General information, not tax advice. Deductibility rules vary by country and by situation. Confirm what applies to you with a qualified accountant.
The general idea behind deductible expenses
Many tax systems, including the United States, allow deductions for expenses that are both ordinary for your type of work and necessary to do it. A laptop for a graphic designer is an obvious yes. A laptop for someone whose freelance work is entirely in-person coaching with no computer involved is a much harder case.
The test is genuine business use, not merely having a receipt. Where something is used for both business and personal purposes, the deductible part is normally the business proportion, which is why so many freelance expenses are fractions rather than whole amounts.
This also explains why tracking matters so much. Tax is charged on profit, meaning income minus allowable expenses. An unrecorded expense means paying tax on profit you never actually made.
Expenses freelancers commonly underclaim
These get missed because they feel too small, too routine, or too personal to count.
- A proportion of home internet and mobile phone. Based on genuine business use. Most freelancers claim nothing here despite using both for work daily.
- Home office space. Calculated properly, usually by the proportion of your home's floor area used regularly and exclusively for work, rather than estimated loosely.
- Software subscriptions. Individually small and easy to forget. A dozen at $15 a month is over $2,000 a year.
- Bank fees, payment processing fees and currency conversion. The percentage your payment provider takes from every client invoice is a real business cost.
- Professional development. Courses, books, conferences and industry memberships relevant to the work you already do.
- Professional services. Accountancy fees, legal review of contracts, and business insurance.
- Equipment depreciation. Larger purchases may be written off over several years rather than claimed at once, and the later years are where people forget.
Expenses people misunderstand
These are frequently claimed in full when only part, or none, applies.
- Clothing. Generally only genuine uniforms, branded workwear or protective equipment. Clothes bought for a client meeting are not deductible simply because the meeting was work.
- An entire phone or laptop bill when the device is also used heavily for personal purposes. The business proportion is the claimable part.
- Meals without a specific business purpose. Lunch while working alone is normally personal. A meal with a client or while travelling for work is a different matter, often with its own percentage limit.
- Commuting between home and a regular workplace, which is usually treated differently from travel between client sites.
- A whole room claimed as a home office when it doubles as a guest room or is used personally.
None of these is automatically disallowed everywhere, which is exactly why they are worth a short conversation with an accountant rather than a confident guess.
A five-minute weekly habit
Expense tracking becomes either ignored entirely or overengineered into a system nobody maintains. The version that survives is small and scheduled.
Pick one day, the same day every week, and do three things:
- Forward any email receipts from the week into one dedicated folder or label.
- Photograph any paper receipts and put them in the same place. Then throw the paper away.
- Write one line in a spreadsheet for anything without a receipt, such as mileage or a cash payment.
Five focused minutes a week is roughly four hours a year. The alternative, reconstructing twelve months of spending the week before a filing deadline, reliably takes longer and finds less.
One change that makes everything easier
Use a separate bank account for business income and business spending. Not a different bank necessarily, just a different account.
It turns expense tracking from an archaeology exercise into a list you can read. It makes the proportional questions simpler, because business-only purchases already sit apart from personal ones. And if you are ever asked to evidence anything, a clean account is the difference between an afternoon and a fortnight.
Where an accountant earns their fee
Tracking your own spending through the year is reasonable and worth doing. Deciding what is deductible, at what proportion, and how to categorise it correctly is where professional advice pays for itself, particularly once you have equipment to depreciate, a home office, or income from more than one country.
The useful division of labour is straightforward: you keep the records, they make the judgements. Treat this article as a way to stay organised, not as the final word on what you can claim.