Where do you enter room and board college expenses so that they are considered in 529 distribution?

[Hal_Al]

You can't enter those expenses yet. This is a known glitch in TurboTax (TT). They are working on it (no announced fix date).   The 2025 education and 529 sections appear totally redesigned, from last year. 

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  The 1099-Q is  only an informational document. The numbers on it are not required to be entered onto your (or your student's) tax return. The interview is complicated and it's easy to make mistakes. Avoid it if you can and you can. 

You can just not report the 1099-Q, at all, if your student-beneficiary has sufficient educational expenses, including room & board (even if he lives at home) to cover the distribution. When the box 1 amount on form 1099-Q is fully covered by expenses, TurboTax will enter nothing about the 1099-Q on the actual tax forms. But, it will prepare a 1099-Q worksheet for your records (you don’t need it). You would still have to do the math to see if there were enough expenses left over for you to claim the tuition credit. You also cannot count expenses that were paid by tax free scholarships.

References:

1. On form 1099-Q, instructions to the recipient reads: "Nontaxable distributions from CESAs and QTPs are not required to be reported on your income tax return. You must determine the taxability of any distribution." 
2. IRS Pub 970 states: “Generally, distributions are tax free if they aren't more than the beneficiary's AQEE for the year. Don't report tax-free distributions (including qualifying rollovers) on your tax return”.
3. "IRS Publication 970, Tax Benefits for Education states: If the entire 1099-Q went to qualified expenses, room and board, tuition, etc; then, you do not need to enter the form." 

[SharonD007]

Your experience has been forwarded to our TurboTax developers and they are working on a resolution. Thank you for bringing to our attention.

Here's additional information regarding 529 Plan distributions.

The 529 distribution (reported on Form 1099-Q) Form 1099-Q only needs to be reported on the tax return of the person whose SSN is on the form if the withdrawal is more than the tuition paid in Box 1 of the 1098-T plus other adjusted qualified educational expenses. In that case, the earnings on the excess distribution would be taxable income.

First, determine if the Form 1099-Q needs to be reported on the tax return by comparing the withdrawal with the tuition paid on the 1098-T added to other qualified educational expenses. To find out what are qualified educational expenses, review the IRS Tax benefits for education: Information center. Refer to the TurboTax articles Guide to IRS Form 1099-Q: Payments from Qualified Education Programs and What is IRS Form 1099-Q? for further details.

Secondly, enter the 1099-Q if the withdrawal exceeds the educational expenses by following the directions in the TurboTax Help article Where do I enter a 1099-Q?

When the student's school expenses are paid with these funds, you can't claim a tuition deduction 

or either of the educational tax credits for the same expense.

[Nounours]

Can we please have an update on this?

It looks like the 1099-Q and 1098-T forms are now unlocked, but there still doesn't seem to be a way to report any eligible costs not reported in the 1098-T other than books. In particular off-campus lodging fees can't be reported anywhere.

Thank you.

[MaxA1]

Off campus lodging fees do not qualify for Education credits but may qualify for qualified expenses pertaining to 529 distributions.  There is no specific field to input these expenses.  When entering the information regarding your 529 distributions (Form 1099-Q), you will indicate how much of the distribution amount was for qualified education expenses and that's where you will take into account your room and board costs,

[Nounours]

Hello MaxA1,

You've described exactly my scenario: I'm trying to enter off-campus lodging costs, which are qualified for the 529 distributions I've taken to pay for them.

But unlike prior years of TurboTax, there is currently no place to enter these costs anywhere in TurboTax 2025. Not in the "ESA and 529 Distributions (1099-Q)" section, nor in the "Expenses and Scholarships (1098-T)" section. The only expenses listed outside of the 1098-T form in the latter are about books.

If I don't enter the lodging costs, our refund gets reduced by several thousands of dollars because a large chunk of the 529 distributions we took become incorrectly taxable.

Please advise where we should enter the 529 qualified lodging costs to ensure we don't get taxed on 529 distributions.

Thank you.

[MaxA1]

Thank you for clarifying your situation.  This is currently being investigated and we are informed that the issue should be fixed during the upcoming update this Friday, February 13.  Please check back after February 13 to confirm whether or not you are still having issues with this.

[user17698181478]

Today Friday, 13 Feb or tonight Friday 13 Feb?  As of noon Central time, it is still broken.  

[confused27]

Apparently, this has been a known issue for weeks. I've used Turbotax for many years and never seen anything like this.

I'm trying out FreeTaxUSA. So far it is pretty nice. If it gets past this issue with room and board payed via 529, I think I'll just move to that from now on. 

[Nounours]

As other have reported here and in other threads, even after installing today's latest update, there is still no place to report 529-qualified lodging expenses not included in a 1098-T. Only book expenses can be entered in the Step-by-step, just like it was before.

Update: Digging into the forms, it looks like there are lines for "Room and board" as well as many others (Other course-related, Special needs expenses, Computer expenses, Equipment, Uniforms, Transportation, etc) in both "Student Info Wk", "People wks", and "ESA/QTP Wks" worksheets. Why are none of these lines exposed in TurboTax "Step-by-step" mode? I understand that users can go an manually edit these worksheets and that they are not filed with the tax return, but the whole point for all of us to purchase the TurboTax software is for the "Step-by-step" process so we don't have to fill in the forms manually by ourselves, especially for common scenarios, like paying for education expenses with a 529 distribution.

Could you please provide an update on when this issue will be addressed?

Thank you in advance.

[AnnetteB6]

The experience described here is expected to be resolved in a TurboTax update to be released by February 27th.  

@user17698181478 

[taxmomyee]

It is 2/22/26 - Still unable to enter the room and board as qualified expenses for 529.  Anyone see otherwise? ....   Patiently waiting for 2/27/26

[talltodd]

Today's update (2/26) seems to fix it. 

[talltodd]

There's been another update on 2/27/26. 

[rchan87]

Are you guys positive that this has been fixed? I checked both the online and desktop versions and both still don't have any entry for room and board expenses when filling out the 1098-T questionnaire. Am I looking in the wrong place?