Yes, you can claim the same home office space if you have more than one Schedule C business, but you can't deduct the office expenses multiple times. You'll have to split this expense between the businesses so that you’re only claiming the total square footage space once on your return.
If you work as an employee and for yourself, your home office can only support your self-employment and not your job as an employee in order to be deductible.
Here are a few examples of how you might choose to divide the space among your businesses:
- Divide it based on time
- For example, if you use your entire office for each of your businesses, but use it for one business 60% of the time and another for 40% of the time, you could divide the square feet of the space 60/40.
- Divide it based on space
- For example, if you have two businesses and one office measuring 100 square feet, you could enter 50 square feet for each business.
- Divide it based on a combination of time and space
- For example, you might have special equipment for one business that uses 50% of your office space. You use the other 50% for both businesses, splitting your time equally. As a result, you would enter 75% of your home office square footage for your first business and 25% for your second business.
Whatever method you choose, when you start entering home office expenses, enter the full amounts you paid during the time you used the space for either office. Do the same for your other office.
It might seem like you're entering everything twice, but since you divided up the square footage earlier based on how you use it, all of the expenses for the total square footage will be accounted for on your tax return.
TurboTax will calculate the correct expense amounts for each office, and the total expense amount will be correct on your tax return.
If you have separate offices for each business, for example one in the house and the other in the garage, you'd enter the pertinent information (like square footage) for each office space when you enter the information for each business.
