Yes. If you’re self-employed, you can deduct health insurance premiums you pay for yourself, your spouse, and your dependents. This is one of the better deductions available to sole proprietors and business owners in the trades, and a lot of people either don’t know about it or don’t claim it correctly.

The self-employed health insurance deduction is what’s called an “above the line” deduction. That means it reduces your adjusted gross income directly on your personal tax return. You don’t need to itemize to claim it. It shows up on Schedule 1 of your Form 1040, not on your Schedule C. This is a common point of confusion. The premiums aren’t a business expense in the traditional sense. They’re a personal deduction tied to your self-employment income.

The deduction covers medical, dental, and vision premiums. If you’re paying for a family plan that covers your spouse and kids, the full premium qualifies. Once you hit 65 and enroll in Medicare, your Medicare Part B and Part D premiums and supplemental policy premiums are also deductible under this same rule.

There are a few limitations to know about. First, you can’t deduct more than your net self-employment income for the year. If your business had a loss or very low profit, the deduction is capped at what you earned. Second, you can’t claim this deduction for any month where you were eligible to participate in an employer-sponsored health plan. This includes your spouse’s employer plan. If your spouse has coverage available through work and you could have been on it, you don’t qualify for those months, even if you chose not to enroll.

If you operate as an S-corp, the process works a little differently. The company needs to pay the premiums or reimburse you, and those amounts must be included in your W-2 wages as shareholder-employee compensation. Then you turn around and deduct them on your personal return. Skip the W-2 step and you lose the deduction. This trips up a lot of S-corp owners who just pay premiums personally and never run them through the business.

One more thing to watch for is the interaction with premium tax credits from the marketplace. If you’re buying insurance through Covered California and receiving a subsidy, you can’t deduct the same premiums that were already offset by the tax credit. You can only deduct the portion you actually paid out of pocket. The math here gets circular because the deduction lowers your income, which affects your credit eligibility. Your tax preparer should be handling this calculation.

Keeping track of what you paid throughout the year is straightforward as long as your records are clean. This is where having solid contractor bookkeeping services matters. When premiums are properly recorded and your income is accurately tracked, claiming the deduction at tax time is simple.

If you’re not sure whether you’re taking full advantage of this deduction or how it fits into your overall tax picture, that’s exactly the kind of thing tax planning can sort out. The deduction itself is easy to claim. The value comes from making sure it’s working alongside everything else you’re doing to minimize what you owe.