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If you received advance premium tax credit (APTC) payments to help cover your Marketplace health insurance premiums, those payments are reconciled on your federal tax return using Form 8962. When your actual household income for the year turns out to be higher than you estimated when you enrolled, the IRS requires you to repay some or all of the excess credit. The repayment amount depends on your final income relative to the federal poverty level and whether a repayment cap applies to your situation. Understanding why this happened and what options you have going forward can help you avoid a larger surprise next filing season.

When someone who received advance Premium Tax Credit (APTC) gets married during the year, their PTC eligibility is retested for the entire year using married-filing-jointly (MFJ) status, combined household income, and year-end household size. If joint income is too high, some or all of the APTC must be repaid on Form 8962. A special one-time relief called the Alternative Calculation for Year of Marriage can reduce repayment by recalculating the pre-marriage months separately, but its benefit is often limited because the IRS requires income to be split 50/50 between spouses for that calculation regardless of who actually earned it.