business name: If no separate business name, leave blank" So just leave those lines blank unless you have incorporated, and/or turk from an office away from home.
Ok. This tax stuff is really hurting my brain. I thought it would be easy but looking at this makes me want to let a professional do it. What do I put for the Payer's information. I don't feel like I'm doing this right at all.
If you mean the payer of of your mturk income you shouldn't have to enter any info. If over $420 or so, took a decent amount of work and was intended for profit the IRS considers it self employment and subject to an extra 15% tax that goes to social security and medicare. You need to file schedules c and se in that case. As others have recommended, try taxact.com software. Their program will walk you through the steps and fill out all the required forms. The federal program is free and so is the e-filing. If you go that route, you will enter your mturk pay in the "business income" section.
Great choice, the best thing to do is to hire an accountant, or a tax expert, they maybe expensive, but they are worth paying for
Okay I have been on here too long to just now be figuring this out but I have made too much to ignore this now, can someone just tell me roughly about how much of each week's earnings should be put back, which I guess translates to what percentage of my turk income as a turk-only earner will I be expected to pay? Is it just 15%, or more? I plan on getting a tax guy at the end of the year but need to know what I should be putting away now.
It depends. Assuming you aren't at the cap for social security/ medicare contributions which is something like 100k a year total, you have to contribute both the employee and employer portion of those taxes. That comes out to a little over 15%. After that you still have to pay standard taxes as though it was income so would depend on your tax bracket. So 15%+whatever your tax bracket is.
I've been lurking this forum for a while as a worker and now am considering using mturk as a requestor (for research in grad school). As noone in my school has ever used mturk for research before, I'm kind of being a guinea pig. After getting hit hard by the commission changes (wtf Amazon?) I'm concerned if there are any other hidden fees I should let my school know about before requesting their funding. Namely do I have to pay any taxes as a requestor? Thanks in advance (and I hope I posted this in the right place, I would have started a new thread but am unable to)
Wow this seems to be really confusing, So I wonder if you make a few hundred dollars if it will help with your tax return if you are claiming a child. Unemployed is horrible.
O.k. so After reading the entire thread i think I am going to quit turking. I am unemployed and going to school and if I make a grand or a little more and end up having to pay back 4 hundred of it then it is not really worth it it seems.
If you're owing 400 dollars on 1000 with no other income, thus putting you in the lowest possible tax bracket, then you're doing it wrong. Trust me, you do not owe 40% in taxes unless your state's taxes are absurd (my state doesn't have an income tax, which isn't all good: sales tax puts a greater portion of the tax burden on the poor). The standard deduction would take care of most of your federal tax liability (max of 6,300 for most U.S. residents). And if that's the case, the added 8% in taxes from the self employment taxes would mean that you probably wouldn't even earn enough from entry level employment for it to be worth it. Such is the way in the United States, I guess.
K, so I have no other income I figure by the end of december I will pull in about 1000 from turking.. I also have educational credit as I am in school. Do you think it would take all my education credit from me? I know everyone says hire a professional but for such little income that would be crazy I think
Great thread but wow, I'm surprised this question hasn't been asked or answered here yet: Do all of you do the quarterly tax reporting for self employed? I'm just now starting to make enough money on turk to have to consider doing this in 2016. It seems very complex and annoying but it seems like it's supposed to be "mandatory" or else we get some kind of fines/have to pay even extra on yearly taxes if we don't do it. But if no one's talking about it here, it seems like maybe no one is doing it?