Work from home & home office deduction calculator

What the 70c already covers

The fixed rate is a bundle. Claim it and you cannot also claim any of these separately, for any part of the year:

• Home and mobile internet or data
• Mobile and home phone usage
• Electricity and gas for heating, cooling and lighting
• Stationery and computer consumables, such as printer ink and paper

What you can still claim on top

These sit outside the bundle. This is where most people under-claim — the rate covers the running costs, not the equipment:

• Decline in value of technology and office furniture — desk, chair, computer, monitor, bookshelves
• Repairs and maintenance to those items
• Items costing $300 or less outright, in the year you buy them
• Cleaning of a dedicated home office, in limited circumstances

Fixed rate, or actual cost

There are two ways to claim home office expenses, and this calculator does the first. They are alternatives for the same costs, decided for the income year as a whole.

The fixed rate — what the box above works out — trades precision for almost no paperwork. One rate an hour covers the bundle listed above, and the only thing you have to be able to produce is the record of hours.

Actual cost is the long way: work out what each running expense really came to over the year and claim the work-related proportion of it. No rate is involved, so nothing is averaged away — which is the point, and the cost. It needs the bills, a defensible basis for the proportion you are claiming, and a representative record of the pattern of use behind that proportion.

Which one wins is arithmetic, not principle. Actual cost tends to come out ahead for a dedicated room, a long day, an expensive internet or electricity bill, or a household where the work use is genuinely most of the use — and behind for someone at the kitchen table two days a week, where the paperwork buys very little. Nothing stops you working out both and claiming the better one; what you cannot do is take the fixed rate and then claim an item it already covers.

The records rule is the one that catches people

You need a record of the actual hours you worked from home across the whole year — a diary, roster, timesheet or logbook kept as you went. A four-week representative sample is no longer accepted, and an estimate written up at tax time is not a record.

You also need at least one bill for each expense the rate covers, to show you incurred it. You are not adding those bills up; you are evidencing that they exist.

Keep both for five years from the date you lodge — and records for depreciating assets for five years from your last decline-in-value claim, which is longer than most people expect.

Worked example

15 hours a week for 48 weeks is 720 hours. At 70c an hour that is a deduction of $504.00 — before any decline in value on the desk, chair or laptop, which is claimed separately.