SteuerGo FAQs

(2023) Am I required to submit a tax return as an employee?

If you are an employee earning income from employment (Anlage N), your employer deducts income tax, solidarity surcharge, and, if applicable, church tax from your gross salary each month. The taxes are paid directly to the tax office. In theory, everything would be settled from a tax perspective, and you would not need to submit a tax return. This also applies to single employees (tax class I) who have not changed jobs during the year.

Mandatory assessment: You must submit a tax return

However, in many cases, the tax authorities suspect that the monthly tax deductions on income from employment have been too low. Therefore, many employees are legally required to submit a tax return, known as the mandatory assessment.

For this reason, § 46 EStG regulates numerous cases in which employees are obliged to submit a tax return:

1. You have earned additional income of over 410 Euro during the year that was not subject to wage tax deduction. This includes, for example, fees, pensions, or rental income.
2. You have received wages from several employers simultaneously during the year.
3. You have had a tax allowance (e.g. for work-related expenses, special expenses, extraordinary burdens) entered on your payslip. The allowances are to be reviewed again as part of the tax return. Exception: If it is a disability allowance, a bereavement allowance, or only the number of child allowances, you are not obliged to submit a tax return.
4. You and your spouse both receive wages, and one of you was taxed under tax class V or VI, or you both chose the factor procedure with the tax class combination IV/IV.
5. You have received wage replacement benefits (e.g. parental allowance, short-time work allowance, or unemployment benefit) during the year. These income replacement benefits are subject to the progression clause and can increase the personal tax rate on the remaining income.
6. You have received a severance payment or remuneration for work over several years from a former employer, for which the favourable one-fifth rule was applied.
7. As divorced or separated parents, you have chosen a different allocation of the training allowance or the disability allowance for the child.
8. You have received special payments and changed employers in the same year, and your new employer did not take into account the values of the previous employer when calculating income tax.
9. Your marriage was divorced during the year, or your partner passed away, and one of the spouses remarries in the same year.
10. You have a spouse with limited tax liability who lives in the EU/EEA and is entered on your payslip.
11. You have your residence or habitual abode abroad and have applied for unlimited tax liability in Germany.

Note: From 1 January 2020, numerous mandatory assessment criteria also apply to employees with limited tax liability (§ 50 para. 2 sentence 2 no. 4c EStG, amended by the "Act on Further Tax Promotion of Electromobility and Amendment of Other Tax Regulations" of 12 December 2019).