In this article, we explain the tax claims that are eligible when working from home. Can I deduct my home office? What about my power and internet bill? And can I claim expenses for work-related purchases on tax? Read on to find out what expenses for your home office you can deduct from tax.

First things first: your home office.
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.

What costs can you deduct?
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 of Home-Office-Pauschale is 1.260€. This covers electricity, heating, rent & insurance.

If your workspace does not 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 on each workday you spend at least 50% of your working time at home. This means even if you visit clients or have other work-related appointments outside, you qualify as long as you work from home for at least half of your daily working 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). Nothing changes in content – only the name.

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

Simply add one expense per year with the amount 1.260€, 0% VAT, 100% professional use, under the "home office allowance" category:

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

In the app, enter the rent amount as an expense under the category "rent", and with a professional use as the % of floor space in your home, like shown below. An attached document is optional for this category.

If your home office meets the aforementioned 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 (auxiliary cost 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 a depreciation and claim the costs over time. Make sure you keep all incoming invoices for business expenses, if you plan on including them in your income tax declaration!

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, as declared by the German ministry of finance.

By the way, you can also deduct privately used items as a business-related expense if you use them for work purposes at least 10% of the time. In that case, you can claim the costs for e.g. your phone or your laptop proportionally to your work usage.