Within DFT, f -electron correlations in bulk plutonium and plutonium hydride can be accounted for using either an on-site Coulomb repulsion (e.g. GGA+U) or orbital polarization, while the magnetic state can be computed through spin polarization (SP) or spin-orbit coupling (SOC) calculations. While spin-orbit coupling (SOC) is essential to compute material properties of PuO 2 , it is less critical in simulating H-Pu interactions in either the surface or bulk. SP computed energies of low-index plutonium surfaces differ from SOC computed surface energies by only 7%. In addition, adsorption energies of isolated hydrogen atoms on the (100) and (111) surfaces of plutonium differ by only -0.03 eV on average when computed with SP vs. SOC. As a result, we choose to employ the less computationally intensive GGA+U and SP methods in this work.