Host: What does head of household mean on a tax return?

Aurthur Auerbach: Head of household means exactly that. It means you are single with a dependent living in your household and when I say living in the household, we will discuss that in the next segment where we will talk about who qualifies as a dependent. So you can have a child away from college, but when they come home they are going to live with you. So even though they have been at school for five or ten months out of the year they are still considered your dependent and living with you in many cases. So head of household means you have got a dependent, it could be a parent, it could be a child, it could be another relative living in your household and you are providing more than half of the household costs. So you are putting the roof over the head, food on the table, things like that, providing the shelter and that is an in between rate, that is in between single and married filing joint. Joint being the cheapest, single being the highest, head of household is somewhere in the middle.