The purpose of this guide is to help you enter your proper income and qualified education expense data into Turbotax so that it generates an accurate tax return for you. This guide uses the free version of TurboTax.
Before you begin, please review the 2016 tax guide home page to gather all the forms you need. If you do not have documentation for all of your income (both compensatory and non-compensatory), you will need to do some calculations before you start entering data into TurboTax.
The common combinations of tax documents that grad students receive are:
- I received a W-2 for my stipend and a 1098-T for my scholarship income and qualified education expenses.
- I received a W-2 for my stipend and no documentation for my scholarship income and qualified education expenses.
- I received a 1098-T for my stipend and/or scholarship income and my qualified education expenses.
- I received no documentation for my stipend and/or scholarship income and qualified education expenses.
- I received a 1099-MISC for my stipend and a 1098-T for my scholarship income and qualified education expenses.
- I received a 1099-MISC for my stipend and no documentation for my scholarship income and qualified education expenses.
If you made estimated tax payments on your fellowship income, you will also need to enter your estimated tax payments into TurboTax. Read: How to enter estimated tax payments into TurboTax
Related article: Paying Income Tax throughout the Year
Even if your income and expenses don’t exactly match one of the above scenarios, you can likely combine them to figure out how to report all of your income and qualified education expenses.
Parent post: Enter Your Grad Student Income into Tax Software
We at Personal Finance for PhDs are not tax professionals, and none of the content in this section should be taken as advice for tax purposes.
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[…] entire section of Grad Student Finances. Read the entire 2015 grad student tax guide, jump to the step-by-step instructions for entering grad student income of various types into TurboTax, or go directly to the equivalent of this post on entering 1099-MISC fellowship income into […]