[crznthndr]

Additional limitations if your household wages are more than $125,000

You can’t use Direct File if:

If your wages are more than $200,000 ($168,600 if you had more than one employer).

You file as Married Filing Jointly, and your spouse’s wages are more than $200,000 ($168,600 if your spouse had more than one employer).

You file as Married Filing Jointly, and you and your spouse's wages are more than $250,000.

You file as Married Filing Separately, and your wages are more than $125,000.

[underyx]

Why are these restrictions in place?

[dmoy]

Eyeballing it, I bet those specific restrictions are in place because:

$168.6k is suspiciously the same as the (2024) social security cap, so they probably didn't handle that edge case.

$250k is the start of NIIT, so they probably didn't handle that case either.

[underyx]

Thanks for the actual answer!

[jljljl]

Direct File was rolled out gradually as a pilot program. It was also only available for taxpayers in 12 states.

My guess: since the tax code is so complicated, they probably wanted to support the simplest and most common filing cases in the first release. Handling all the edge cases would delay the launch, and prevent them from collecting feedback. If the feedback and demand was positive for v1, they could expand the surface area in the future.

Unfortunately, it didn't last long enough

[3eb7988a1663]

Assuming I am reading this Census table correctly, 2023 Table A-2 [0] says 76% of the US has a household income under $150k. So as an initial deployment, covering 3/4 of the country as the first filter is not terrible.

[0] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2024/demo/income-poverty/...

[unsnap_biceps]

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