If you work from home as an employee, you cannot deduct anything for your home office. But as a business owner, you can deduct the proportional square footage of your home office from your rent or mortgage, including utilities and renovations.
To qualify: Your home office must be your principle place of business. The majority of the work you do must be done from your home office. And, the space must be used regularly and exclusively for work.
How to take the home office deduction: To take this deduction, you can use the simplified method and the regular method (both are explained below).
You get a $5/square foot deduction per year for every square foot in your home office. If your home office is 10 feet by 10 feet, that’s 100 square feet so you would get a $500 deduction for the year.
The bad part about this deduction is that there’s a limit. The max you can take on this deduction per year is $1,500 or 300 square feet. So if you have a larger space than the limit allows, do not use the Simplified Method. The other bad part is that you cannot carry forward losses. If your business has a loss on your schedule C, you don’t get to take this deduction, you just lose it.