<p>D1 was blessed to earn and be offered a substantial amount of merit scholarship money (about $25K per year) as she heads off to college in the fall. We're estimating tuition costs and books/supplies to run around $18K for next year. We're trying to look ahead and plan our tax strategy and have a question regarding the tuition tax credit (in case it still exists next year).</p>
<p>Our tax software says you can claim tuition costs paid directly to the school by either ourselves or D1 (we're assuming her since the 1098-T will be in her name) as long as they were paid by a "taxable" scholarship as opposed to a "tax-exempt" scholarship. Our understanding from reading other threads is that only the amount of her scholarships above and beyond tuition and books/fees will be considered "taxable income" for her, but if that's the case how can tuition ever be paid by a "taxable" scholarship?</p>
<p>Anyone have any experience in this area?</p>
<p>I’m not sure I understand what you are asking.</p>
<p>Scholarship money used to pay for tuition/fees and required books is non taxable. Scholarship money used to pay for anything else is taxable income. You can not use the same expense for more than one tax benefit. For instance you cannot use the same tuition expense to make a scholarship non taxable and to claim a tax credit. </p>
<p>If a scholarship does not specify that it is for tuition then you can choose how you are spending it. Sometimes it may be beneficial to use part of a scholarship to pay for non qualified expenses such as room and board (if the terms of the scholarship allow) and use your own funds (or loan funds) to pay for part of the tuition. For instance my daughter has a tuition waiver scholarship - obviously that can only be used for tuition. She also has a cash scholarship. We usually consider that as being used for room an board expenses. this makes it taxable income to her, but enables us to take a tax credit for her fees which we consider to be paid by her loan. It is usually more beneficial for the parent to claim the credit as part of it is difficult for a student under the age of 24 to qualify for. (We just claim the credit and pay our daughter’s taxes.)</p>
<p>Not that some of the tax softwares do not give you the way to do this. Turbotax for instance, asks you to enter the data from the 1098T and if scholarships are higher than tuition/fees tells you you can not claim the credit. However if you look at the IRS 970 publication it actually shows scenarios such as those I mention above.</p>
<p>Does that answer any of your questions?</p>
<p>^Thank you swimcatsmom…I think that does answer our question. I don’t think any of her scholarships specifically define what they need to be used for, although the value of one scholarship is for the difference between IS and OOS tuition so that could be construed as being for tuition only. It didn’t make sense to me that we’d be able to take a tuition credit on our taxes while using scholarship money that didn’t count as taxable income, but our software (H&R Block) wasn’t specific about it and our “test version” return didn’t prevent us from claiming the credit like your TurboTax did. She’ll need to file her own return next year regardless, since she’ll have over $5700 of taxable income from the non-tuition/books part of her scholarships but we’ll run the numbers a few different ways to see what’s most benificial. In the grand scheme of things we’ll happily trade a few hundred dollar tax liability for several thousand dollars of scholarships. Thanks again for your help!!</p>