Tax & GST

Phone, internet and home office for personal trainers

Your phone is a work tool and a personal one on the same SIM. Your programming happens at the kitchen table between a 6am and a 4pm. Both are claimable. But only the work share, and only if you can show how you arrived at the number.

Apportionment is the only skill on this page

Nearly every mistake in this area is the same mistake: treating a mixed expense as if it were a pure one. The phone is the obvious case. It rings for clients, and it rings for your mother. The internet runs your invoicing and your Netflix.

You don't lose the claim because an expense is mixed. You apportion it: work out a fair business-use percentage, claim that share, and keep the working out that got you there. The percentage itself is the deduction, and it only counts for anything if it came from something real rather than a round number that felt about right. A percentage you can't reconstruct is a percentage you can't support.

Your phone: how to get to a number

Start from the honest position. If it's your only phone, it is a private phone you also use for work. The ATO's expectation is that you identify the work-related portion over a representative period, usually around four weeks, and apply that pattern to the year.

• Calls and messages. Count work calls and messages against the total. If 40 of 100 calls that month were clients, gyms or suppliers, that's a 40% starting point.
• Data. If most of your work use is data (the coaching app, video check-ins, uploading programs), count data instead, because calls will understate it badly.

Then write down the sample period, what you counted, and the percentage you landed on. That note is the claim. The bill proves you spent the money; it proves nothing about how much of it was work.

There is a shortcut for very small claims. The ATO accepts incidental use of $50 or less with only basic records showing how you worked the figure out, at a set rate of 25 cents per work call from a home phone.

One catch worth knowing before you lean on it: the ATO publishes that concession in its work-related deductions material, which is written for employees. You're claiming a business deduction as a sole trader, which is a different part of the law, and the ATO doesn't say either way. At $50 it isn't worth a fight - if your real claim is bigger than that, do the four-week analysis and claim properly.

Internet

Same logic, harder evidence. There is no itemised bill for a home connection, so the percentage has to come from how the household actually uses it: how many people are on it, what for, and how much of that is business. Apportion by time or by number of users. Either is acceptable if it's reasoned and written down. What isn't acceptable is 50% because halves are tidy.

What counts as working from home when you're a trainer

This trips people up because the training itself happens somewhere else. The hours still count: writing and adjusting programs, invoicing and chasing payments, coaching calls and online client check-ins, answering messages outside session time, filming and editing content, CPD.

What doesn't count is training yourself in the garage, or being at home with your phone on in case someone messages. The hours have to be hours you were working.

The two working-from-home methods

There are two ways to claim the additional running costs of working at home. You choose when you lodge, for the year as a whole, on the strength of the records you kept - which is the real argument for keeping records for both. What you can't do is combine them: the ATO is explicit that the costs the fixed rate covers can't then be claimed separately as well.

1. The fixed rate method

A set rate for each hour you run your business from home. The ATO sets it per income year, and for 2024-25 and 2025-26 it is 70 cents per hour. One number covering a bundle of costs, which is why it's simple and why it's restrictive.

Use the rate for the year you're actually claiming, not the one you used last time. The ATO publishes each year's figure on its home-based business expenses page for sole traders, and a new year's rate is not always up the moment that year starts.

It includes energy (electricity and gas for lighting, heating, cooling and running your devices), home and mobile phone, internet, stationery, and computer consumables like paper and printer ink.

You can still claim separately on top of the rate: the decline in value of your desk, chair, laptop, phone handset and similar assets, repairs to those assets, and cleaning a dedicated home office if you have one.

2. The actual cost method

Work out what you actually spent and what portion of it was work: the real work-related share of energy, phone, internet, consumables, and the decline in value of the gear you use. More effort, and usually a materially bigger claim for someone who genuinely runs a business from home rather than answering the odd email.

There's no hourly rate here, so you're not locked into the bundle. Each expense stands on its own percentage, which is why it suits a trainer whose phone is doing heavy lifting and whose electricity use at home barely changes.

Records: the requirement differs by method

This is where the fixed rate stops being the easy option.

• Fixed rate: a record of the actual hours you worked from home for the entire income year. Not an estimate. Not a four-week sample scaled up. A timesheet, roster, diary or app log kept as you go. You also need evidence you incurred each of the costs the rate covers, and one bill for each is generally enough.
• Actual cost: no year-long timesheet, but you still need a record of your work-from-home pattern (a diary or similar kept for a representative period, commonly four weeks) plus the bills and a defensible basis for every percentage you've applied. Energy in particular can't be apportioned without hours.
• Both: keep it for five years from the date you lodge the return it supports.

Reconstructing a year of home-work hours in July from memory is not a record, and everyone who tries it discovers the same thing: the number they end up writing is a guess wearing a uniform.

Laptops, tablets and the depreciation question

A laptop or tablet used partly for work is claimable on the same principle: business-use percentage, claim that share. What changes is when you claim it.

Cheaper items are generally written off in the year you buy them. More expensive assets are depreciated: you claim the cost across the years you use it, with the business-use percentage applied. Where the line sits depends on the write-off threshold in force for that income year, and that figure has moved several times recently. Check it for the year you bought the asset rather than assuming last year's.

Keep the invoice, not just the bank line, because you'll want the date and the model if the asset gets depreciated. And record the business-use percentage at purchase: a laptop bought in September is very hard to apportion honestly the following June. Full deductions checklist →

Occupancy costs: rent, mortgage interest, rates and insurance

Everything above is a running cost: the extra you spend because you're working at home. Occupancy costs are the costs of owning or renting the property at all, and you'd pay them whether you worked there or not.

Generally, you can't claim them. Rent, mortgage interest, council rates and house insurance are only deductible where part of your home is a genuine place of business. That's a real test, involving space genuinely set aside and used for the business, not a corner of the lounge with a laptop on it. Most sole-trader trainers don't meet it, because the business is conducted at gyms, in parks and in clients' homes.

There's a second gate even if you do meet it. Where the personal services income rules apply to what you earn, the ATO says you may not be able to claim occupancy expenses at all. A sole trader whose income is mostly their own labour is exactly who those rules are aimed at, so this is worth checking before you count on the deduction rather than after.

Worth knowing: if your home genuinely is a base of business, the drive from home to a client can stop being private travel. How car claims work for trainers →

Common questions