You aren't exempt from anything unless you know otherwise. For your allowances, just read. If it says "Put 1 for single with one job, or 2 if you're married" you put 1, unless you're married. It's really that simple, lol. Just gotta read and answer accordingly. It's confusing at first, but trust me, once you read everything, it becomes clear. And when you get to the final part where it asks you to count up all your allowances, if you answered properly on all, then you, being single, should get a number on or between 0-3, depending on how many of them you answered 1 to.
You can, however, choose to answer 0, meaning you claim 0 allowances, which in turn takes the MOST out of your paychecks, but gives back the most during tax season. I prefer to have the largest amount of money coming to me in the form of a paycheck because I'm currently in college, and income tax doesn't mean shit to me at the moment. If I'm 30 bucks short on rent, and the high tax due to claiming 0 allowances caused me to lose ~80-90 on a $340 dollar check, then I'll be very pissed. I guess something new happened to the W-4 where there are more opportunities for people to claim allowances, as I currently have 3 and I'm with no child, but I placed a 1 on each line that pertained to me, meaning less tax taken out. You can really only owe if you're claiming kids you don't have.
Enough on my spiel. tl;dr (Claim your allowances if you're broke and in college cause Eff income taxes -- Claim zero if you're not hurting for cash and want a big income tax check.)
