Lohnsteuerbescheinigung: How is the annual payslip relevant to my tax return?

Every year you receive a printout of the annual payslip from your employer. As you go through it, you’ll find important information like your tax deductions, social security contributions, gross wages, and additional amounts that your employer has already paid via the monthly payslip.

Auf dem Ausdruck findest du übersichtlich auf 2 Spalten viele Informationen zu deinem Einkommen und deinen persönlichen Steuermerkmalen:

The eTIN, which is your personal electronic transfer identification number. It is important for data comparison and data transfer with the tax office.

Your tax identification number (Steuer-Identifikationsnummer)

Personnel number (Personalnummer) from the personnel department

Date of birth

Tax class

Childcare allowances (Kinderfreibeträge)

Your employer’s address and tax number

Gross income

Information on withheld income tax, solidarity surcharge, and church tax

Contributions to health, pension, long-term care, and unemployment insurance

Child benefit (Kindergeld) that was paid to you

You will also find a column in your annual payslip on short-time work allowance (Kurzarbeitgeld). If you would like to receive more information on how Kurzrbeitgeld can affect your taxes, read this article.

What the annual payslip for 2022 looks like:

Taxable employees should receive their annual payslips from employers anytime between December and February of the following year. If there are delays, consult your employer.

If you resign from a company during the year, (in many cases) your former employer will send you the annual payslip earlier than usual. If you have received unemployment benefit (Arbeitslosengeld) for any duration during the tax year, you’ll also receive it from the employment office as a payroll tax statement (Lohnsteuerabrechnung). This usually arrives by the end of February.

The printout of the annual payslip not only gives you an overview of the benefits and deductions that you had in the past year, but is also very helpful when preparing your tax return. This is because the values from your wage tax statement and your other deductible expenses as well as various income streams determine the amount of tax refund you can expect.

Your annual payslip, therefore, greatly simplifies the preparation of your tax return. But be careful: it’s tempting to merely assume these values and send off the tax return prematurely in order to save yourself work. Many taxpayers secure incorrect refunds when their income-related expenses and special expensesIn contrast to income-related expenses, special expenses are various costs that are legally considered to be related to your private life management – for example pension expenses, health insurance, or …
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If you have not received your income tax certificate or cannot find yours, you can simply ask your office HR department for it. If there are mistakes, you should discuss them with your employer and note them in your tax return.

Errors that are shown to the tax office must be proven. Don’t worry: the annual paysli[ serves as a guide for the tax return, but only the tax return itself and the subsequent tax bill from the tax office are legally binding. This makes it easy to fix errors.

You should file your annual financial statements, i.e. the printouts of your annual electronic Lohnsteuerbescheinigung, together with your annual tax assessments and keep them until you retire. In the foreseeable future, you may need this to supplement your tax assessment, as proof for the care of relatives, for the application for parental allowance, booking a place in the Kita, the child’s BAföG application, and other applications.

In the long run, however, the printouts could also be useful in calculating your pension, for example, to contest a pension entitlement. Read this guide to know which documents to retain and for how long.