Is it normal for federal tax withheld to be less than 10 percent of your total income?

It's very normal if your payroll processor's software shows that you aren't earning enough to owe any tax for the year. Some weeks you may earn enough to trigger some withholding, but for the year, you can easily end up with a withholding rate of less than 10%.

If you earn very little - less than $230 each and every week - then even claiming zero on the W-4 won't get you any federal tax withheld - the software will see that you will not earn the $12,000 that is tax-free (because that's your standard deduction).

If you earn decent money and claim zero, then there is no way less than 10% will be withhheld in federal income tax.

What is your total income? MILLIONS of people have a total tax liability of less than 10%.

That depends on what your total income is.

When you put down 0 that tells the payroll supervisor to take out the MAXIMUM amount of tax allowable by law. The MORE allowances you put on your W4...the LESS money comes out of your check.

Depends on your income..

It can be, depending on how much your weekly paycheck is. The tax tables are set up to allow for the standard deduction, so it is unlikely that your withholding would be exactly 10% of your check, even if you're in the 10% bracket.

Its very possible that the withholding is correct, even for having claimed Single and 0 allowances.

There are a few things you can check:

1. Look at your pay stub to see if it says the withholding rate being used, if it doesn't say on your pay stub, then ask your HR or payroll person to double check your file.

2. Look at the amount earned and withheld on this first paycheck and multiply by the number of paychecks you'll receive in 2019 (to determine a projection for the whole year), put those numbers into a tax estimator site such as turbo tax's Tax caster tool and see if you are on pace to cover your tax liability for the year or not.

Here's the link to the taxcaster tool:

https://turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tools/calculators/...

3. You can also run a calculation at paycheckcity to verify that they are withholding the right amount for your status, income and frequency of pay. Here's the link:

https://www.paycheckcity.com/

4. If you want more money withheld, you can always submit a new W4 and specify extra withholding. Or you can may payments to the IRS by mailing checks or making online payments on the IRS website. I would only recommend this if you expect to have a tax debt that needs to be covered, otherwise you're just giving the IRS an interest free loan so you can get a big refund of your own money next year.

It would be if your income is low enough

1) Is your income relatively low? If your income is low, 10% might be enough.

2) Double check with your payroll person to make sure it is entered correctly. I saw "Single-0" get entered as "Married-2" once. The HR/payroll person had entered the SSN off of one W4 and the details off of another W4.

Why would you do that? The amount of withholding is affected by the amount of income, lower income amounts have smaller withholding.

Here is a calculator that should give you a ball park number of what should be withheld: https://apps.irs.gov/app/withholdingcalculator/