Cook for a living and you quietly bankroll a good chunk of the kitchen yourself. The knives in your roll, the whites and checked pants that get you through service, the food-safety card you keep alive, the petrol across town on a split shift: it all leaves your wage before the venue sees a cent of it back. Some of that spending belongs on your tax return, and a lot of it never makes it there. One idea decides which. Money you laid out to earn a wage as a cook can be claimed; money that was really about your life outside the kitchen cannot. Once you can sort a cost into the right pile on sight, July stops being a shrug and a guess.
The test behind every claim
Nothing reaches your return until it passes three checks at once.
Fail any single check and the claim is dead, no matter how much it feels like part of the trade. When a cost sits half in the kitchen and half at home, say the chef's knife you also use for Sunday roasts or the phone the roster texts land on, you take only the slice that was for work, worked out with a straight face.
Knives, tools and kit
Most of a cook's own money is tied up in the knife roll, and it is the deduction the ATO understands best. Whatever you buy to work the line and pay for out of your wage can be claimed. The only thing to settle is the timing.
The whole cost drops onto this year's return. A paring knife, a probe thermometer, a peeler or a microplane each land here.
You write it down bit by bit as it ages, which the ATO calls a decline in value. A single premium chef's knife or a cast-iron pan can sit up here.
Keeping the kit in shape counts as well: sharpening, honing, repairs and a policy over your knives. The trap is the set rule. A knife roll bought in one go for more than $300 is one set to be depreciated, not a handful of cheap blades you can each write off at once. The knives and tools chapter runs the whole thing through.
Whites, checked pants and clothing
Here chefs come off better than almost anyone, and here the venue's dress code quietly bites. Your whites, the jacket, the toque, the neckerchief, the apron and the checked pants count as occupation-specific clothing, the ATO's own phrase for gear peculiar to cooking, so buying them and washing them is deductible. Kitchen shoes with a non-slip sole go through as protective footwear.
Plain black pants and a plain black shirt are ordinary clothing and never deductible, even under an "all black" rule the venue enforces to the letter.
That single contrast is the whole game, and the uniforms chapter lays the line out in full.
Travel between venues
Getting from home to your usual kitchen is on you, and a bag of knives in the passenger seat does not change that. In the ATO's eyes the trip to work is private, the price of showing up rather than the work itself. What you can claim is driving the job demands: straight from one venue to a second the same day, out to another kitchen you also cook at, or to a function somewhere that is not your home base.
A fixed amount for every work kilometre, ceiling of 5,000 a year, backed by a sensible note of where you drove.
Your real running costs scaled by your work-use share. It usually comes out ahead when you cover a lot of venues, at the price of a twelve-week logbook and the receipts.
The deductions that get missed
It is the little, repeating kitchen costs that fall through the cracks, and a full year on the line quietly stacks them up:
What you can't claim
A handful of kitchen costs look deductible and still get knocked back:
- The trip to work. Home to your regular venue stays private, split shift or not, and with the knife roll riding shotgun the whole way.
- Plain and "all black" clothing. The plain black pants, plain black top and ordinary shoes a venue makes you wear are conventional clothing, so they are out.
- Your first qualification. The apprenticeship or cookery course that opened the door came before any cooking wage, so it counts as getting in, not doing the job.
- Staff feeds and the shift coffee. The meal on an ordinary shift and the flat whites that carry you through it are personal.
Tips are income too
This one is not a deduction, but cooks get it wrong so often it earns a spot up front. Tips are taxable, whether they reach you as cash in hand, a cut of the tronc, or a line the venue pays out. If your income statement in myGov does not already show them, you enter them yourself before lodging. Nailing the income side first is what keeps every deduction underneath it steady.
The paper trail off the line
A missing receipt takes a real deduction down with it. The ATO expects written proof of what you spent, a twelve-week logbook where you claim the car that way, and a note showing how you landed on any work-use split. Kitchen paper breeds fast and scatters everywhere: the docket for a new gyuto, the sharpening invoice, the certificate renewal, the fuel slip to the offsite gig, the fortnightly union debit. The trick is to grab each one where it lands, at the till or in the changeroom, instead of hunting through a bag of faded slips the night before you lodge, which is exactly where good money slips away. The ATO's free myDeductions app will hold the basics for you.
The bottom line
A chef can claim more than most cooks ever bother to, but every line has to be your own spend, tied to earning your wage, and backed by proof. Put through the knives, the sharpening, the whites and checked pants and their washing, the driving between venues and the certificate renewals. Drop the commute, the plain black clothing, the staff meal and the qualification that first let you in. Declare your tips for the income they are. Sort those piles, keep the dockets, and the ATO only takes its share of what is left once the true cost of working the line has come off.
Tally the knives, the whites, the sharpening and the travel between venues, and see what they come to against your income and tax.
Related: deductions by occupation · income tax calculator. General information only, not tax advice. Check the ATO or a registered tax agent for your situation.