Form 6765: what the IRS wants to see
Form 6765 is where the R&D tax credit gets claimed — including the expanded Section G business-component reporting. Here's what to prepare. PLACEHOLDER content.
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Form 6765, Credit for Increasing Research Activities, is the form you file with your return to claim the R&D tax credit. Recent revisions ask for more detail than ever.
Regular vs. ASC method
You can compute the credit two ways:
- Regular method — based on a fixed-base percentage of historical research.
- Alternative Simplified Credit (ASC) — 14% of QREs above 50% of the prior three years' average. Most newer companies use the ASC.
Business-component detail
Expanded reporting asks you to break the credit down by business component, describing the information sought and the activities performed. Contemporaneous documentation makes this straightforward instead of a year-end scramble.
The payroll tax offset
Qualified small businesses can elect to apply up to $500,000 of the credit against payroll taxes — valuable for pre-revenue startups that owe little or no income tax.
How ClaimKit helps
We assemble the business-component records and QRE schedules as you work, so the Form 6765 package is ready when your return is — reviewed and signed off by an R&D tax credit expert.