Working from home: what you can claim and how?

In this article, we explain the tax deductions you can claim when working from home.

❓ Can I deduct my home office? What about my power and internet bills? And can I claim expenses for work-related purchases on tax?

👉 Keep reading to find out which home office expenses you can deduct from tax.

You can generally deduct the costs of your home office from your taxes, but only if certain requirements are met.

❗The most important one:

Your home office must be a separate, enclosed room that is used exclusively for work. A desk in the corner of your bedroom, in a hallway, or in a shared space like a basement doesn't qualify.

You can only claim the cost of a home office if no private use takes place in that room - so no bed, wardrobe, or TV.

If the requirements are met, you can deduct a proportional share of your rent and utilities (e.g. electricity, heating, internet).

Secondly, you can only deduct the full amount if your home office is your primary place of work, meaning you carry out the majority of your professional tasks there.

If you mostly work in an office or co-working space and only occasionally from home, you typically cannot deduct the full home office costs.

In that case, you're limited to the Homeoffice-Pauschale (home office flat-rate), but only if you have no alternative workplace for certain tasks.

You can either deduct the flat-fee allowance or real expenses.

The flat-fee allowance (Homeoffice-Pauschale) is up to 1.260€.

💡 This covers electricity, heating, rent & insurance.

If your workspace doesn’t qualify as a fully deductible home office – for example, if it’s part of another room or used privately – you can’t deduct rent or utilities.

However, you can still claim the flat-rate allowance (Homeoffice-Pauschale) of up to 1.260€ per year, as long as you spend at least 50% of your working time at home on each workday.

This means that even if you have client meetings or other appointments outside, you can still claim the flat-rate, as long as you work from home for at least half of your daily hours.

This makes the flat-rate a useful fallback even without a fully compliant home office setup.

👉 Note:

Since 2023, the flat-rate is officially called “Tagespauschale für das Homeoffice” (daily home office allowance). No changes to the content - just the name.

On top of the Pauschale, you can also deduct real expenses for the following:

The daily home office allowance is 6€ per day, up to a maximum of 1.260€ per year.
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To calculate your deduction, count the number of days you worked from home for your self-employment. Only include days where you worked more than half of your normal working hours at home.

📌 Note:

For the flat-rate, you can count a maximum of 210 days per year, even if you worked more days from home. This corresponds to the maximum deduction of 1.260€ per year.

Then simply add one expense manually per year, enter the calculated amount, with 0% VAT and 100% professional use, under the “Home Office Allowance” category.

💡 Since this is a flat-rate allowance, you don’t need to attach any documents.

If your home office is your main place of work, you can claim the proportional rental expenses on your tax. Make sure you know the exact size of your home office and calculate the rent per m².

In the app, enter the expense manually. Record your rent as an expense under the “Rent (Home Office as Main Workplace)” category, using the professional use percentage based on the size of your home office.

If your home office is not your main workspace, use the category “Rent (Home Office as Secondary Workplace)” instead.

💡 Attaching a document is optional.

If your home office meets the previously mentioned criteria, you can also deduct the proportional other costs for your apartment.

This includes your power and internet bill as well as any additional services included in your Nebenkostenabrechnung (utilities and service charge statement).

❗Again though, you can’t claim the whole cost, only the proportional amount broken down for the size of your home office.

👉 Also keep in mind that you - hopefully - don’t work 24/7, but usually 5 days of the week for specific times. So you are only allowed to claim the expenses for used power etc. within this time period.

You can generally claim the costs for work-related insurances on your tax.

This includes the cost for your home insurance, given that you mainly work from home and meet all of the above-mentioned criteria for deducting your home office.

👉 If that’s the case, you can claim the proportional cost of the home insurance for your home office.

To be able to properly work from home, you will probably need some office supplies like folders, pens, staplers, or notebooks. All of these expenses are 100% tax deductible.

You can even claim costs for toilet paper, as it is a relevant business-related expense when working from home! 🧻

If these costs exceed 800€, however, you might not be able to claim everything at once but rather have to treat it as an amortisation and claim the costs over time.

More about amortisation in our article

📂 How to manage assets and amortisation?

Make sure you keep all incoming invoices for business expenses if you plan on including them in your income tax declaration! More about incoming invoices in our article:

📂 What should be included on all incoming invoices?

Last but not least, you also need some proper office furniture to work from home.

Therefore, you can claim the full expenses for desks, office chairs, monitors, etc. on tax, given the accumulated costs are not higher than 952€, including VAT.

If your expenses were higher, you have to divide the costs according to their approximate lifecycle and amortise them over time, as declared by the German ministry of finance.

By the way, you can also deduct items you use privately if they’re used for business purposes at least 10% of the time. For example, you can claim the work portion of the costs for your phone or laptop based on how much you use them for work.

Don’t hesitate to contact us whenever you have a question

at tax-coach@accountable.eu - we’re here to help and guide you further. 😊