US Treasuries and Muni Bonds

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
February 12, 2025
1 reply
0 views

I own US Treasury Bonds and various state municipal bonds (directly, not through a mutual fund)

I have a 1099INT imported to TurboTax from Fidelity that shows all of the transactions.

Boxes 1 (interest income), 3 (Interest on US Treasury Bonds), and 8 (Tax exempt interest) are filled in.

Question 1. For the Federal Return, does TT automatically deduct the Municipal Bond interest from Federal taxable income since it is not supposed to be taxed, or do I need to manually do something here.

Question 2. For the State Return (MD), does TT automatically deduct the US Treasury interest income as it is not taxed by state or local government, or do I need to manually do something here.

Question 3. For the State Return (MD) Municipal bond interest, do I just need to document the MD bond interest so in can be deducted from taxable interest income, or do I need to input all states?

Thank you. Rich

Best answer by Hal_Al

Thank you.

I am not an expert, but for others searching here, I think the message is that if you have out-of-state municipal bond income, and you are using TurboTax for both federal and state returns, you must input your total interest income per state in your federal return. This will transfer the correct amount of taxable income to your state return. By not inputting the state by state income, your state return will not include this income (as it will transfer as tax-exempt), and you will be under-reporting income on your state return.

After entering your 1099-INT, two screens later, you'll be asked "tell us if any of these uncommon situations apply". If you answer "None of these apply", the next screen will ask "Which state is your $#### of exempt interest from?"

When asked which state, check the box "I earned tax exempt dividends in more than one state". In the drop down menu, select your state and enter the $ amount you calculated. In the 2nd box, select "More than one state" (at the bottom of the scroll down list) and enter the remaining dollar amount.

Hal_Al

Question 1. For the Federal Return, does TT automatically deduct the Municipal Bond interest from Federal taxable income since it is not supposed to be taxed?

A.1. Yes.

Question 2. For the State Return (MD), does TT automatically deduct the US Treasury interest income as it is not taxed by state or local government?

A.2. Yes.

Question 3. For the State Return (MD) Municipal bond interest, do I just need to document the MD bond interest so in can be deducted from taxable interest income?

A. 3. Yes.

After entering your 1099-INT, two screens later, you'll be asked "tell us if any of these uncommon situations apply". Check the box "Our state doesn't tax all this interest".

rjabaraAuthor

Thank you. 1 and 2 are solved.

For question 3, I went back into the Federal return and added all of the state by state municipal interest income, including interest income from my state (from 1099 INT). What this did was add the tax-exempt income back to my state return as MD taxes out of state municipal bond interest. I am hoping I did it wrong as that is a bigger tax bill for me but it make sense. As example, if I had $10,000 in Tax-Exempt municipal bond interest and $1,000 was from Maryland, the Federal return would exempt $10,000, but Maryland would only exempt $1,000, adding $9,000 back to interest income and then taxing it.

The uncommon situations checkbox only had an option to exempt income that was taxed at the federal level, which i not the case with muni bonds as they are tax exempt.

Does this seem right to you?

Hal_Al

Q. Does this seem right to you?

A. Yes. The $9000 would be taxed by MD.

It works this way in every state. There is one one minor exception. The states are not allowed to tax the interest from US territories (Guam, Puerto Rico, USVI)