United States

Form W-4, in plain English.

Form W-4, the Employee's Withholding Certificate, is how a US employee tells their employer how much federal income tax to withhold from each paycheque. The redesigned form no longer uses withholding allowances. Instead it captures filing status, multiple-job adjustments, dependents, and other income or deductions. Employers keep the form on file rather than submitting it. Workzoom applies the W-4 inputs on every pay run from the employee's own record.

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How Form W-4 works.

A W-4 drives withholding only. It does not change what the employee ultimately owes, which is settled on their annual return. Employees can submit a new W-4 at any time, and the employer applies it to future pay runs rather than retroactively. When an employee provides no W-4, the employer must withhold as single with no adjustments. Because Workzoom holds the W-4 inputs on the single employee record, a mid-year change flows into the next pay run without a parallel spreadsheet.

Where Form W-4 goes wrong.

  1. The most common misread is treating the current W-4 like the old allowance-based version and hunting for a number of allowances that no longer exists.
  2. The second is the two-earner problem: households with multiple jobs routinely under-withhold because each employer calculates in isolation, and the multiple-jobs step on the form exists precisely to correct that.
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In the product

How Form W-4 runs on Workzoom.

Form W-4 is part of the Workzoom Payroll Suite. Workzoom runs HR, workforce, and talent on a single employee record across ten countries: Canada, the United States, the Bahamas, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Antigua and Barbuda, Anguilla, the Cayman Islands, and the United Kingdom. Full gross-to-net payroll runs live in Canada, the United States, and the Bahamas. Pricing starts at $4 per employee per suite per month.

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Related terms.

Questions about Form W-4

No. Employers keep Form W-4 on file and use it to calculate withholding. It is not submitted to the IRS as a routine filing, though the IRS can request it in specific circumstances.
As often as they need to. A new W-4 takes effect on future pay runs once the employer processes it, and it is not applied retroactively to earnings already paid.
The employer must withhold federal income tax as if the employee were single with no other adjustments, which usually results in higher withholding than the employee would otherwise choose.
Read more

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