An expense counts as a business expense when it was incurred for the business. That is the shape of the test nearly every tax system applies, however it words it, and most purchases fall obviously on one side of it or the other. The judgment lives in the boundary cases — the phone that is also personal, the clothing that is almost a uniform — and boundary cases are decided by your jurisdiction’s rules and your records, in that order.
What is the general test?
Purpose, not payment method. The question is why the money was spent, not which card it was spent on: a work purchase on a personal card is still a business expense, and a personal purchase on a “business” card is still not. Jurisdictions phrase the test differently — some ask whether an expense was incurred wholly and exclusively for the trade, others whether it is ordinary and necessary for the business — and the differences matter at the margins, which is why the margins belong to your tax authority’s guidance rather than a blog post.
What the phrasings share is more useful than what separates them: the expense must serve the business, and you must be able to show that it did. The second half is where most claims actually fail — not because the purchase was illegitimate, but because nothing recorded at the time connects it to the work.
Which expenses come up most in gig work?
A familiar set, subject to your local rules. The pattern across all of them: small, recurring, and forgettable one at a time — which is exactly why they compound into real money when recorded and into nothing when not.
Vehicle costs are the special case: where a standard mileage rate is used, it usually bundles fuel, maintenance and wear into the per-distance figure, so those costs are not claimed again separately. The deductions primer on this blog walks through that mechanism.
- Working equipment: insulated bags, phone mounts, chargers, tools of the trade
- Platform fees and commissions withheld before payout
- A business-use share of the phone and its plan
- Parking and tolls on business trips, where rules allow
- Software and subscriptions used for the work, including record-keeping tools
- Protective or branded workwear, where your jurisdiction permits it
How do mixed-use costs work?
By apportionment: you claim the business share of a cost that serves both halves of your life, and you should be able to explain how the share was arrived at. The phone is the classic example — dispatcher, navigator and proof-of-delivery camera during work, an ordinary phone otherwise. A share based on something observable, like hours in work apps or a data-use split, applied consistently, is defensible. A hopeful round fraction picked at filing time is the same number with none of the defence.
Note the method once, when you first use it, and reuse it. An apportionment written down in advance reads as a system; one improvised per year reads as an answer reverse-engineered from the refund you wanted.
What almost never qualifies?
The purely personal, however adjacent to work it feels. Ordinary commuting is the famous trap — travel between home and a regular workplace is generally treated as a personal cost even though the day it starts is a working day, and the drive-classification guide on this blog covers where that line falls for gig driving. Fines and penalties are commonly excluded outright: a parking ticket collected on a delivery is generally your cost, not the business’s, however work-related the parking felt.
Everyday clothing is the other recurring disappointment — worn for work is not the same as being workwear, and most systems disallow ordinary clothes however consistently you wear them on shift. When a category keeps tempting you, that is a sign to check your authority’s actual guidance rather than reasoning by fairness. Tax rules are not fair; they are written.
What records turn an expense into a deduction?
The receipt, captured at the moment of purchase, attached to a record that says what the purchase was for. Amount, date, vendor, purpose — the purpose is the field that connects the spend to the business, and it costs five words. For apportioned costs, the bill plus the note of your method. For platform fees, the statements that show the withholding.
Captured at the moment is the operative phrase, for the same reason it is in mileage logging: reconstruction misses things in only one direction, and receipts fade — literally, in the case of thermal paper. The receipts post on this blog is entirely about that habit.
What do you do with the unsure cases?
Record them anyway, flagged as unsure, and let a professional decide at filing time. The asymmetry is total: a recorded expense can be excluded from the return in seconds, but an unrecorded one cannot be resurrected — the receipt is gone, the date is fuzzy, the claim is dead. Recording is not claiming; it is preserving the option to claim.
A short list of flagged questions is also exactly what makes an accountant efficient. “Here are the boundary cases, with their receipts and my notes” is a ten-minute conversation that pays for itself. A shoebox and a shrug is billable hours.