Renting a room in my house for part of the year

[ccman1]

I have rented out a room in my house for a couple of years. This past year, my tenant moved out partway through the year, so I have the tax situation where I rented a portion of my house (1 room) for only part of the year.

In previous years, I have checked the option that "I rent out a part of my home" and "Yes, this property was rented all year". I then get an option to allow TurboTax to calculate the expense deductions for me, where I enter the percentage of my property that I rent out (based on square footage). This has worked for previous years.

For this year, I checked the option that "I rent out a part of my home", and select "No, this property was not rented all year", and am then presented an option to enter the amount of time that the property was rented at fair market value and the amount of time it was used for personal use. I enter these numbers (the room was rented for 8 months of the year, and I did not rent it out after that, so the remaining time was fully personal use). But I am then not given the option to allow TurboTax to calculate the expense deductions (where I would enter the percentage rented out). This causes the final numbers to be significantly off.

Is there a way to get TurboTax to do these calculations correctly, to avoid having to do all of the calculations myself?

[ColeenD3 · Accepted solution]

No, unfortunately, you will have to do the calculations.  TurboTax can handle part-year rental and part of the home rental, but not a combination of the two.

Please see this answer from Marketstar:  

Mortgage interest and property taxes are divided between personal (Schedule A, itemized deductions) and rental use (Schedule E) proportional to the number of days used for each and square footage rented.

Your formula is as follows: square footage of rental space/ total square footage of house times days rented/365 to be allocated as a rental expense

For instance, if you have $10,000 in mortgage interest and rent 25% of your floor space for 6 months, multiply 10000 x .25 x .5 = $1250 to allocate as a rental expenses. the balance as a Schedule A, itemized deduction.

So, you will enter a portion of mortgage interest and property taxes in both areas.

To enter personal mortgage interest and property taxes:

• Type in mortgage interest in the search box, top right of your screen
• Hit the Enter key
• Click jump to mortgage interest in the search results
• Follow the prompts and online instructions
• To enter rental expenses, type in rental property and follow the above instructions