Trust signals · About
About OBBBAtips
At a glance
Sunset (TY)
Client-side math
Every policy claim links to a primary source. Last verified 2026-05-07.
Personalized calculation
Editorial
Editorial standards
Every policy claim links to a primary source.
Statute (P.L. 119-21 §70201, 26 USC §§224–225), IRS guidance (IRS Notice 2025-69 and TD 10044 in the Federal Register), and IRS W-2 instructions for TY2026 are the load-bearing citations. CPA-firm blogs and tax-prep operator blogs are supplementary — never the load-bearing source for a claim about the deduction, the cap, or the phase-out.
Every page with a policy claim carries a last-verified date.
The PolicyStatePin block under each claim shows the date the claim was last verified against its primary source. A quarterly review cadence (90 days) is mandatory through the 2028-12-31 sunset. See /methodology.
Plain English first; statute citation second.
Pages lead with what the worker (or employer) needs to do. Statute citations are inline footnotes and visible on hover/tap, so the page reads cleanly but the source trail is one click away.
No editorializing on policy.
Pages state what the statute and the final reg say. This site does not predict litigation outcomes (e.g. on a future SSTB exclusion of performing-arts workers). It does not take positions on whether the deduction should be extended past 2028-12-31.
No tabloid framing.
This site does not use “Save thousands!” / “Maximum refund!” / “Don't miss out!” copy. It does not use countdown urgency timers, popups, or exit-intent modals. The audience is anxious about getting it right, not about being entertained.
Editorial standards
Statute-cited expansion
Reviewer policy, sunset honesty, AI Overview acknowledgment, and governance
Reviewers
No fabricated reviewers
Tax content on this site is YMYL (Your Money, Your Life). Every reviewer attribution published on this site is a real human with a real CPA license (state + license number) or a real IRS Enrolled Agent enrollment number. Their LinkedIn or firm page is linked. Their last-reviewed date is stamped on every page they reviewed.
This site will never publish a synthetic reviewer — no AI-generated bios, no stock-photo headshots, no composite credentials. If the reviewer hasn't signed off on a page yet, the attribution block stays in its honest placeholder state rather than fill it with fiction.
Current state: Reviewer onboarding is in progress. The attribution block on every page populates with a real CPA or Enrolled Agent — name, credential, license or EA number, and a LinkedIn or firm link — once reviewer sign-off closes. Until then it stays in its honest pending state.
Sunset
Sunset honesty disclosure
The qualified-tips and qualified-overtime deductions sunset on 2028-12-31 unless Congress extends them. This site does not predict whether Congress will extend; the political incentive is real, the legislative outcome is not.
If the deductions are extended or made permanent, this site updates within 30 days and re-pins all affected claim-ids. If the deductions sunset as scheduled, this site pivots to tipped-occupation tax planning generally plus the residual amend-prior-year long tail (the TY2025 amend window stays open through 2029-04-15 regardless of the federal sunset).
Either way, the truth about the window stays on the page.
AI Overview
How this site is positioned against AI Overview
Before authoring a single page, the build ran a 30-query SERP audit covering topline policy, form-mechanics, per-occupation eligibility, statute thresholds, procedural amend, and tooling / brand classes. The pre-build audit measured 43.3% of representative OBBBA-tip search queries (13 of 30) as HIGH-cannibalization risk for Google's AI Overview — above the 40% pass threshold the build had set as the heuristic gate. The full audit lives at .ops/research/aio-audit.md.
Rather than hide that finding, this site is built around five surfaces AI Overview structurally cannot render: a 3-tier per-occupation depth structure (5 deep + 18 medium + 48 long-tail navigational); a personalized-math decoder that accepts the worker's actual inputs; a 50-state conformity matrix nobody else renders comparatively; an employer-side Box 14b validator with a W-2c request template; and an amend-prior-year decision tree that walks the §6511(a) window math step-by-step. The build accepts AI Overview's ownership of the topline-policy and boolean-eligibility surfaces and competes on depth, tooling, and procedural walkthroughs instead.
The methodology page covers the same decision in more detail; see /methodology — How we built around AI Overview.
Governance
Site governance
OBBBAtips.us is operated by its site operator (a US entity not yet formed). Editorial inquiries, reviewer credential verification, and correction requests: [email protected].
Site terms of use are governed by the laws of the State of Delaware (US-default) — see /terms for the full governing-law clause.
Actionable artifact
Affiliate disclosure and decoder privacy
Disclosure
Sponsorship and affiliate disclosure
When a reader clicks through to a tax-prep service from this site and completes a filing, OBBBAtips may receive an affiliate commission. The affiliate operators in scope are TurboTax, TaxAct, FreeTaxUSA (via CJ Affiliate) and H&R Block (via Impact, NOT CJ).Only operators with confirmed, live affiliate approval appear in CTAs on the site; any operator not yet approved is held back rather than shown, so the disclosure never misrepresents participation.
Important: The qualified-tips and qualified-overtime deductions are yours regardless of which preparer (or no preparer) you use. You can claim the deduction on a paper return at no cost via Form 1040 (current year) or Form 1040-X (prior-year amend). Affiliate links are convenience, not necessity.
The decoder's output is never gated behind a paywall or a sign-up. The decoder is free, complete, and produces the same answer whether or not a reader clicks an affiliate link. The AffiliateCard slot on /decode renders after output; it never appears before the reader has the answer.
No affiliate operator is permitted to change what this site says about the law. The cap is $25,000 because the statute says so, not because TurboTax wants it shown that way. If a tax-prep vendor's product page contradicts the statute, this site cites the statute, not the vendor.
Direct sponsorship from payroll-software vendors is not currently active. If this site accepts direct sponsorship in the future, the sponsored unit will be visually labeled and disclosed on this page within 7 days of activation.
Privacy
The decoder doesn't log your inputs
Your occupation, base wages, tip wages, overtime wages, MAGI, and filing status are processed in your browser. They are never sent to a server. They are never logged to analytics. The only thing the analytics layer ever sees is an aggregated event — a verdict bucket, an industry bucket, a tax year — never tied to identifying inputs and never tied to a session that could be re-identified.
Full details on /privacy.