I purchased a new cell phone through T-Mobile with a trade-in. How much of this if any can I deduct from my taxes? I use the cell phone for DoorDash and Walmart Spark.

[hollyc1208]

The phone is also used for personal use

[Vanessa A]

You would need to prorate the amount that you deduct based on business use versus personal use.  So if you use the phone 15% for DoorDash, 25% for Walmart Spark and 60% for personal, then you would split it 15/25/60.  Remember social media, internet, and random scrolling would count as personal use.  For the business portions, you will enter the amount that you are claiming as expenses after you enter the income for each individual activity. 

The purchase of the phone would be split the same, based on percentage of use between business and personal.  Since you traded your old phone in, you would count the amount you paid plus the value of the trade in as the total cost of the phone.  

[Opus 17]

You can list the phone as a business asset using the purchase price.  Some assets must be depreciated over time, but for purchases under $2500, you can usually take the purchase as an expense in year 1, rather than depreciating over time. (The trade-in is irrelevant unless it was also a business asset.)

However, you can only deduct the percentage used for business, and if audited, you need to show by some kind of contemporaneous, reliable written record, how you calculated that percentage.  Contemporaneous means it is a record or calculation you performed close in time to the use of the phone, not something that you wrote down from memory the night before the audit.