Divorced, separated or widowed in 2024? How it will affect your tax return

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Rachel Barber, USA TODAY

Mon, Apr 7, 2025, 2:03 AM 3 min read

Many factors and beingness changes tin impact your taxation returns, and experts accidental becoming recently azygous is 1 of the astir significant.

If you were widowed, separated, oregon got divorced from your spouse successful 2024, it’s apt going to impact your tax instrumentality and refund. Though everyone’s circumstances are different, experts counsel it’s usually a bully clip to beryllium down with a fiscal planner oregon taxation professional, particularly if dependents and shared assets are involved.

“The details matter. Keeping the records matter,” said Jackson Hewitt’s elder vice president and main taxation serviceman Mark Steber. “Dealing with a taxation pro matters.”

From a alteration successful filing presumption to however to program for adjacent year, present are experts’ tips for recently azygous taxpayers:

More: What is the mean taxation refund? Why yours mightiness beryllium little oregon higher

If you’re recently single, you're apt utilized to filing joined jointly oregon filing joined separately.

Remember this date - Dec. 31, 2024. That's the day that matters. If you were legally joined erstwhile the caller twelvemonth hit, your presumption options stay the same. However, if you were legally divorced oregon separated earlier 2025 hit, adjacent if the paperwork was processed in December, they’ll beryllium different.

You present person 2 options: filing azygous oregon arsenic a caput of household. The azygous filing presumption applies to anyone who is unmarried, divorced, oregon legally separated. But if you person children oregon dependents, you whitethorn privation to record arsenic a caput of household. To record with this status, you’ll request to beryllium you paid much than fractional of your surviving expenses for yourself and a qualifying babelike successful 2024.

“If you person an eligible kid successful the home, filing arsenic caput of household is going to beryllium much advantageous,” said Andy Phillips, vice president of the Tax Institute astatine H&R Block. “Larger modular deduction, amended taxation rates, things similar that.”

If your spouse died during 2024, you tin inactive record a joined associated taxation instrumentality successful 2025. If your spouse died during the past 2 years and you person a babelike child, you tin record arsenic a qualifying surviving spouse.

For the champion outcome, experts said it’s perfect if exes enactment unneurotic to find who volition assertion dependents and related credits connected their taxation return. In immoderate cases, parents tin divided taxation benefits utilizing the custodial genitor signifier 8342, but it’s much communal for 1 to assertion them.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Building is seen connected February 20, 2025 successful Washington, DC. The Internal Revenue Service volition statesman laying disconnected astir 6,000 employees successful the mediate of taxation play arsenic the Trump medication pushes to downsize the national workforce done the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

This determination is often determined and spelled retired successful a divorcement oregon separation agreement. If it is not, and exes cannot travel to an statement connected their own, the IRS volition person 3 questions for them to answer.