Can I deduct my work boots, uniforms, and safety gear?
Yes. If you’re self-employed or own a business, work boots, uniforms, and safety gear are all deductible. The IRS has a two-part test for work clothing. The item has to be required for your job, and it can’t be the kind of thing you’d wear in everyday life. Safety gear for skilled trades passes both tests without much debate. Nobody is wearing a hard hat and steel-toe boots to the grocery store.
Steel-toe boots, composite-toe boots, and any other protective footwear required on job sites are deductible. Regular boots that just happen to be tough probably don’t qualify. The more specialized the footwear, the cleaner the deduction. Same logic applies to everything else you wear for safety. Hard hats, safety glasses, hi-vis vests, flame-resistant clothing, respirators, hearing protection, work gloves, knee pads, tool belts, and fall harnesses all count.
Uniforms with your company name or logo also qualify because they’re clearly work-specific. Plain clothing you happen to wear on the job site does not. A pair of jeans and a t-shirt that you wear both at work and on the weekend is not deductible, even if they get trashed regularly.
One important distinction. If you’re a W-2 employee and not a business owner, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act eliminated the deduction for unreimbursed employee expenses starting in 2018. That means you can’t deduct safety gear on your personal return even if your employer doesn’t cover it. If that’s your situation, ask your employer about setting up an accountable reimbursement plan instead.
For business owners and self-employed workers, these deductions go on your Schedule C and directly reduce your taxable income. They also reduce your self-employment tax, which is the part a lot of people forget. Every dollar of deductible gear saves you roughly 15 cents in self-employment tax on top of whatever your income tax rate is.
The mistake most trade workers make isn’t claiming these deductions wrong. It’s forgetting to track them at all. A $180 pair of boots here, $40 in safety glasses there, $25 for gloves every couple months. Individually they seem small but over a full year they can easily add up to $1,000 or more in missed deductions. Keep receipts or run everything through a dedicated business card so nothing slips through. A Long Beach bookkeeper who understands trade businesses will make sure these expenses get categorized correctly and don’t get lost in the shuffle at tax time.
Long Beach's CPA for Contractors and Trades
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Assign every invoice and expense to a specific job in your accounting software. QuickBooks Online's Projects feature or classes let you track income and costs per job so you can see profitability on each one.
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