The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has updated its
approach to how you claim expenses for working from home.
The ATO has ‘refreshed’ the way you can claim deductions for the costs you incur when you work from home. From 1 July 2022 onwards, you can
choose either to use a new ‘fixed rate’ method (67 cents per hour), or the ‘actual cost’ method depending on what works out best for your
scenario. Either way, you will need to gather and retain certain records to make a claim.
The first issue for claiming any deduction is that there must be a link between the costs you incurred and the way you earn your income. If
you incur an expense but it doesn’t relate to your work, or only partially relates to your work, you cannot claim the full cost as a
deduction.
The second key issue is that you need to incur costs associated with working from home. For example, if you are living with your parents and
not picking up any of the expenses for running the home then you can’t claim deductions for working from home as you have not incurred the
expenses, even if you are paying board (the ATO treats this as a private arrangement).
Let’s take a look at the detail:
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