Is this quiz answer wrong?

Are they truly saying that only a man can be head of household if they are married? That does seem wrong.

There seems to be an ambiguity in the question that may be the problem. Did Bridgett pay 100% both before and after Sam moved out or only after he moved out?

To claim HOH the tax payer must be unmarried or considereded unmarried on the last day of the tax year. To be considered unmarried the taxpayers spouse must not have lived in the same house during the last six months.

https://www.ftb.ca.gov/individuals/hoh/Index.shtml

As you have probably deduced by now, @janbb, the status has nothing to do with the person’s gender, but has everything to do with the living arrangements and marital status. (I believe that if the couple had not been married that the woman in the example could have claimed the HOH filing status for the full year, but it has been a long time since I studied this stuff.)

Here is the official response:

The key here is that HOH filing status is intended mostly for single taxpayers supporting dependents, and in this case, they are still legally married on Dec. 31. There is, however, a special rule allowing certain married taxpayers with dependent children to use the HOH filing status. Under that rule, they are “considered unmarried” and therefore she can file as HOH only if the spouses did not live together at any time (even one night) during the last half of the year, and in this example, they clearly did live together well into the 2nd half of the year. The other requirement under this special rule is that a son or daughter lives with the taxpayer for more than half the year.

Therefore, she would not qualify for HOH filing status, and her only legal options are Married Filing Jointly (if they both agreed to do that) or Married Filing Separately. And unfortunately, filing MFS mean that she would not be allowed to claim a number of tax benefits she might otherwise qualify for, including Earned Income Tax Credit, education credits, the Child and Dependent Care Credit, and deducting rental real estate losses, among others. She would still be allowed to claim the dependent exemption and the Child Tax Credit for Mitchell.

Note that HOH would have been allowed if they had gotten a separate maintenance decree from a court by Dec. 31 (sometimes called a “legal separation), because they would then be “considered” unmarried, even though a divorce were not yet final.

Part of the reason such rules cause confusion is because the tax code defines certain terms, such as “married” and “head of household” differently (for tax purposes) from the way they are commonly understood by most people.

Another reason for a flat tax.