📋 Deductions & write-offs

A deduction is a discount, not a rebate. Spending a dollar to save 30 cents of tax still costs you 70 cents, so the only deductions worth chasing are for things you were going to buy anyway. Where deductions genuinely matter is that a business expense on Schedule C reduces your self-employment tax as well as your income tax — roughly 14 cents extra in the dollar — which is why a legitimate business expense is worth substantially more to a freelancer than the same expense is to an employee.

The ones that actually move the number

For most people working from home the home office deduction is the largest, and the choice between the simplified $5-per-square-foot method and actual expenses is worth making properly rather than defaulting to the easy one. Business mileage is next, and 2026 has a wrinkle: the standard rate rose mid-year, so trips before and after the change are priced differently.

For anything substantial you buy, the Section 179 calculator shows how much you can write off immediately — and, more usefully, how much the income cap holds back to a later year, which is the part that surprises people who expected the whole purchase to land this year.

Health insurance premiums deserve their own attention, because the deduction behaves unlike the others: it sits above the line rather than on Schedule C, which means it never reduces your self-employment tax. That single fact changes how much it is worth by about a third.

The new ones from OBBBA

Two deductions arrived for 2026 and both are narrower than the headlines suggested. The "no tax on tips and overtime" provisions are income tax deductions, not exemptions — payroll tax still applies to every dollar — and they phase out. The car loan interest deduction requires a new vehicle with final assembly in the United States, on a loan secured by the car, and it disappears entirely by $150,000 of income for a single filer.