Register and certify income tax

As an employer, you must deduct income tax, the solidarity surcharge and, if applicable, church tax from your employees' wages each time they are paid.

You must calculate the amounts according to the personal tax characteristics, which are stored in the tax authorities' database as wage tax deduction characteristics (ELStAM) and must be retrieved by you.

At the end of each registration period, you must summarise the deduction amounts of all employed persons in a wage tax registration, transmit them electronically to the tax authorities and transfer them there. You will not receive a tax assessment notice.

The registration period can be

• the calendar month,
• the quarter or
• the calendar year.

This depends on the amount of tax to be paid.

Based on the records in the payroll account, the employer must submit an electronic wage tax certificate for each employee to the competent tax authority by the last day of February of the following year after the payroll account has been closed. The employee must be provided with a printout of the electronic wage tax statement in accordance with the officially prescribed model or it must be made available electronically.

Attention: The wages of part-time employees and temporary staff may be subject to flat-rate taxation under certain conditions. For example, if you employ an employee as part of a so-called mini-job, you must pay the flat-rate contributions to payroll tax and health insurancecontributions to income tax, health insurance and pension insurance not to the tax office, but to Deutsche Rentenversicherung Knappschaft-Bahn-See.