DianeW
Expert Alumni

Deductions & credits

To Enter Daycare for your home office deduction in TurboTax (desktop or online) :

1. Select "Business" at the top of the screen (or Income & Expenses for online)

2. Choose "Continue", then "I'll choose what I work on"

3. Select "Start" next to "Business Income and Expenses" (Self employment income & expenses for online)

4. Select "Edit" next to your business name (Choose to edit your Business Profile if you did not list 624410 as the business code).

5. Select "Start" next to "Home Office Expenses"

6. Continue through the screens answering the questions appropriately

Day Care Use

If you use your entire home in your day care, then your square footage is 100%. However, from here, as you then must reduce this by the non-business hours that you did not work. There were 8,760 hours in a year. Let’s assume you had children in your home an average of 50 hours per week. You would have actually provided child care services for 2,600 hours. You then divide this by the total hours in a year. In this example, your net result is about 30%. Thus, square footage usage (100%) x time usage (30%) gives you 30% business use of home percentage for last year. If your square footage usage was only 75%, you would then take 75% x 30%, and you would have 22.5% business use of home allocation. So, unless you are open 24/7 365 days per year, your business usage of home can never be 100%

Click the image attached to enlarge to see the screens that should come up for you to populate for the square footage.