What do those boxes on my W-2 mean?
You're sitting down to do your tax return, you pick up the W-2, and you look at it, and there's numbers all over the place. All of them in separate little boxes. Conceivably, when you're looking at the W-2, the box of numbers that you should be most familiar with is the one that says "taxable wages". The next box that you're going to see on your W-2 is "federal withholding taxes". That's the taxes that were taken out of your pay check to prepay the taxes to the IRS. The next box that you're going to see on the W-2 is social security wages, and the box next to that on the W-2 is the tax, social security tax. You're going to see another box on the W-2 that's going to say Medicare wages, and next to that would be the taxes that you paid for Medicare. Those are the basic ones that are going to be on everybody's W-2 tax return, other than the big box that's got your name and address and social security number, and another big box that's going to have your employer's address and ID number. Basically, that's what you're going to see on your W-2. Every W-2 has those boxes on it. They may not necessarily be in the same order on every W-2, but they're always there. There's other boxes that are going to show up on the W-2, and they're specific boxes for specific purposes. There's a box number 12 on the W-2 that's got letters in it. That's going to indicate if you had a 41K program, if you had something special at your work, a medical plan, various different things. In that box 12 when you see the letter code next to the number, and you wonder, "What the heck does that letter mean?" If you look on the back of your W-2, they're going to have instructions there that tell you what all of these letters stand for. They're specific to certain things, they may not have any bearing on completing your tax return. They're primarily information for you, and information for your employer to transmit to you.
