Question about marriage and how it affects taxes if both members earn high income in NYC (Brooklyn)
Hello Accountant Redditors,
I hope all is well. My fiance and I have been going back and forth on how we should handle making official our marriage - we see marriage as a choice and the need for documentation with the government almost seems unnecessary (fully aware this is an opinion but not the topic of debate for this post so I respectfully ask we don’t dig into this part unless helpful to the main question). Long story short, we have rings and did the whole proposal thing and are living together and all that you would expect from a married couple. We just didn’t officially sign for the government piece - mainly due to these rumors we hear from our work colleagues about a marriage penalty tax. I wanted to ask about this because I do want to officially get married now but just not sure what to expect or what our options might be and if the feedback we’ve heard was even true.
For context, we earn a decent combined income - hers around 185k annually (hospital worker; eligible for overtime) and myself around 240k (salary all in), employed in NYC. We heard that from coworkers that if we get married officially we’ll have to pay a ton in marriage penalty taxes but some sources say the amount would be insignificant.
Ultimately, my question is what should we expect? I would want to avoid being surprised come next April and so we can start saving now for it but is it really that tolling? Some folks have mentioned it could be tens of thousands of dollars. Like 40k. That seems steep and unheard of but maybe it’s like one of those things that just don’t get talked about in society (like money. People don’t talk about it really).
Any thoughts or help/ advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!