How to Claim a Laptop on Tax

A deduction doesn't refund your laptop; it subtracts the cost from the income you get taxed on, so you save tax at your marginal rate — the rate on your last dollar earned. On a $2,000 laptop at a 30% rate with full work use, the real prize is around $600, spread over a few years.

Here's how the laptop claim works: the $300 line, depreciation, your work percentage, and the trap that catches work-from-homers.

The ATO draws a line at $300. Equipment costing $300 or less gets claimed in full, immediately, in the year you bought it. A $250 keyboard-and-monitor combo used only for work is a $250 deduction this return. That makes accessories the easy wins: mice, keyboards, laptop stands, cables, a budget monitor — buy before 30 June, claim that same year.

One catch: you can't split a $1,500 laptop into five imaginary $300 parts. The $300 test applies to the whole item, and the ATO has seen that trick before.

Above $300, you claim depreciation — the cost gradually as the item loses value, instead of all at once. The ATO assigns computers an effective life of roughly two years for laptops and around four for desktops. A $2,000 laptop over two years is roughly $1,000 a year of deduction — before the work-use haircut below.

Slower than an instant claim, but the total is the same, and tax software or your accountant does the maths for you.

You only claim the work share of the laptop. If it's your Netflix machine on weekends, it isn't 100% work — and claiming 100% on a personal-ish laptop is a classic audit invitation (an audit being the ATO combing your return line by line). Estimate the split from actual use: hours of work use versus total use over a representative period. Sixty percent work use on that $2,000 laptop means 60% of each year's depreciation slice — about $600 a year over two years.

Keep the receipt and your working. The receipt proves the cost; the working proves the percentage.

The 70 cents per hour WFH fixed rate does not include your laptop. The rate bundles running costs — electricity, internet, phone, stationery and consumables — but depreciation on equipment sits outside it. So you can claim the 70c rate for your hours and your laptop's depreciation on top. That's not double dipping — claiming the same cost twice — because they're different costs.

The actual double-dip trap is consumables: ink, paper and stationery are inside the 70c rate, so don't claim those again separately. The machine is claimable on top; the stuff it prints through is not.

Under $300: instant claim. Over $300: depreciate over about two to four years. Either way: work percentage only, receipt kept, working noted. And if you claim the 70c WFH rate, the laptop still goes on top.

Add up your tech and see what it does to your refund in our Deduction Estimator — the $600 you're owed doesn't claim itself.