The 2022 Income Statement campaign starts on April 11, 2023, when the deadline for requesting the draft and presenting the returns opens. One of the first questions that many families ask themselves before completing this annual procedure with the Treasury is: individual or joint declaration, which is better for me?
To begin with, it should be remembered that the individual return is the one that appears by default in each Income tax campaign. In addition, there is no obligation to maintain the type of taxation in the income statement in the following years, but it is an option available in each campaign.
The joint declaration grants reductions in the tax base, but not all taxpayers can present this tax in the declaration
The joint tax regime is the one that is applied to people united by a kinship bond and only natural persons residing in national territory can form part of said unit, for tax purposes. As pointed out by the Tax Agency:
To determine which members make up the family unit, the date of accrual of the tax must be taken into account, that is, December 31, 2022 for this campaign. Except in cases in which the tax period is interrupted, the accrual of which materializes when the event that gives rise to the interruption occurs. Since the same person cannot belong to two family units at the same time, if during the tax period they become part of another family unit other than the initial one, they will automatically be excluded from the previous one.
If taxpayers do not know if they meet the necessary conditions to make the joint return or which of the two modalities is best for them, it is enough to carry out a simple operation. And it is that from the income document itself a comparative calculation can be made with both options, taxation by individual or joint modality. Said calculation is made when submitting the declaration online through Renta WEB, a tool that will indicate which is the most favorable declaration when consigning the data corresponding to all the members of the family unit.
However, the level of income to be included in the general base obtained by each spouse during the year is the main criterion for determining the most convenient modality. In general terms, the progressivity of the tax means that in cases in which both spouses have income, individual taxation is the most beneficial modality. On the contrary, in situations in which one of the spouses does not receive remuneration for his work or that it is very low, the joint declaration is usually the best option.
These are the characteristics that the Tax Agency establishes in order to file the joint return:
It is also important to take into account that if one of the members of the family unit files an individual return, the other members must use this same tax regime. Once the return has been filed individually or jointly, you can only change the option if you file new returns within the filing period.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
