Hand Sanitiser, Disinfectant, Gloves, Face Masks
There have been a lot of questions recently around whether you can claim these expenses on your tax return this year, so here’s the low down….
If your job requires physical contact or you are in close proximity to your clients, customers, or co-workers (E.g. Hospitality workers, Healthcare, or Retail workers), then these expenses are tax-deductible.
They are not tax-deductible if you are working remotely or have no interaction with clients and customers.
As with all tax expenses, you cannot claim a tax deduction if you have been reimbursed by your boss and you must have tax receipts to claim this tax deduction.
To claim your COVID tax deductions, head to our 'COVID' page to enter in the total amounts you spent on your COVID tax expenses
Home Office for your Online Income Tax Return
If you are working remotely from home, there are two ways you can claim tax deductions with your Working from Home Tax Expenses…
- Normal Home Office Method
To claim these tax deductions, you must be working from a designated office, keep a log (you can get a tax logbook off us), of the hours working in your home office to claim tax deductible heating, tax deductible cooling, tax deductible lighting, and tax deductible depreciation on office furniture. All great income tax deductions for your online income tax return.
You can also claim other tax deductible work from home costs e.g.
- Stationery that is tax deductible
- Printers, printer ink, paper etc., they can be tax deductible as well.
- Office equipment e.g. Computers, Laptops, Computer monitors, webcams, headsets etc., subject to tax write off limits and tax dedctible.
We have found that this tax method entitles you to greater tax deductions if you are willing to undertake the documentation requirements. It's a better way of claimimg all your tax deductions over the tax deductions created by the Shortcut Method which we will outline next.
2. Shortcut Method for Home Office Tax deductible expenses
For this method, you do not need to work from a designated office and this method can only be claimed on your 2020 Tax Return from 1 March to 30 June. It is also available for the full tax year in 2021.
This tax deduction method simply requires you to keep a tax log of the time you spent working from home, you can then claim 80c per hour for working from home. The shortcut tax method bundles all of your home office expenses into the 80c per hour, creating a simple way to calculate your work from home tax deduction.
Once again, we don’t feel that this is the best tax option for some of our clients, you can upskill your tax knowhow and can read more about this on our tax blog: We don’t like the Gov’ts new home office method
If you have any tax questions about this tax topic or you are unsure if the work you do will make these tax expenses tax-deductible, send us a message on live chat or shoot us through an email outlining your tax query. One of our tax experts will then respond shortly.
We are more than happy to help you out with any tax matters you have.
Happy tax year.