2024 Hurrican Milton

[canes]

I suffered a loss of over $100,000 to my home from Hurricane Milton and I have a $25,000 deductible. Can I use the 25K as eligible disaster expense under the 2024 H.R. 5863 Federal Disaster Relief Act. signed in Dec. .?  Our area was declared a federal disaster area by President Biden.

[Opus 17]

Probably.  Technically, the amount of your loss is the loss in value of the property, which usually needs to be established by an appraisal.  However, if you restore the property to its original condition, you can use the cost as a fair estimate of the loss in value (however, if you take the opportunity to make additional improvements, that needs to be adjusted for.)

However, we have not received word from the IRS or Turbotax about how this will be handled, since it is a very recent change.  There is a box you can check for "qualified disaster loss" which is how you would indicate the special treatment of the deduction, but you also have to include the FEMA number of the disaster.  Before the law was signed, only 2020 and 2021 losses counted as "qualified", and we have not heard from Turbotax or the IRS about whether you can claim the loss under the new rules now, or have to wait for the IRS to update their systems.