TurboTax® Live Assisted 2023-2024 See How Expert Help Works
After you’ve told TurboTax about all your income items, it’s time to get to the good stuff — deductions and credits. TurboTax is a top-of-the-line tax software, but it doesn’t come cheap and tends to upsell users on various services. TurboTax Free Edition (and TurboTax Live Basic) are intended for taxpayers with very simple returns that can fit on the new 1040 form without any schedules. Once you start working on your return, TurboTax will run you through a series of Q&A-style and fill-in-the-blank questions and import documents (e.g., W-2, 1099s) automatically where possible to eliminate time-consuming manual entry. H&R Block also offers desktop software, where your return doesn’t reside in the cloud, but it’s not part of our review.
- For instance, if you are a taxpayer with investments in cryptocurrency, there is a clear TurboTax version for you.
- And while our site doesn’t feature every company or financial product available on the market, we’re proud that the guidance we offer, the information we provide and the tools we create are objective, independent, straightforward — and free.
- Once you finish your federal return, TurboTax will automatically transfer your information and give you the option of adding on a state return for an extra charge.
- You may see this option after starting with Live Full Service if it’s available in your area.
If at any time you want to be matched to a new expert, you can inform your current expert and they’ll help you get reassigned.Where available, you will have the option to choose an independent Intuit TurboTax Verified Pro. You may see this option after starting with Live Full Service if it’s available in your area. You can speak to your tax expert on the phone, through a live turbotax live deluxe one-way video call on your screen (you can see your tax expert, but they can’t see you), or in-person with an independent Intuit TurboTax Verified Pro where available. Your tax expert will ask you questions and provide advice as they prepare your return and get ready to file on your behalf. You can also communicate with your tax expert via the messaging center as needed.
Assisted I Deluxe
After starting in Live Full Service, we’ll ask you some questions to learn about your tax situation and create a personalized tax planner for you. This tax planner helps you know what docs you’ll need so you can gather them https://turbo-tax.org/ and start securely uploading them to your TurboTax account. TurboTax Self-Employed includes all of the features of the other TurboTax versions as well as some important extras for taxpayers who work for themselves.
Wages & Income
A simple click in the left nav bar switches the interface from English to Spanish. These prices reflect the list prices advertised as of April 19, 2023, without any discounts that TurboTax may offer to people who file early in the tax filing season. If you want to pay your filing fee out of your federal refund, TurboTax charges an extra $39 refund processing fee for the convenience.
Cost: TurboTax’s prices
Not only does it tally up your estimated bill or refund, but it also provides a detailed breakdown of what factors are currently affecting it. This means that investors who formerly used TurboTax Premier will now need to use Premium, regardless of whether they need help with self-employment taxes — which might be a sticking point for some filers moving forward. Investment reporting and rental income (Schedules D and E, and K-1s), plus business income, expenses on a Schedule C, home office deductions and features for freelancers. The TurboTax service has responsive design, making it easy to navigate across mobile apps, mobile browser, and desktop browser.
The upsell I was shown during my first test return was for TurboTax Max audit protection. Unlike some tax software that gives you a free federal return but then makes you pay to file your state return, the TurboTax Free Edition is free for both your federal and state returns. With its intuitive design and variety of human support options, TurboTax is, in many ways, the standard for the do-it-yourself tax-prep industry. Its products come at a price, however, and confident filers might find that similar offerings from competitors may provide a better value.
TurboTax Review: The bottom line
You can receive your refund by check, whether you’re printing or e-filing. Your tax expert will be able to see a read-only version of your tax return to assist them in addressing your questions. Your personal information (like SSN) will be masked so the expert can’t see it. TurboTax Self-Employed can be upgraded to TurboTax Live Self-Employed. The upgrades gives customers access to unlimited tax advice and an expert final review.
Go here for more info on which forms are included in TurboTax Free Edition. Small businesses get a boost with the new TurboTax Live Full Service Business Tax, which handles LLCs, S-corps and partnerships. Here’s a look at where TurboTax excels and how much it costs to help you decide whether you might want to file with it in 2022.
Embedded links on each screen offer tips, explain different income, deductions, and tax credits. Like all TurboTax software, Premier aims to give customers the biggest tax break possible. TurboTax Premier searches for more than 450 tax deductions and credits to find qualifying tax breaks.
After you finish inputting your deductions, TurboTax will let you know whether — based, of course, on the information you provided — taking the standard deduction or itemizing your deductions would make the most sense. On another screen, you’ll be asked whether or not certain tax events happened in your life during the year (or example, whether or not you had a child). Be sure to click “Show More” at the bottom to be sure you don’t miss anything. Other taxpayers, however, may not be well-served by, say, upgrading from the Free Edition to the Premium Edition. Finally we have the Self-Employed Edition, which accommodates even the most complicated self-employment situations reported on Schedule C.
You’ll start with adding personal info (name, birthday, Social Security number, occupation, residency — including if you lived somewhere part-time – and military status), dependent info, and the like. After reviewing all of the personal info, TurboTax plugged an optional $49 upgrade for its theft-monitoring and audit-defense service. Once I declined this, we finally moved into the federal return. Onboarding continued even before I logged in, asking how I filed taxes last year; the answer will customize your experience once you log in. Prior users of TurboTax or other Intuit online products (QuickBooks, Mint) log into the service with their Intuit credentials; new customers have to create an account.
Although TurboTax isn’t the cheapest tax filing option for most users, it’s extremely user-friendly with a user interface and various features that make tax filing easy. If you want to make tax season even more hands-off, you can always upgrade to a full-service package. Yes,but only for simple filers (generally, this means W-2 income, claiming the standard deduction, and potentially the Earned Income Tax Credit and child tax credit). If you have a more complex return, you will pay $59 to $64 to file each state tax return. A Form 1040 return with limited credits is one that’s filed using IRS Form 1040 only (with the exception of the specific covered situations described below).
