I set my federal deductions to 4 and there has only been $4 taken out of my check since January. How do I fond out if that is correct?

How much is the income, but you can ask the employer to check.

You can check the withholding tables in Pub 15, which is the document employers use to calculate withholding for their employees: http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p15.pdf If you read through it you'll find that if you are married and claim 4 allowances the first $28K or so of your annual wages is essentially not taxed by the IRS. So if this is close to your annual wages it would account for the low amount of withholding. If you want a more precise accounting: post back with your wage rate, filing status (married or single), and whether you're paid weekly, semi-monthly, or monthly, and I'll be happy to give you an estimate of how much your employer should be withholding for someone with 4 allowances.

On a related topic - your employer IS deducting social security (FICA) and Medicare taxes, right?

Wage: $9.00/hr
Status: Married
Paid Weekly

As for the related topic: Yes for both.

Each allowance you claim is a deduction worth $70.19 per week. So your taxable income each week is $360 - 4 x $70.19 = $79.24/week. The withholding for a married person is $0 if this amount is less than $264. So it seems correct.

Thank you for that info! Work couldn't tell me anything on that.

This leads to another question, As I am not giving Uncle Sam his cut, how do I determine if I will have to pay-up at tax time?

The withholding amounts are pretty good at predicting what you will owe Uncle Sam when you file your taxes next year, assuming (a) you are the only wage earner in the family and (b) you have no other sources of income. Or you can try out this calculator on the IRS web site:

2010 Withholding Calculator

It verifies that for annual income of $19K, married filing jointly, with 1 dependent the federal tax bill is $0.