What is your working from home claim actually worth?
Find your hours in the table and see roughly what the deduction comes to. Then check whether you are entitled to claim it, because that is the part that catches people, and it is the part the calculators do not tell you.
The rate, by income year
The fixed rate method is your hours multiplied by a rate the ATO sets for each year. If you are doing your 2026 return, the year ended 30 June 2026, your rate is 70 cents.
| Income year | Rate per hour | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 2025-26 | 70 cents | The 2026 return, the one most people are lodging now |
| 2024-25 | 70 cents | |
| 2023-24 | 67 cents | |
| 2022-23 | 67 cents | |
| 2021-22 | 52 cents | |
| 2020-21 | 52 cents | |
| 2026-27 | Not published yet | The year we are in now. Keep recording your hours anyway |
The 80 cent shortcut rate is gone. It was a COVID measure and it does not appear in current ATO guidance at all. If something you have read still quotes 80 cents, or 52 cents for a recent year, it is out of date.
What your hours come to
At 70 cents an hour, over a working year of about 46 weeks once you take out leave and public holidays. Find the row closest to your week.
| Hours a week at home | Hours for the year | Deduction | Roughly back in your pocket |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 hours, about half a day | 230 | $161 | $48 |
| 10 hours, about a day | 460 | $322 | $97 |
| 15 hours, about two days | 690 | $483 | $145 |
| 20 hours, about half the week | 920 | $644 | $193 |
| 25 hours | 1,150 | $805 | $242 |
| 30 hours, most of the week | 1,380 | $966 | $290 |
| 38 hours, full time from home | 1,748 | $1,224 | $367 |
These figures are an illustration, not a number for your tax return. Use the ATO’s calculator for that, because it asks the questions this table cannot.
Are you actually allowed to claim it?
Find the row that sounds like you. Almost everyone gets the running expenses. Almost nobody gets the rent or the mortgage interest, and the few who do pay for it later.
| This sounds like you | The 70 cents an hour | Rent or mortgage interest | Effect when you sell the house |
|---|---|---|---|
| Employee. Your employer has an office you could go to | Yes | No | None |
| Employee. No workplace provided, but it is laptop work you could do anywhere | Yes | No | None |
| Employee. No workplace provided, and the room doubles as a spare room | Yes | No | None |
| Employee. No workplace provided, the work needs a proper base, and the room is used only for work | Yes | Possibly. Ring us first | Part of your exemption goes |
| Business from home. The space doubles as something else | Yes | No | None |
| Business from home. A space used only for the business, clients come to it | Yes | Likely yes | Part of your exemption goes |
If you landed on one of the two bottom rows, that is the conversation worth having before you claim anything, not after. Here is what it does to your capital gains tax.
For the whole thing written out, including the records the ATO asks for and the 2026 court decision on rent, see claiming home office expenses as an employee.
What the 70 cents already covers
All of this is inside the hourly rate, so you cannot claim any of it again separately:
- Electricity and gas for heating, cooling and lighting
- Home and mobile internet or data
- Home and mobile phone usage
- Stationery and computer consumables
Claiming the 70 cents and then claiming your phone bill on top is the most common error there is. The ATO’s own example is an engineer who works 843 hours from home, claims $590, and gets nothing extra for the work calls she made on days she was in the office.
What you can still claim on top
- The decline in value of your desk, chair, monitor, computer and bookshelves, plus repairs to them
- Cleaning, if you have a genuine dedicated home office
- Anything costing $300 or less that is mainly for work, though you still take out private use, and the write off can be lost where items form a set worth more than $300
Never claimable: coffee, tea, milk and general household items, and anything your employer gave you or paid you back for.
The records are the whole thing
You need a record of the actual hours you worked from home across the whole year, kept as you went. A timesheet, a roster, a diary or a spreadsheet all count.
Estimates are not accepted. Working it out afterwards, from memory, is the claim that does not survive a question. If you have not been keeping hours for the year you are in now, start today. A part year record kept properly is worth more than a full year reconstructed.
You also need at least one bill for each type of expense you are covering.
The trap almost nobody sees coming
Your working from home records and your car logbook get read against each other. One of the inconsistencies the ATO specifically looks for is a logbook showing a work trip on a day your own records say you were home all day. Each claim looks fine alone. Together they contradict each other.
The ATO wrote its example about Albury
The ATO’s published example of an employee who cannot claim occupancy expenses is a salesperson called Priya who lives in Albury, covers the southern New South Wales region, and is promoted into a role based at her employer’s Geelong office. Her employer is flexible and lets her keep working from her Albury home.
She cannot claim occupancy expenses, because her employer provides an office. In the ATO’s words, it is Priya’s personal choice to live in Albury.
If you have moved out this way and kept a job based in Melbourne or Sydney, that example is about you. The running expenses are still yours. The mortgage interest is not.
And in 2026 the Full Federal Court made it harder again
A producer at the ABC claimed $5,878.87 of his rent and $1,148.40 of car expenses. Lockdowns and his employer’s directions meant he had no choice about working from home, and he used the second bedroom exclusively for work. The Tribunal allowed both claims. The Court took them back, because the essential character of rent is putting a roof over your head, and being required to work from home does not turn a private cost into a deductible one.
Questions we get asked
What rate applies to the year I am in now?
The ATO has not published a rate for 2026-27 yet. Its table stops at 70 cents for 2025-26. That does not change what you need to do, which is keep recording your actual hours, because whatever the rate turns out to be it gets multiplied by hours you can prove.
Is the fixed rate always the better option?
No. The actual cost method can be worth considerably more if you have a big power bill, a dedicated space and the patience to work out and substantiate the work related share of each expense. It is more work and it needs better records. For most people the fixed rate wins on effort, and for some it quietly leaves money behind every year.
My employer pays me an allowance for working from home.
Then it goes in your return as income. You can still claim what you are entitled to, but the allowance is not tax free and leaving it out gets noticed, because your employer has already reported it.
Is a claim like this an audit flag on its own?
A reasonable claim backed by records kept at the time is not something to be nervous about. Working from home is a stated focus area, which means the claims that stand out get looked at. The ones that fall over are nearly always missing an hours record or have phone and internet claimed twice.
I run my business from home. Is this the same?
The running expenses work similarly. The occupancy and capital gains side is a different set of rules and the stakes are higher, because a real home based business is far more likely to qualify for occupancy expenses, which is exactly what puts your main residence exemption at risk.
What to do next
You do the sum, not us. The ATO built the calculator and it is the one that produces a figure you can put on a return. All we need back is the answer.
Add up your hours
From your diary, roster, timesheet or spreadsheet. The actual hours you worked from home across the year, not an estimate.
Put them through the ATO calculator
It asks the questions this page cannot, and it handles both methods. Free, and a few minutes.
Send us the result
Email the figure to [email protected] with the rest of your tax return paperwork, and we will take it from there.
Stuck on whether you can claim it at all?
The calculator works out the number. It cannot tell you whether the room counts, or whether claiming against the mortgage will cost you when you sell. That part is worth a phone call, and it is a short one.
Level 1, 561 Olive Street, Albury NSW 2640. Registered Tax Agent 20651000.
This is general information, not advice about your situation. The figures above are illustrations at 70 cents an hour and a 30% marginal rate, and they ignore the Medicare levy, offsets and the rest of your return. Whether part of your home is a place of business is a judgement about your specific facts, and the capital gains consequence lands years later when you sell, so please do not decide it from a web page. Sources: the ATO’s guidance on working from home expenses, the fixed rate method, and occupancy expenses for employees, checked 9 September 2026. The court decision is Commissioner of Taxation v Hall [2026] FCAFC 43, judgment 10 April 2026, with the ATO’s decision impact statement published 17 June 2026. The capital gains position for a home used in business is in section 118-190 of the ITAA 1997.