Self-employed persons report the home office deduction on either Schedule C or F and complete and attach
Form 8829, depending on which of the two methods is selected.
Claiming the actual home office deduction involves filing
Form 8829 in conjunction with the taxpayer's Schedule C for the business.
After 1990, home office expenses were calculated separately on
Form 8829, Expenses for Business Use of Your Home, and the deductible portion brought forward to the Schedule C.
Since no tax benefit would result from this expenditure under the simplified method, C should elect to compute the home office deduction using actual costs on
Form 8829, Expenses for Business Use of Your Home.
Under prior law, taxpayers had to fill out IRS
Form 8829, which has more than 40 lines, in order to claim home office deductions.
The safe harbor is elected on a timely filed original tax return (instead of on
Form 8829, Expenses for Business Use of Your Home, which is used for the actual-expense method), and taxpayers are allowed to change their treatment from year to year.
If you are self-employed, use
Form 8829 to figure your home office deduction and report those deductions on line 30 of Schedule C, Form 1040.
The instructions for the 2004 IRS
Form 8829 "Expenses for Business Use of Your Home," Page 3, and the 2004 IRS Publication 587 "Business Use of Your Home," Page 10, both indicate that depreciation for business use of a home is based on the 39-year recovery period for nonresidential real property.
Over the past few years, the Internal Revenue Service (www.irs.gov) has made it easier for taxpayers to take the proper home-office deduction by having them file
Form 8829, Expenses for Business Use of Your Home.
Sometimes the real benefit is not as great as it appears on IRS
Form 8829 (expenses for business use of your home).
In addition, a new
Form 8829 must also be filed with the individual's income tax return.