It totally hit me this year. I was maxed out before the mortgage interest deduction was even finished and the charitable contributions mattered exactly diddly squat. Ended up taking the standard deduction instead because it was higher.
Are...you sure you did your taxes right? Just because you maxed out your SALT deduction doesn't mean you don't also qualify for other itemized deductions. Unless you're affected by AMT or something?
That's what TurboTax told me. SALT wasn't huge for me, and I'm nowhere near the AMT. I put in the mortgage interest deduction after the dependents and it popped up a window saying that I've hit the $10k limit on deductions and any further deductions won't be counted. True to its word all further deductions (mostly charitable contributions) made no difference.
Same version we use every year. Same procedure we go through every year. If I did it wrong I'm not alone.
Roughly:
Enter all W2 info that they should already have.
Enter all interest income.
Enter dividends (which are small)
then we move on to deductions
Enter Dependants
Enter Mortgage Interest (at this point the software tells us that we've maxed out deductions for the year)
Now a note about the interface on this software. In the corner they included a current tally of your tax owed/refund which updates every time you enter a new value.
At this point we start putting in the deductions anyway, because some things aren't counted until later steps, although it had been counted in the past. We note that the value in the corner is not changing despite putting in a significant amount of deductions.
Once we finish with the deductions the software tells us that the cap on deductions ($10k) is less than our standard deduction and suggests we take the standard deduction instead, which we do.
