Turbo Home & Office.
I believe there is a quick and easy way to add a home office expense without going through all the depreciation of my home and adding all the interest to my mortgage expense and maintenance of my house expense. I would just like to have a minimum of added deductions.
Yes. you can use the simplify method for home depreciation (see screenshot)
As an employee, the Home Office Deduction is a job-related expense subject to the 2% AGI limitation and is only available as a deduction if you itemize on your tax return.
To enter your Home Office expenses as a job-related expense in TurboTax Online or Desktop, please follow these steps:
I am having trouble understanding if I can use the employee home office deduction. I read that it's been eliminated as part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. (for W-2 employees) But then I also find that if it was for "employer convenience" then it may be allowed. Turbotax allowed me to enter my data and gave me a deduction. (using the simplified version) Do you know whether it's still an active deduction for W2 employees. I searched IRS rules and it was not helpful. Thanks.
@beccaineugene No-----there is not a provision for a W-2 employee to get a deduction for a home office for the "employer convenience." Not sure where you heard something like that. (I suspect social media).
Sorry---W-2 employees cannot deduct expenses for working from home. Job-related expenses were eliminated as a deduction for W-2 employees by the tax laws that changed for 2018 and beyond. Your state tax laws might be different.
Thanks for that. It wasn’t social media actually, (I don’t turn to social media for tax advice- not sure why you said that) but this article, among others. However, now I notice I can’t find a date for the article.
It’s weird that TurboTax let me claim it. I was answering prompts about employee expenses, and then it walked me through all the info, letting me choose the simplified method ultimately, and gave me a deduction of about $550. It seems that might be a program flaw if that doesn’t exist anymore. Anyway, thanks for the help.
ugh. And now that link is broken/error 400. (Shrugging shoulders.) Never mind.
There are a few states that allow job-related expenses for W-2 employees, and that is why the software allows you to enter them so that they will flow from your federal return to your state form. But you will not get a federal deduction for job-related expenses for a W-2 job on a federal tax return.
Okay, thanks. It didn’t appear that the supposed $550 was an Oregon deduction, but I’ll chalk it up to some kind of error one way or the other. I understand it’s my responsibility to know or research tax law well enough to do my own taxes, but it didn’t inspire much confidence in TurboTax last night when I was working on it to have it tell me i qualified for a large deduction that i apparently don’t.
thanks for the help.
Another thing that led to the confusion----this thread is old. When you see a 2019 date in some of these threads ---they can really be much older---and this one is old. When the user forum changed from Answer Xchange to Real Money Talk in mid-2019, a bunch of old threads migrated over with 2019 dates. But the information in that reply above has to be much older---from before the tax law changes that occurred for 2018 and beyond.