Working from home for teachers: marking and prep

The teaching day does not end at the last bell. A pile of books comes home, reports get written after dinner, and next week's lessons take shape at the kitchen table on a Sunday. All of that runs your lights, your heating, your laptop and your internet, and the extra it costs is a genuine work expense you are entitled to claim. This chapter walks through what counts, the two ways to work it out, and the one record the ATO now insists on that quietly sinks a lot of teacher claims.

What working from home actually covers

When you mark, plan and write reports at home, you can claim the additional running costs that work creates. That means the slice of these bills that exists because you were working, not the whole bill:

• Energy for the room you work in. The electricity and gas that heats, cools and lights your workspace while you mark and plan.
• Phone and internet. The work share of the calls and data you use for school work from home.
• Stationery and consumables. Printer paper, ink, and the bits that get used up doing the job.
• Your home office gear as it wears out. The decline in value of a desk, chair, laptop or monitor you use for teaching work.

Two methods, and you pick the bigger result

The ATO gives you two ways to turn those costs into a deduction. You are allowed to work out both and claim whichever comes out higher, so it is worth a few minutes to compare.

The fixed-rate method

You claim a set amount for every hour you work at home, and that single rate is meant to cover your energy, phone, internet, stationery and consumables in one bundle. The rate is reviewed each year, so check the current figure on the ATO's working-from-home page rather than relying on last year's number. The appeal is that you do not have to carve up every bill: count your hours, apply the rate, done.

One thing teachers often miss: the fixed rate does not swallow your equipment. You can still separately claim the decline in value of your desk, chair or laptop, plus any repairs to them, on top of the hourly rate. Those items are not part of the bundle, so leaving them off means leaving money behind.

The actual-cost method

Here you claim the real work-related portion of each expense: the actual electricity, phone, internet and consumables that your home marking and planning used. It takes more record-keeping, because you need to work out and back up the work-use share of each bill, but if you do a lot of hours at home in a well-heated study, it can land on a bigger number than the flat rate.

The catch that trips teachers up

This is the part worth reading twice. To use the fixed-rate method you now need a record of your actual hours worked from home across the whole year, kept as you go. A diary, your roster, or a timesheet all work, but it has to be a real log of the hours as they happened. The old shortcuts are gone: you can no longer estimate a typical week, and the four-week sample that used to be accepted no longer is. Plenty of teachers do the hours, do the work, and then find the claim will not stand because the hours were never written down. The marking happened at the kitchen table for months; the record of it did not.

So the habit that protects this deduction is small and dull: jot the hours down each time you sit down to mark or plan, from the first week of the year. It is the single thing that decides whether the claim holds.

What you cannot claim

Working from home has firm edges, and knowing them keeps your return clean:

• Occupancy costs. Rent, mortgage interest, council rates and house insurance stay off. Your school is your workplace, so your home is not a place of business, and these never come into it.
• Everyday household items. The coffee, the tea and the general things you would buy anyway are private, not work costs.
• Anything the school paid for. If your employer funded your home-office setup or covered a cost, it is not yours to claim.
• Phone and internet on top of the fixed rate. If you use the fixed-rate method, those are already inside the bundle, so claiming them again is a double-dip that is not allowed.

The records that hold it together

A home-work claim rests on two things, and both need to be in place before you lodge. The first is that full-year log of hours, which the fixed-rate method lives or dies on. The second, if you go the actual-cost way, is at least one bill for each running cost you claim, so you can show the expense and how you worked out the work-use share. Reassembling either in July from memory is where teachers come unstuck, because a year of hours and a stack of quarterly bills do not reconstruct themselves. The fix is to capture both as the year runs. The ATO's free myDeductions app will hold the raw records.

The bottom line

The hours you spend marking and planning at home are real work, and the extra they cost you is a real deduction. Log those hours from day one, keep the method that gives you the larger claim, add the decline in value of your gear, and leave the rent and the coffee out. Do that and the work you take home earns you back what it should, instead of quietly disappearing because nobody wrote the hours down.

General information only, not tax advice. Check the ATO or a registered tax agent for your situation.