I was looking around for information on fee waivers. I couldn’t find anything specific regarding income and requesting the waiver. My spouse makes around 60K per year, I make 40K (but only started working 4 months ago and was a full-time college student the last 2 years). Once it is converted to US it’s just under 75K per year. Would it be frowned upon at that income level to request waivers? At this point DH only wants DD to apply to 4 schools because of the costs - but DD said she would like to apply to more to increase her chance of acceptance. So I want to do whatever we can to help her.
When I contacted schools about waivers, no one asked about income. They just said OK.
In most cases, my experience was like @gusmom2000 's. However, some schools requested tax returns even after I repeatedly told them we were too poor to file taxes!
You can always choose to file tax returns, even if you don’t need to for any reasons. It may take only a few minutes. When you are not required file tax returns, you woundn’t owe any tax when you choose to file returns. Actually, you often end up earning some tax credit/rebate income.
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-prior/f1040ez–2015.pdf
Some schools have income guidelines. I know that Lawrenceville is $55,000 and PA is $30,000 (according to their website).