What to Put for Number of Regular Withholding Allowances

Zero. The number of withholding allowances to claim on your W-4 is none, because withholding allowances no longer exist. The IRS removed them from Form W-4 starting in 2020, and the concept is permanently gone.¹ The current form asks for dollar amounts instead: your filing status, credits for dependents, any outside income, and any extra withholding you want. If you’re staring at a W-4 looking for the “allowances” line, you won’t find it, and that’s the point.

Why Allowances Are Gone

Each old allowance shaved a fixed dollar amount off your taxable wages, and that amount was tied to the personal exemption. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 set the personal exemption to $0, which knocked the math out from under the whole system. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed in 2025, made that elimination permanent.² Personal exemptions are not coming back, and neither are the allowances that depended on them.

What replaced them is a form built around actual numbers. Rather than picking an allowance count that roughly approximates your situation, you enter your expected child tax credit, your outside income, your extra deductions, and the form calculates withholding from there. For most people the result lands closer to what they actually owe.

If You Have an Old W-4 Still on File

You are not required to submit a new form. If you filled out a W-4 before 2020 and never replaced it, your old allowance count is still valid and your employer keeps using it.¹ Payroll systems run those old numbers through a “computational bridge” in IRS Publication 15-T that translates each allowance into the dollar-based fields on the current form.³

The bridge is an approximation, though. If your life looks different than it did the last time you filled out a W-4, submitting a current one will produce more accurate withholding. And once you do, your employer must use the new form going forward. There’s no going back to the old allowance count.

What to Enter Instead of an Allowance Number

The current W-4 has five steps. Steps 1 and 5 are required for everyone. Steps 2, 3, and 4 exist for people whose situation calls for them.⁴

Step 1: Filing Status

Enter your name, Social Security number, and filing status (Single or Married Filing Separately, Married Filing Jointly, or Head of Household). If you have one job, no dependents, no outside income, and you take the standard deduction, that’s it. Sign Step 5 and you’re done. The payroll system reads your filing status, applies the correct standard deduction and brackets, and withholds accordingly.

Step 2: A Second Job or a Working Spouse

Fill this out if you hold more than one job at a time, or if you’re married filing jointly and your spouse works. Skipping it means each employer withholds as if its paycheck is your only income, which almost always leaves you short. Three options:

Use the IRS Tax Withholding Estimator at irs.gov/W4App. It’s the most accurate method, and it produces a specific dollar figure to enter on line 4(c).⁵
Use the Multiple Jobs Worksheet in the W-4 instructions. Less precise than the estimator, but you don’t have to enter your data online.
Check the box in Step 2(c) on both W-4s if there are exactly two jobs and the pay is roughly similar. This splits the standard deduction and brackets between them. When the two jobs pay very different amounts, this method over-withholds from the lower-paying one.¹

Step 3: Dependents

Step 3 is the closest thing on the new form to the “more allowances if you have kids” logic of the old one, but you enter a dollar figure, not a count. Fill it out only if your total income will be $200,000 or less ($400,000 or less if married filing jointly). Multiply each qualifying child under 17 by $2,200, multiply other dependents by $500, and enter the combined total.⁴ The $2,200 reflects the 2026 child tax credit, which rose from $2,000 in prior years.⁶

Two qualifying children? Enter $4,400. Two children plus a college-aged dependent? $4,900. That amount reduces the annual tax your employer withholds, spread evenly across your paychecks.

Step 4: Other Adjustments

Three separate lines. Use any combination, or skip the step entirely.

Line 4(a), other income. Enter the estimated annual total of income that isn’t already subject to withholding, such as interest, dividends, capital gains, or retirement distributions. Your employer adds that figure to your wages for withholding purposes so more tax comes out of each paycheck. Don’t include self-employment income here; the IRS recommends the Withholding Estimator for that.⁵

Line 4(b), deductions. This one is for people who plan to itemize above the standard deduction. For 2026, the standard deduction is $16,100 for single filers, $32,200 for joint filers, and $24,150 for heads of household.⁷ Use the Deductions Worksheet in the W-4 instructions to figure the excess of your expected itemized deductions over the standard deduction, and enter only that excess. A number here reduces your withholding.

Line 4(c), extra withholding. A flat dollar amount you want taken out of every paycheck on top of everything else. This is where the Withholding Estimator and Multiple Jobs Worksheet direct their output, and it’s also where people go when they want a bigger refund or need to cover irregular side income.

When to Submit a New Form

The IRS suggests checking your withholding at the start of every year even when nothing obvious has changed.⁴ Submit a new W-4 whenever your financial picture shifts: marriage, divorce, the birth or adoption of a child, picking up or losing a second job, a meaningful change in non-wage income, or buying a home that moves you into itemizing.

2026 adds another reason. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act created several new deductions that run through 2028, and they change what accurate withholding looks like. Workers in occupations that customarily received tips as of December 31, 2024 can deduct up to $25,000 of qualified tips per year, with the deduction phasing out above $150,000 in modified AGI ($300,000 for joint filers).² Up to $12,500 of qualified overtime is deductible ($25,000 on a joint return), with the same phaseout thresholds.⁸ Car loan interest is deductible up to $10,000, and taxpayers 65 and older can claim an additional deduction of up to $4,000 ($8,000 if both spouses qualify). If any of these apply to you, run the Withholding Estimator and submit a new W-4 with the result. Waiting until you file means lending the government money interest-free all year.

After you submit a new form, check your next two or three pay stubs to confirm withholding changed as expected. If the numbers look off, run the estimator again with your actual year-to-date figures and submit a corrected form.

Claiming Exempt Is a Different Question

Some people asking about allowances are really trying to figure out whether they can have no federal income tax withheld at all. That’s called claiming exempt, and it has strict rules. Both of these must be true: you owed zero federal income tax for the prior year, and you expect to owe zero for the current year.⁴ This mostly fits students, low-income part-time workers, and retirees whose income sits below the filing threshold.

Exempt status expires every year on February 15. Miss the deadline for submitting a new exempt W-4 and your employer must start withholding as if you’re single with no other entries.⁹ If the deadline lands on a weekend or holiday, it moves to the next business day.

What Happens if You Get It Wrong

Under-withholding doesn’t just mean a bill in April. If you owe more than $1,000, the IRS can add an underpayment penalty. The penalty works like interest, compounded daily at a rate the IRS resets quarterly. For 2026, the rate started at 7% in the first quarter and dropped to 6% in the second.¹⁰

You avoid the penalty entirely if any of these safe harbors applies:¹¹

Your total tax minus withholding and credits is under $1,000.
Your withholding and estimated payments cover at least 90% of the tax on the current year’s return.
Your withholding matches 100% of the total tax on your prior-year return. That threshold rises to 110% if your prior-year adjusted gross income was over $150,000 ($75,000 if married filing separately).

The IRS can also waive the penalty if you retired after age 62 or became disabled during the current or prior tax year and the underpayment had reasonable cause, or if a casualty or federally declared disaster contributed.¹²

So the honest answer to “how many allowances should I claim” is that the question is asking about a form that doesn’t exist anymore. Open a current W-4, pick your filing status, enter dollar amounts for whichever of Steps 2 through 4 apply to you, and sign it. If you want to check your work, the Tax Withholding Estimator at irs.gov/W4App will tell you exactly what to enter based on the pay stubs and tax situation you already have.

1
Internal Revenue Service. FAQs on the 2020 Form W-4
2
Internal Revenue Service. One, Big, Beautiful Bill Provisions – Individuals and Workers
3
Internal Revenue Service. Publication 15-T (2026), Federal Income Tax Withholding Methods
4
Internal Revenue Service. Form W-4, Employee’s Withholding Certificate
5
Internal Revenue Service. Tax Withholding Estimator
6
Internal Revenue Service. Child Tax Credit
7
Internal Revenue Service. IRS Releases Tax Inflation Adjustments for Tax Year 2026
8
Internal Revenue Service. Questions and Answers About the New Deduction for Qualified Overtime Compensation
9
Internal Revenue Service. Topic No. 753, Form W-4, Employees Withholding Certificate
10
Internal Revenue Service. Quarterly Interest Rates
11
Internal Revenue Service. Underpayment of Estimated Tax by Individuals Penalty
12
Internal Revenue Service. 2025 Instructions for Form 2210 – Underpayment of Estimated Tax by Individuals, Estates, and Trusts