You're probably overpaying the IRS $500 to $3,000 a year.

You probably do. The IRS says you qualify if you use a space in your home regularly and only for business. In plain English:

You qualify if:

• You're self-employed or have contractor income (1099, LLC, S-Corp, or sole proprietor).
• You have a specific spot for work: a desk, a corner of a room, or a spare room.
• You use that spot only for business, not the kitchen table where you also eat dinner.
• You work there regularly. A few hours a week or month counts.

You don't qualify if:

• You're a W-2 employee working from home. This one is only for self-employed folks and 1099 income.
• You work at coffee shops or coworking spaces and never at home.
• You use the space for both personal and business, like the living room couch.

If you have a desk you use for client work and nothing else, you qualify, even if it's in your bedroom, even if it's small.

Source: IRS Publication 587, Business Use of Your Home

Yes. Your accountant will probably wish you'd brought it up sooner.

Most accountants skip the home office deduction because the data takes time to gather: square footage, assessed value, and purchase date. It isn't sketchy. It's just tedious to hunt down old closing documents, so a lot of accountants would rather not deal with it.

That's exactly why we built this calculator. Enter your address and we pull the property data from public tax records. Your accountant gets a clean PDF with the math already done, and you've saved them an hour of work.

Simplified method: $5 per square foot, up to 300 sq ft, so $1,500 max. It's quick and needs no receipts. Use it if your office is tiny or your home costs are low.

Actual expense method: you deduct a percentage of your real home costs, like mortgage interest, property taxes, utilities, repairs, and depreciation. It needs annual totals, not individual receipts. Use it if you own your home or have real home expenses.

Most people save $1,500 to $5,000 more per year with the actual expense method. The catch is you need your annual totals, and that's the part Shoeboxed makes simple. Forward your bills and 1098 as they come in, and we keep the running totals for you.

No. This is one of the most common deductions self-employed people take.

• About 18% of sole proprietors claim it, which is more than 5 million people a year (IRS data, Tax Year 2020).
• The overall individual audit rate is about 0.5% (IRS Data Book 2024).
• The deduction is not an audit trigger.

The old reputation comes from a 1990s crackdown on people who claimed their whole house. Today it's normal when you follow the rules: measure your office honestly, keep your annual totals, and use the space only for business. Shoeboxed keeps those totals for you.

You can still benefit. You can get the big numbers without much digging.

• Property taxes, home square footage, and depreciation: we pull these for you from public records and do the depreciation math.
• Utilities, internet, water, and repairs: download last year's bills and total them up, or upload them into Shoeboxed and we'll do it for you.

Use this calculator to see what you could have saved on last year's taxes, then set up Shoeboxed now so next tax season is automatic. Don't let "I should have started sooner" cost you money.

We build the estimate from real data, and your accountant confirms the final numbers.

What we pull from public records: your home's square footage, exact property tax amount, assessed value, and the purchase date, price, and building value we need to calculate depreciation (the slice of your home's value you write off each year). Depreciation is often the biggest single piece of the actual expense method, and most people have no idea where to find it. We handle it for you.

What we estimate, and you confirm: mortgage interest, utilities, and other home costs, drawn from state averages. You add one number we can't pull, your office size, which you measure wall to wall.

Think of it as a strong starting point. It gives your accountant about 90% of what they need, and it's accurate enough to print, bring in, and say "can we claim this?"