How much can I claim for working from home? It's 70 cents an hour — but only if your records hold up

You spent a good chunk of the year working from the kitchen table — video calls, emails, the actual job, just done at home instead of the office. So at tax time the question is fair: how much of that can you claim? There is a deduction, and the simplest way to work it out is a flat rate for every hour you worked from home. The catch is that the easy part is the rate. The part that decides whether your claim survives is the hours behind it.

The rate: 70 cents an hour, and what it already covers

The ATO's fixed rate method lets you claim 70 cents for each hour you work from home. That rate has applied for both the 2024–25 and 2025–26 income years, so it's the figure you use on the return you're lodging now. You multiply your work-from-home hours for the year by 70 cents, and that's your running-expenses deduction — no need to work out the actual cost of each bill.

The reason the rate looks modest is that it bundles a lot together. Those 70 cents an hour cover your home and mobile internet or data, your mobile and home phone usage, electricity and gas for heating, cooling and lighting, and stationery and computer consumables like paper and ink. One rate, and all of those are already inside it.

The first mistake: claiming your phone and internet again on top

Here is the trap that catches careful people. Because the fixed rate already includes your phone and internet, you cannot then claim a separate deduction for those same expenses on top. The ATO's own example is blunt about it: if you use the fixed rate, you can't add a separate claim for your mobile phone — even for the times you use it when you're not working from home — because the rate per hour already includes it. Try to claim both and you're double-dipping, which is exactly the kind of thing the ATO looks for at tax time.

What the rate doesn't cover is worth knowing, because those items you can still claim separately. The decline in value of the bigger things you bought to work from home — a desk, an office chair, a laptop or monitor — sits outside the 70-cent rate, along with repairs to those items and the cleaning of a dedicated home-office room. So the flat rate handles the running costs; the equipment is a separate line.

The second mistake — and the one that actually costs money: your hours

This is the change most people haven't caught up with. To use the fixed rate, you need a record of the actual number of hours you worked from home across the whole income year — a timesheet, roster, diary or similar document kept at the time you did the work. An estimate is not acceptable. The old shortcut of keeping a four-week 'representative' diary and scaling it up to the full year is gone; it no longer works for this method.

The ATO's example shows how expensive this gets. A worker who kept no record of their hours from July through February, and only started a proper log in March, simply loses the July-to-February hours entirely — they can't be estimated back in. Months of legitimate working-from-home time, unclaimable, purely because the hours weren't written down as they happened. Alongside the hours, you also need at least one bill for the running expenses the rate covers — one quarterly electricity bill, one monthly internet bill — to show you actually incurred them.

So the practical version is simple. If you want to claim working from home this year, the rate is 70 cents an hour, it already includes your phone, internet and power, and the thing that makes or breaks the claim is a contemporaneous record of your hours — not a guess made in July. If your records for the past year are thin, the honest answer is to claim only the period you can actually back up, and start logging your hours now for next year.

This is general information current as at July 2026, not advice for your situation — whether the fixed rate or the actual cost method leaves you better off depends on your bills, your equipment and how many hours you really worked from home. If you're not sure which method to use, or whether that laptop is a separate claim, that's a five-minute question worth asking before you lodge, not after. That is what our individual tax return service is for.