NPC inputs

Paying for College
4

Thanks to Peteclo for starting this thread - I have been thinking about these same issues. Just to clarify, let’s say a student’s family has $100k in total gross income from a single W-2 job, of which $8k goes to 401k pre-tax contributions. Assume no other pretax contributions and no outside income. I can see at least three ways to fill out NPCs (and CSS for that matter):

  1. Income: 100; Other untaxed income: 0
  2. Income: 92; Other untaxed income: 8
  3. Income: 100; Other untaxed income: 8

Option 3 actually makes the least sense to me, as it appears to double-count 8k. But I’m sensing that this is how colleges will expect the info to be entered in order to get an accurate estimate. Is that correct?