Nobody is setting any of this up for you. No open enrollment email in October, no HR person, no employer match quietly landing in an account you forgot about.
That's the whole difference between this job and a job. And most shoppers I know handle it by not handling it.
The subsidy cliff is back
The enhanced premium tax credits that ran from 2021 through 2025 are gone. They expired at the end of 2025 and were not extended.
What that changes: under the enhanced rules there was no upper income limit, and your benchmark silver premium was capped at 8.5% of income no matter what you earned. That cap is finished. The old structure returned, and the old structure has a wall in it at 400% of the federal poverty line. A dollar over and the credit doesn't shrink, it stops.
KFF tracked what that did. Average monthly premium payments, after tax credits, went from $113 to $178. A 58% jump. And the damage concentrated exactly where you'd expect: enrollees between 400% and 500% of poverty were 3% of 2025 sign-ups but accounted for 27% of the entire drop going into 2026. Sign-ups in that band fell 44%, over 321,000 people.
For 2026 the poverty guideline for a household of one in the lower 48 is $15,960, so the wall sits at $63,840. Household of two, $86,560. Those numbers move each January and the marketplace uses whichever guidelines were in effect when enrollment opened, so check the current ones rather than the ones in your head.
The income the marketplace looks at is not your Shipt payouts
This is the part that changes the answer for a lot of shoppers.
Marketplace savings run off modified adjusted gross income, and MAGI starts from your AGI, which is built from Schedule C profit. Not from what Shipt deposited. Mileage comes out before that number exists.
Say you grossed $47,365 across the year and drove 18,000 business miles, split evenly across the two halves of 2026. The IRS rate changed mid-year, 72.5 cents through June 30 and 76 cents from July 1, so that's $6,525 plus $6,840. A $13,365 deduction, which leaves $34,000 of net profit. Which means the mileage log you did or didn't keep is quietly deciding what you pay for health insurance.
Then half of your self-employment tax comes off on the way to AGI. On $34,000 of profit that's $2,402, so you're looking at about $31,598 before any other adjustments. The tax guide covers the rest of what lands on Schedule C.
An application with $47,365 on it and an application with $31,598 on it get very different answers. Same person, same year, same driving. One of them kept a mileage log.
Estimating income when your income is a guess
The marketplace asks what you'll make next year. You don't know. Nobody doing this work knows. If you've been tracking what you actually clear, you at least have a defensible starting point instead of a shrug.
Advance payments of the credit go straight to the insurance company each month based on your estimate, and then you reconcile the whole thing on Form 8962 when you file. Guess low, and you pay back the difference at tax time. Guess high, and the balance comes back to you.
The fix is boring and works: update your estimate mid-year when your metro slows down or picks up. You're allowed to. It takes about ten minutes on the site and it beats finding out in April.
The premium deduction has a trap in it
If you pay your own premiums and had a net profit on Schedule C, you can generally deduct them, using Form 7206. The deduction is capped at your net earnings from the business the plan is established under, so a year where you barely broke even is a year where the deduction mostly evaporates.
The trap is the month-by-month eligibility rule. Any month you were eligible to participate in a health plan subsidized by an employer, yours or your spouse's, is a month you can't deduct. The IRS instructions are explicit that eligibility is what counts. Declining your spouse's employer plan doesn't get you the deduction back.
So if your partner works somewhere with coverage and you're on a marketplace plan by choice, this deduction probably isn't yours. Worth knowing before you build a tax plan around it.
The SEP IRA number you've seen is not your number
Every article about self-employed retirement leads with the big limit. For 2026 that's $72,000.
You are not going to contribute $72,000.
For a self-employed person the SEP contribution isn't 25% of what you made. The IRS says to base it on net profit, minus one half of your self-employment tax, minus the contribution itself, and that last part makes it circular. Solve it and the 25% plan rate turns into 20% of what's left.
Run it on the $34,000 net profit from earlier. Subtract the $2,402 half of SE tax and you're at $31,598. Twenty percent of that is $6,320.
That's the real ceiling. To actually reach $72,000 you'd need $360,000 of plan compensation, which is also exactly where the annual compensation limit sits. The headline number was never written for someone delivering groceries.
$6,320 is still a lot of money to shelter, and it's more than most shoppers will manage. Which is why the plain IRA is worth mentioning: $7,500 for 2026, plus $1,100 more if you're 50 or older. Less paperwork, no plan document, and for most people it's the account that actually gets funded.
HSA, if your plan qualifies
For 2026 you can put $4,400 into an HSA with self-only coverage, or $8,750 with family coverage.
The thresholds to qualify are lower than people assume. A high deductible health plan for 2026 means a deductible of at least $1,700 self-only or $3,400 family, with out-of-pocket maximums no higher than $8,500 and $17,000.
Look at that first pair of numbers again and then go look at the bronze plan you already bought. A lot of them clear that bar easily. Shoppers who assumed HSAs were for people with better insurance are frequently already holding an eligible plan and have never opened the account.
Only one of these touches your self-employment tax
Something to be clear about, because it's where people get their hopes up.
Self-employment tax runs 15.3% on 92.35% of your net earnings, and it's calculated off Schedule C. The SEP deduction, the IRA deduction, the HSA deduction, and the health premium deduction all sit further down the return. The IRS instructions say it plainly for the health premiums: you can't subtract that deduction when figuring net earnings for self-employment tax.
Same goes for the rest of them. They cut your income tax. They do nothing to the 15.3%.
The only thing on this list that reduces self-employment tax is the mileage, because mileage is a business expense and lands on Schedule C, above the line where SE tax gets calculated. On that $13,365 deduction, the self-employment tax it saved you comes to about $1,888, before whatever it saved you in income tax on top.
Your mileage log is doing more for you than any retirement account you open this year.
What to do before November
Open enrollment opens November 1. The window is shorter than it used to be. CMS finalized a rule moving the federal marketplace to a November 1 through December 15 period starting with plan year 2027, and state-run exchanges set their own dates within limits, so look up your own state's deadline instead of assuming January.
Between now and then, the useful work is unglamorous. Get your mileage total for the year so far, because it determines the income you report, which determines the credit, which determines the premium. Everything downstream of that number depends on you having it.
Auto Tip Map is an Android app that tracks your miles and saves every order, tip, and address automatically. The mileage total sitting in it in October is the number your marketplace application runs on.