Including personal telephone costs in the private tax declaration in Germany

The telephone costs of your home telephone can be used professionally. For example, if you have business talks or send faxes in the name of your employer from home.

In this case, these costs are included in the advertising costs, which you can assert on the investment N of your tax declaration. How much you can state of your telephone costs in the tax return depends entirely on how you can prove the job-related part of the tax office. The alternative is to have your employer refund the costs incurred.

What is the telephone cost?

The chargeable telephone costs include not only the call charges. Also basic charges, equipment costs and connection fees are telephone costs can be taken as advertising expenses.

How much telephone costs can you state in your tax declaration

You can settle the most profitable telephone costs on a flat-rate basis, which means you do not have to provide single-person proof. In this case, the tax office will recognize up to 20% of the monthly costs, but not more than 20 euros per month, in your tax return. A further possibility is to provide the financial authority with an estimate of the actual costs. This must include the day of the call, the duration or the call charges as well as the caller and the destination of each professional call. If you have shown this to the tax office for 3 months at a time, you can use the determined occupational benefit for the entire period of use. It is only worthwhile to have a single proof for these three months if you are likely to have a much higher professional use of your phone during this time than usual. Then the calculated value is as high as the maximum of 20 Euros.

What if you have a separate telephone line for professional conversations at home?

If your employer places a second line in your home and forbids you to use it for private telephone calls, the situation is somewhat different. In that case, the employer may reimburse you all the costs of this connection without tax. If the private use is not prohibited, then you do not have to tax the advantage that you achieve.