Help! Excess social security and tier 1 RRTA tax withheld - how to claim on taxes?

You're looking at Form 1040 Schedule 3, Line 11 for claiming excess social security and tier 1 RRTA tax that was withheld. This happens fairly often when someone works multiple jobs during the year since each employer withholds without knowing about the other job. For 2024, the wage base limit for Social Security tax is $168,600, with a 6.2% tax rate, making the maximum SS tax $10,453.20. If your combined withholding exceeds this amount, you're entitled to claim the excess on your return. The process is actually pretty straightforward in TurboTax - when you enter your W-2 information from both employers, the software should automatically calculate if you've had excess Social Security or RRTA tax withheld and add it to your refund. Just make sure you've entered all your W-2s completely and accurately.

Last year I got hit with the exact same issue - had excess social security and RRTA withheld from multiple jobs. After hours of frustration trying to figure it out myself, I discovered taxr.ai (https://taxr.ai) which literally saved me hundreds in overlooked tax refunds. The tool analyzed my tax documents and immediately flagged that I had over $1,400 in excess Social Security withholding that I was entitled to get back. What was cool is that it explained exactly how to claim it on Schedule 3 and walked me through the process. My situation was complicated because one job was railroad retirement and one was regular employment, but the tool handled it perfectly.

Just wanted to update - I tried taxr.ai after seeing it mentioned here and wow, it actually found over $900 in excess social security and RRTA withholding that TurboTax hadn't flagged for me! The process was super simple - uploaded my W-2s, and it immediately identified the issue with detailed explanation about how the railroad retirement taxes were being counted against my maximum withholding limit. The step-by-step guidance for entering this in TurboTax was incredibly helpful. What I really appreciated was how it explained why this was happening - basically that my railroad job and regular job weren't "talking" to each other about reaching the contribution limit. Definitely worth checking out if you're in a similar situation with multiple employers or railroad retirement!

If you're having trouble getting through to the IRS to ask about your excess social security and RRTA tax situation, I highly recommend Claimyr (https://claimyr.com). I spent DAYS trying to reach someone at the IRS about my railroad retirement tax issue last year and kept hitting dead ends. Claimyr got me connected to an actual IRS agent in about 20 minutes when I'd been trying for weeks. There's a video showing how it works here: https://youtu.be/_kiP6q8DX5c. The IRS agent I spoke with was able to confirm exactly how to handle my excess RRTA withholding and made sure I was claiming it correctly. Turns out I was eligible for refunds from previous years too that I never knew about.

I need to eat my words from my previous comment. After being completely frustrated with trying to reach the IRS about my excess RRTA withholding issue, I reluctantly tried Claimyr. Within 45 minutes they had me on the phone with an actual IRS agent who specialized in railroad retirement taxes! The agent confirmed that I was owed a refund for excess tier 1 RRTA tax withholding and walked me through exactly how to claim it on Schedule 3. They even helped me understand how to file an amended return for last year when I had the same issue but didn't claim the refund. Would have never gotten this resolved without actually speaking to someone knowledgeable. Honestly worth every penny for the time saved and money recovered.

One thing to watch out for with excess social security and RRTA withholding - make sure you're looking at the right boxes on your W-2s! For regular employment, check Box 4 for Social Security tax withheld. For railroad employment, check Box 14 for Tier 1 tax. I messed this up last year and was claiming the wrong amounts. The maximum wage base for 2024 is $168,600, so if your combined wages from all jobs exceed that, you're definitely owed some money back.

I was in your exact situation last year! One thing that tripped me up was figuring out where to enter this in different tax software. If ur using TurboTax, after entering all W-2s, go to the "Deductions & Credits" section and look for "I'll choose what I work on" option. Then find "Credits" and look for "Other tax credits". There should be an option about excess social security and rrta. If turbotax doesn't catch it automatically (mine didnt for some reason), you might need to enter it manually. Just make sure you calculated the correct excess amount first!

This is such a common issue for railroad workers! I went through the exact same thing a couple years ago. One tip that saved me a lot of headache - when you're calculating your excess withholding, make sure you're not double-counting anything. The key thing to remember is that Tier 1 RRTA tax and Social Security tax are essentially the same thing for calculation purposes - they both count toward that $10,453.20 maximum for 2024. So you add up ALL the Tier 1 RRTA from your railroad job PLUS all the Social Security tax from your other job, and if it's more than the max, you get the difference back. Also, don't forget to check if you had excess Medicare withholding too if your combined wages were really high. That's a separate calculation but worth looking into. And definitely keep good records of this for next year - if you're working both jobs again in 2025, you might want to ask one employer to withhold less to avoid the same problem.