Personal Finance (Not Investing) • Primer on Paying Taxes With a Credit Card

payUSAtax appears to be the cheapest for both debit card payments AND credit card payments at $2.14 and 1.82% respectively:

https://www.irs.gov/payments/pay-your-t ... redit-card

Staples routinely waives the $6.95 fee to purchase both Visa and MasterCard debit card (gift cards) and you can hear about those routine offers via subscribing to email newsletters from sites like slickdeals.net or you can go to Staples.com and view the weekly flyer (as the primary source) here is an example of Staples offering a fee-free MasterCard recently:

https://frequentmiler.com/staples-fee-f ... ift-cards/

It’s worth noting that from what I’ve read (through various forums) the websites facilitating tax liability payments via debit cards DO NOT have the ability to differentiate an American Express debit card from an American Express credit card and thereby default to the credit card rate of 1.82% - so avoid purchasing American Express debit cards from Staples (or any store)

I have the PayPal World MasterCard (credit card) and I’m able to get 3% back if I pay my taxes directly via my PayPal World MasterCard, however, a better deal for me would be to purchase Visa or MasterCard gift cards directly from my local (brick and mortar) Staples using my PayPal MasterCard and get 2% cashback (while not having to pay the $6.95 fee) and subsequently using those debit cards to pay my taxes at a flat fee of $2.14 (payUSAtax) so essentially earning 2% in cash back rewards (while only paying $2.14)

As of right now, my understanding is that Staples (brick and mortar) does not accept payment with checkout via PayPal (in order to obtain the maximum 3% rate) so for the time being, I’m only able to get the standard chip/swipe rate of 2%

There are many 5% rotating quarterly category credit cards that specify either Staples (or office stores in general) as a qualifying 5% cash back category - so that’s one way to beat the 2% (or 3%) rate until Staples offers the ability for customers to check out in their stores via PayPal (to get the 3% cash back rewards rate)

I saw a few posts on this thread where there’s a credit card that Bank of America offers that pays the highest known cash rewards rate of 2.65% so I Googled it to read more about it and found this article:

https://thepointsguy.com/credit-cards/b ... d-rewards/

I hope that I was able to add a little insight into this topic describing the ability to make a profit while paying your state or federal tax liability and I will post an update to this thread once I discover that I’m able to check out in a physical Staples store via PayPal

The chase INK cash card give 5 points at staples which can be used for cash or transferred to airline partners and such via other complex routes.

How many gift cards can these tax pay sites accept? I thought it was 2 per month, max. So a total of 6 cards via all sites every month.

Statistics: Posted by tj — Sat Apr 13, 2024 3:19 pm — Replies 882 — Views 168863