Today I'm going to be talking about estimated tax payments who needs to make them win and help hey y'all this is Tracy with ledger harmony and I help small business owners by doing their bookkeeping and taxes so that they don't have to worry about it one thing a lot of small business owners are confused about when they're first starting off is how to pay taxes this is especially true if you're just transitioning from a w-2 job and you're used to your taxes being withheld from your paycheck and then auto magically being remitted to the IRS on your behalf now that you're working for yourself you are responsible for withholding a portion of your income and remitting it to the appropriate taxing authorities on your own but if you were curious as to how to do this and looked it up per the IRS instructions you would see that they're not written for the average business owner and it's about as clear as mud so my goal is to help you understand estimated taxes just a little bit better first let's talk about who needs to be making these payments pretty much anyone that earns income and doesn't have taxes withheld from that income so contract work freelance work side hustles and income from your small business these would all be situations where you may need to make estimated tax payments the IRS gives us a few exceptions to this rule and tells us that we don't need to make estimated tax payments if number one you will owe less than $1,000 for the current tax year that is after subtracting any tax withholdings and refundable credits number two your income tax withholding will be at least 90 percent of the tax shown on your current year tax return number three your income tax withholding will be at least 100 percent of the tax shown on your previous year tax return I do want to mention that if you're not required to make estimated tax payments that doesn't mean that you're not gonna end up owing money at the end of the year and you may choose to make estimated tax payments so that you're not stuck with a large bill do with your return because it's very complicated and there are so many pieces that go into calculating your estimated taxes I'm not going to cover that in this video instead if you have a question on how much you should be paying please contact me directly so I can help you figure that out estimated tax payments are due on a quarterly basis the first quarter runs January 1st through March 31st and payment is due on April 15th second quarter runs April 1st through May 31st and payment is due June 15 their quarter runs June 1st through August 31st and payment is due on September 15 and finally fourth quarter runs September 1st through December 31st with payment due January 15th