Personal Finance & Money Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for people who want to be financially literate. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Me and my wife moved to the US in the 2016 and she enrolled in the community college in the end of the 2016 for spring term 2017.
So I paid the tuition in 2016, but she became a student in 2017.
What should I do to get the tax deduction for the tuition expenses?
The problem is that I can't claim this expenses in the 2016 form because she was not a student in that year.
As long as she starts school before April, 2017, you can still deduct it for 2016 even though she didn't become a student until 2017. (And in fact you should because you can't deduct it in 2017.) This exact scenario is described in publication 970 chapter 6:
Prepaid expenses. Qualified education expenses paid in 2015 for an academic period that begins in the first 3 months of 2016 can be used in figuring an education credit for 2015 only. See Academic period , earlier. For example, if you pay $2,000 in December 2015 for qualified tuition for the 2016 winter quarter that begins in January 2016, you can use that $2,000 in figuring an education credit for 2015 only (if you meet all the other requirements).
