Self-Employed? Your Income Estimate Is the Whole Ballgame

I’m Christopher Horne, a licensed health insurance broker serving Florida, Texas, Arizona, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Missouri, South Carolina, Tennessee, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Virginia. When you are self-employed, there is no HR department and no pay stub with the answer printed on it. Your Marketplace application runs on an income estimate — and getting that estimate honestly right is the difference between steady monthly help and a tax-time headache. Einstein, my assistant, watches the 1099 texts and gets your facts to me fast; I do the estimating work with you personally.

What the Estimate Actually Is

The Marketplace asks for your expected household income for the coverage year. For self-employed income, that generally starts from your net profit — what the business actually makes after ordinary business expenses — plus other household income like a spouse’s wages or a part-time job. It is not your gross deposits, and last year’s tax return is only a starting point if this year looks different. One important boundary: I am an insurance broker, not a tax professional. I will help you build a defensible estimate for the application; your tax preparer owns the return itself.

Why the Number Matters Twice

• Now: your estimate helps decide how much monthly premium help you receive during the year, and whether extra cost-sharing help is available on the plans that offer it.
• At tax time: the help you received is reconciled against what you actually earned, using your Form 1095-A and Form 8962. Estimate too low and some of the advance help may have to be repaid. Estimate too high and you may have paid more each month than you needed to. Either way, the estimate is not a set-and-forget number.

When tax season arrives, my 1095-A walkthrough shows exactly where the form comes from and how to get it to your preparer.

How to Build an Estimate You Can Defend

• Start with your recent profit-and-loss picture, not your best month.
• Account for seasonality. A strong spring and a slow winter average out; the application wants the year.
• Use signed contracts and recurring clients as ballast, and treat hoped-for work as hoped-for.
• Add the rest of the household honestly — a spouse’s income counts in the household number.
• When in doubt, we document how we got the number, so a good year or a bad year is easy to explain and adjust.

The Habit That Protects Self-Employed Clients: Update It

Land a big contract, lose a big client, hire help, slow down — when your expected income changes materially, tell me and we update the application mid-year. That one habit is how the 1095-A stays boring in April. My self-employed clients hear this from me until they are tired of it, because it works.

When You Can Enroll

Being self-employed does not by itself open a Special Enrollment window. Most self-employed enrollments happen during Open Enrollment (November 1 – January 15), or sooner if you have a qualifying life event like losing other coverage — that path starts at Just Lost Coverage. If your income may fit Medicaid in Arizona, Iowa, Michigan, or Ohio, we check that door first; Florida and Texas run the non-expansion math described on my Medicaid vs. Marketplace page. The broader playbook is in the self-employed health insurance guide and the gig-worker guide.

What to Send Me

Text 1099 to 954-787-9118 with what you do and your best yearly income estimate. A range you can defend beats a precise number you invented. Do not send tax returns, Social Security numbers, or birth dates by text — we handle documents through the official application when they are needed.

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