No, Box 1 of Form 1098-T does not include room and board. It only includes tuition and fees that are required by the college.
Other school expenses like books, supplies, and room and board may assist you in maximizing an education credit or preventing scholarships or education savings account withdrawals from being considered taxable income. You may enter those in TurboTax separately and in addition to the Box 1 Tuition amount:
Room and board expenses are not considered qualified education expenses for the purpose of education credits and they can't reduce scholarship income. You can use education savings account withdrawals for room and board.
No, Box 1 of Form 1098-T does not include room and board. It only includes tuition and fees that are required by the college.
Other school expenses like books, supplies, and room and board may assist you in maximizing an education credit or preventing scholarships or education savings account withdrawals from being considered taxable income. You may enter those in TurboTax separately and in addition to the Box 1 Tuition amount:
Room and board expenses are not considered qualified education expenses for the purpose of education credits and they can't reduce scholarship income. You can use education savings account withdrawals for room and board.
You will not get the screen to enter room and board, unless you previously entered a form 1099-Q (distributions from QTP?529/ESA) since R&B is only a qualified expense for those distributions and not for the tuition credit. To get the screen to enter Room & Board, answer yes when asked if you have book expenses
Thank you for your response. I verified that in the IRS's Form 1098-T Instructions, where I found the instructions for Box 1 vague, but then found the paragraph defining "Qualified tuition and related expenses." However, the instructions say nothing about whether books are qualified or not. Since it enumerates expenses that are not qualified, it seems like books are. If that's not true, can you please tell me where that is in the tax code?
Trying to check the accuracy of Box 1, since apparently schools often get it wrong, I found it difficult to figure out how to determine what Box 1 should be. It is to be the total of all payments to the school, with scholarships and loans included as payments, for qualified tuition and related expenses. I had to assume that scholarship monies and loans were paid in the same year as the semester, but amounts I paid out of pocket were not necessarily for a semester in the tax year. This gets messy if scholarships and loan amounts change from one semester to the next and if room and board change, too. So, for the Fall semester everything was in 2021, easy; I knew what to include and what not to. But for the Spring semester, I was paying for Spring 2022's tuition and related expenses but included Spring 2021 scholarship and loan amounts as payment. However, I had to make sure in my accounting that I did not pay out of pocket in 2021 the portion of Spring 2022 tuition that would be paid for with a scholarship. Otherwise, in 2022 I will have to pay tax on that scholarship money. Does it sound to you like I did it right? Is there an easier way?
To have to answer a question about book expenses to get a Room & Board screen shows that TurboTax is deficient here. TT never did ask me to enter my 1099-Q information. I had to search on "1099-Q" to get a screen for it.
Part of my confusion on the R&B/book expense page was that I couldn't tell if TT subtracted those values from the Box 1 amount or if it added them to it, or even just subtracted or added certain fields, like books that had to be bought from the school versus those that didn't, or vice versa. I think this is an example of places where TT should include more explanation on the effects of the inputs.