Are Home Cleaning Services Tax Deductible?

Everybody’s busy. Although, as you well know, there’s busy, and there’s BUSY. You need more time to focus on your career, but your home keeps getting dirty. So, you struggle to make time to clean it. You somehow succeed in getting all the housework done. You do a little victory dance! But, in no time at all—there it is again, dust and dirt and emerging chaos everywhere you look in your house. At this point, hiring a cleaning service is the obvious solution. But, you’re not even sure that’s tax deductible?

Why Do I Need A Home Cleaning Service?

Having help with housekeeping and laundry service frees you from the kinds of chores that add value to your life but that don’t directly add value to your career progress. Delegating the housekeeping work provides the support you need in order to be able to spend more hours on what you do best—use your professional skills to earn a living.

The reality is that you probably paid plenty of money and effort to acquire those skills. You may be finding yourself increasingly frustrated and stressed by a sense that you’re squandering valuable time on housecleaning that could be so much better spent sharpening your job/business skills and applying them to earning more. If that sounds like you, then you probably need to offload a major burden on your schedule by getting yourself a reliable cleaning service.

Advantages Of Having A Home Cleaning Service

• Higher productivity at your job, due to more time to spend on value-added projects
• Increased satisfaction with your home and life, due to consistently clean and orderly house
• Better preserved belongings, due to keeping them free of dirt and dust buildup
• Reduced stress, from having a big time-consuming mass of tasks completely removed from your hectic schedule.

Disadvantages Of Having A Home Cleaning Service

• Cleaning services aren’t free. But wait, you’ll make more income if you devote the same amount of additional time to your job that you’ve been spending on cleaning! Sweet! So, you can actually scratch this one off of the list of disadvantages.
• You’ll have someone in your home during cleaning, while you’re working at home, or relaxing, or while you’re out. A pretty minor inconvenience in exchange for a better living.
• Throwing yourself into cleaning as a form of exercise will need to be replaced with another type of workout, like walking in the park, or even running in the park, or doing Yoga, or maybe that Zumba thing.

Are Home Cleaning Services Tax Deductible?

Having a cleaning service may be something you already do routinely. Maybe you need the service so you can put in more time at the office instead of at your house doing cleaning chores. Or, maybe you want to spend more time with your family and have more spare energy to enjoy it.

Or, maybe you have a home office. If so, you’ve figured out that working from home does not mean that you have more opportunity to clean. On the contrary, people working at home often work longer hours than those who go out to the office. That’s partly because when working at home, you may find that you don’t really have clearly defined blocks of time off, like whole evenings and weekends, as people who work at an outside office do.

Meanwhile, the mopping and laundry are crying out to you, louder and louder. But, even though you’re home most of the time, you don’t have time to clean as frequently as necessary to live and work as comfortably as you could if you just had more time—or help with the cleaning. Yeah, you’re definitely someone who needs professional housekeeping services to make your work and private life manageable. But, does the IRS see it that way?

So, you hire people to clean your home office and the rest of the entire house. You use the cleaning services regularly, and it becomes a budgeted item included in your whole home expense. Now you’ve become aware that, for a qualifying home office, you’re entitled to some tax deductions. But, is your house cleaning service one of those? Note, most likely hiring a nude maid service will not be tax deductible.

Can You Deduct Home Cleaning Services As Home-Based Business Expense?

If you have an office for your home-based business or freelancing work that you’re using in a way that qualifies, under IRS description, as a home office, then there are tax benefits you may be able to claim. The IRS allows you to claim business tax deductions for a range of typical expenses associated with operating a home office, regardless of whether you rent or own your home.

So, before you fill out and file your business tax return, find out what your allowable deductions are, and capture all of those that apply to your home office.

How Much Of My Home Cleaning Services Expense Is Tax Deductible?

There are lots of home office expenses that you can deduct from your business tax return, such as phone expense, office equipment, depreciation, security systems, utilities, office supplies, insurance, cleaning services and numerous others. Whatever portion of your home is used regularly and exclusively for business purposes, a percentage of expenses for maintaining that portion is tax deductible. This includes routine maintenance and cleaning expense for your home office.

Cleaning Services Help Keep Your Home and Home Office Clean

Beyond the joy of having a clean home and work environment, there’s the joy of getting a business tax deduction for home office cleaning. Since you’d gladly pay to have the room(s) you’ve dedicated to your home office cleaned as part of your regular whole housecleaning anyway, it’s kind of a bonus to be able to deduct it.

Note: In addition to now having this good general information, of course, unless you’re a tax whiz, you still need to consult your accountant for tax advice.

Having a professional housekeeping service to help you maintain a clean and orderly living and work spaces is, naturally, an essential for optimum productivity and quality of home and work life for busy people. It also saves you time to focus on the things that you would rather be doing, like spending more time on work projects, enjoying being with your family and friends, practicing your Cha-cha moves. And, now that you know you can also benefit from a business tax deduction for a portion of the cleaning in your home, making the decision to get the cleaning help you need is a no-brainer.

Maid Sailors NYC

We are an NYC cleaning service. We’re proud to be among the most trusted and efficient cleaning companies in the city, serving our clients in all five boroughs with the very best in cleaning and laundry services. Maid Sailors offers regular cleaning, deep cleaning, organizing, laundry service, green/eco-friendly cleaning, office cleaning and other services. Call Maid Sailors NYC at (212) 299-5170 anytime, to discuss your home and office cleaning service needs.