Private ruling: Accommodation expenses
Date of advice: 13 April 2016
Published: June 2016
Ruling period: For the year ended 30 June 2015.
Date scheme commenced: 1 July 2014

Ruling: Q1: Are you entitled to a deduction for accommodation expenses incurred in the city? | A1: No.

Relevant facts and circumstances: You work from home three days a week. The remaining two days you are required to travel to the city and stay overnight while visiting clients. Your employer pays for your fuel and car costs. You are required to pay for your own accommodation.

Relevant legislative provisions: Income Tax Assessment Act 1997 section 8-1

Reasons for decision: Summary: Section 8-1 of the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997 (ITAA 1997) allows a deduction for all outgoings to the extent to which they are incurred in gaining or producing assessable income, or are necessarily incurred in carrying on a business for that purpose. However, a deduction is not allowable for outgoings that are of a capital, private or domestic nature. Generally, accommodation expenses are private in nature and are not deductible. In Lunney v. FC of T (1958) 100 CLR 478 the Full High Court laid down the principle that for a deduction to be allowable it is not enough for the expenditure to be an essential prerequisite to the derivation of assessable income. In that case it was held that the costs incurred by a taxpayer in travelling to the place where they work are expenses incurred in order to enable them to earn income but are not expenses incurred in the course of earning that income. An exception is where a taxpayer is travelling in the course of performing their work duties, for example, an interstate truck driver who travels away from home overnight. In these types of cases, the accommodation, meal and incidental expenses incurred while the taxpayer is travelling are incidental to the proper carrying out of their employment function and cease to be of a private and domestic nature. The issue of expenses incurred in relation to accommodation near the work place while maintaining a family residence in another location was considered in FC of Taxation v. Toms 89 ATC 4373; (1989) 20 ATR 466 ( Toms' Case ). In Toms' Case , the taxpayer was a forest worker who during the working week lived in a caravan in a bush camp 108 kilometres from his family home in Grafton. He claimed it was too far to travel each day to his work in the forest, so that it was necessary to establish a caravan at the camp. He would return home on weekends. The Federal court disallowed a forest's worker's deduction for the cost of maintaining a caravan and other living expenses. The taxpayer incurred the expenses in providing temporary accommodation at the base camp because the taxpayer had chosen to reside at a place far from the worksite. These expenses were dictated not by work but by private considerations and therefore were not deductible. In your case, you work at two regular places of employment in your home and in the city. You incur expenses for accommodation due to having your home in one place and your employment in another. Whilst the expenses would not be incurred but for the distance of your work place from your family home, the expenses are a prerequisite to the earning of assessable income. They are incurred in order to enable you to earn income but are not incurred in the course of gaining or producing that income. As you are not travelling in the course of carrying out employment duties, no deduction is available for accommodation expenses you incur when working at the second work location.