einbehaltene

Einbehaltene is a form of the German past participle einbehalten, used as an attributive adjective meaning "withheld" or "retained." It describes items, sums or amounts that have been kept back by an actor such as an employer, a tax authority or a financial institution.

The term derives from the verb behalten with the prefix ein-, which in this context conveys the act of retaining or withholding. As an attributive participle, einbehaltene follows the ordinary rules of German adjective declension: its ending changes according to gender, number, and case, and depending on whether an article or determiner is present. For example, eine einbehaltene Summe (feminine singular, indefinite article) and die einbehaltenen Beträge (plural, definite article) illustrate typical usage. Without a definite article, forms like einbehaltene Beträge are also possible in common finance or accounting language.

In everyday and technical language, einbehaltene commonly appears in contexts such as payroll, taxation, and financial reporting, where portions of pay, taxes, social security contributions or other withholdings are described as withheld amounts. The noun form Einbehaltung, meaning the act or result of withholding, is closely related, and a nominalized use of the participle as das Einbehaltene is possible to refer to “the thing that has been withheld.”

Usage notes: while einbehaltene functions as an adjective, it is closely tied to the noun it modifies and agrees in gender, number, and case. The term is standard in German financial and administrative prose and appears less often in casual speech.