How to report tips. Report your tips with your wages on line 1, Form 1040EZ, or line 7, Form 1040A or Form 1040.

What tips to report. You must report all tips you received in 1998, including both cash tips and noncash tips, on your tax return. Any tips you reported to your employer for 1998 are included in the wages shown in box 1 of your Form W-2. Add to the amount in box 1 only the tips you did not report to your employer.

If you received $20 or more in cash and charge tips in a month and did not report all of those tips to your employer, see Reporting social security and Medicare taxes on tips not reported to your employer, later.

If you did not keep a daily tip record as required and an amount is shown in box 8 of your Form W--2 see Allocated Tips, later.

If you kept a daily tip record and reported tips to your employer as required under the rules explained earlier, add the following tips to the amount in box 1 of your Form W-2:

• Cash and charge tips you received that totaled less than $20 for any month, and
• The value of noncash tips, such as tickets, passes, or other items of value.

Example. Jeremy Martin began working at the Diamond Restaurant (his only employer in 1998) on June 30 and received $10,000 in wages during the year. Jeremy kept a daily tip record showing that his tips for June were $18 and his tips for the rest of the year totaled $7,000. He was not required to report his June tips to his employer, but he reported all of the rest of his tips to his employer as required.

Jeremy's Form W--2 from Diamond Restaurant shows $17,000 ($10,000 wages plus $7,000 reported tips) in box 1. He adds the $18 unreported tips to that amount and reports $17,018 as wages on line 1 of his Form 1040EZ.

Reporting social security and Medicare taxes on tips not reported to your employer. If you received $20 or more in cash and charge tips in a month while working for one employer, you must report the social security and Medicare taxes on the unreported tips as additional tax on your return. To report these taxes, you must file a return even if you would not otherwise have to file. You must use Form 1040. (You cannot file Form 1040EZ or Form 1040A.)

Use Form 4137, Social Security and Medicare Tax on Unreported Tip Income, to figure these taxes. Enter the amount from line 12 of the form on line 52, Form 1040, and attach the form to your return.

Reporting uncollected social security and Medicare taxes on tips. If your employer could not collect all the social security and Medicare taxes or railroad retirement tax you owe on tips reported to your employer, the uncollected taxes will be shown in box 13 of your Form W--A (codes A and B). You must report these amounts as additional tax on your return. You may have uncollected taxes if your regular pay was not enough for your employer to withhold all the taxes you owe and you did not give your employer enough money to pay the rest of the taxes.

To report these uncollected taxes, you must file a return even if you would not otherwise have to file. You must use Form 1040. (You cannot file Form 1040EZ or Form 1040A.) Include the taxes in your total tax amount on line 56, and write "UT "and the total of the uncollected taxes on the dotted line next to line 56.

Previous | First | Next

Publication 17 | 1998 Tax Year Archives | Tax Help Archives | Home