How to Claim Your Phone on Tax

You can claim your phone on tax — but only the slice that's genuinely work. That slice is a deduction — an expense subtracted from the income you get taxed on — and it's one of the easiest legitimate claims going. It's also easy to fumble, because "I use it for work heaps" is not a number.

Here's how to turn heaps into a percentage the ATO will accept.

The whole claim rests on one number: your work-use percentage — what fraction of your calls, texts and data is for work. If 40% of your phone use is work and your plan costs $80 a month, you claim $32 a month — $384 over a year. Not bad for a device you were paying for anyway.

Incidental use — the odd running-late call — isn't worth the paperwork; there are small no-questions claims for trivial use. Regular, genuine work use deserves the full percentage treatment.

You can't just declare 80% work use and hope. The accepted evidence is a diary over a representative four-week period: log work calls versus personal calls, and note your work data use — apps, emails, hotspotting to your laptop. An itemised bill makes it easy — mark the work items, then divide work use by total use for your percentage.

Do it once and that percentage covers the whole year, as long as your usage stays broadly the same.

The phone itself is a separate claim from the plan, and it splits at $300. Cost $300 or less? Claim the work percentage of the whole price immediately, in the year you bought it. Over $300 and you claim depreciation instead: a slice of the cost each year over the phone's effective life, a few years for a typical handset — still only the work percentage of each slice.

So a $1,200 phone at 40% work use doesn't hand you $480 in year one. The work share spreads over a few years — smaller annual bites, same total.

One giant asterisk for the work-from-home crowd: the 70 cents per hour fixed rate for home office costs already includes your phone use. Claim the 70c rate and your mobile is spoken for. Claiming both is double dipping — claiming the same cost twice — and exactly the pattern the ATO's systems catch on work-from-home returns.

If your phone claim is big, run the numbers: sometimes ditching the fixed rate and claiming actual costs (phone included, at your diary percentage) pays more. You get one method — pick the fatter one.

The formula: track one representative month, land on an honest work percentage, apply it to your plan (and handset, minding the $300 line), and never stack it on top of the 70c WFH rate.

Then see what your percentage is worth — drop the numbers into our Deduction Estimator.