The law in Bosnia and Herzegovina allows taxpayers to include other immediate family members who have no income or extremely low income on their tax card, in addition to children. By doing so, the worker ensures an increase in their personal deduction and, consequently, receives a higher net salary payment.
For someone to be legally considered a dependent member of the immediate family, they must meet strict tax definitions of kinship. This category includes:
Local amount limits exist!
A person can be considered your dependent member only (and exclusively) if their annual taxable receipts, receipts on which tax is not paid, and all other receipts in a calendar year do not exceed the strict legal threshold.
Watch out for the "hidden" calculation! Many workers register their unemployed spouses without thinking about their fees, shares, dividends, sick leave payments at the expense of state insurance (Zavod zdravstvenog osiguranja), or occasional income through service contracts. If the spouse breaks that annual threshold of total income inflows by even a single cent, the worker fully loses the right to the personal deduction for that year, and Porezna uprava (FBiH/RS) will subsequently, during the return resolution, request the payment of penalty amounts of tax debt back into the budget! This is a common, painful, and expensive mistake.
For a dependent member of the immediate family (who by legal definition is not your child or is not disabled), a fixed initial tax deduction coefficient of 0.70 is assigned. This increases your basic threshold for tax exemption from 560 KM, by an additional generous 392.00 KM!.
Ivan has a gross salary of 2,000 KM and lives in an area where the tax rate is 15%. His wife Ana is currently unemployed without any annual income. Ivan comes to Porezna uprava (FBiH/RS) (or uses the digital system nacionalni digitalni sustav) and links his wife Ana as a member for his Personal Deduction number 1 on the Porezna kartica form.
He is calculated an additional large monthly "shield" (part of the salary on which he does not pay tax). Multiplied by the 15% city tax rate, this leaves him with a clean bonus – a significantly higher net salary every single month in his bank account based on the status relief.