Guides — New York, New Jersey and Connecticut tax questions
These pages answer the questions this practice is asked most often, for clients living and working across the New York, New Jersey and Connecticut lines.
Every figure on a guide page renders from a cited primary source — a statute, a regulation, a revenue procedure or a state department's own instructions — and the build fails if a number appears without one. Where an answer is genuinely unsettled, the page says so rather than picking a side. Each guide ends with a section naming what it does not cover.
7 guides. These are general explanations of how the rules work, not advice on your own situation — the answer for a particular client usually turns on facts a page cannot know.
Residency
Three questions that are often mistaken for each other. Which return you file is not the same question as when your residency began, and neither of those is the question behind a residency audit — whether New York counts you as a resident at all.
- Which return do I file?
You live in one of New York, New Jersey or Connecticut and earn in another. Which returns, in what order, and where the credit goes — for employees and for business owners.
- When did I become a US tax resident?
Your year splits between two countries. When residency begins, when it ends, what New York does about it, and the election available when a spouse is still abroad.
- Am I a New York resident?
The two tests New York applies, and either one alone is enough. What makes a dwelling a permanent place of abode, how a day in the state is counted, and what an examination weighs when it disagrees with you.
Sales tax
Personal care services only — beauty, barbering, nail, spa, hair removal, massage.
- Does my salon charge sales tax?
Whether the service is taxable in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, what the rate turns on, and how products and supplies differ from services on the same ticket.
Entity
Who may hold the stock, and what breaks the election.
- Can this person be an S corporation shareholder?
Visas, green cards and citizenship; trusts that hold stock; what counts as one class of stock; and what happens when an ineligible shareholder is discovered.
Depreciation
Federal treatment, and where New York and New Jersey depart from it.
- How is a business vehicle depreciated?
Bonus depreciation and §179 as they now stand, the weight gates, the luxury caps, and why the New York and New Jersey answers differ from the federal one — in opposite directions.
Filing calendar
When things are due, and what happens when a due date lands on a weekend.
- When is my sales tax return due?
Filing frequencies and due dates across the three states, how the quarters differ, and whether a monthly obligation replaces the quarterly return or adds to it.
What is not here
Payroll — employer obligations across the five jurisdictions this practice touches — is not yet published.