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Your medical expenses may be tax-deductible under certain circumstances. If the medical bills you pay out of pocket in a year exceed 7.5 percent of your adjusted gross income (AGI), you may deduct only the amount of your medical expenses that exceed 7.5 percent of your AGI from your taxes.
You also must itemize your deductions to deduct your medical expenses. Most taxpayers no longer itemize because the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act greatly increased the standard deduction. Other criteria for eligibility include meeting the income threshold and the IRS standard of deductibility.
If you itemize your deductions each year using Schedule A, you might be able to deduct some of the medical (including dental) expenses you paid out of pocket that year. Deducting these expenses from your total earnings reduces some of your tax burden.
The IRS allows filers to deduct medical expenses that are more than 7.5 percent of their adjusted gross income. Let’s say your AGI for 2020 was $45,000. Multiply that by 0.075 and you get $3,375, which is the threshold for your medical expenses. If your unreimbursed, out-of-pocket medical bills totaled $6,000, that means that you can deduct $2,625.
Qualifying medical and dental bills for you, your spouse and your dependents — everyone listed on your tax return — count toward the deduction limit. Medical bills you paid for a deceased dependent, whether before or after the person died, also are deductible.
“Medical care expenses include payments for the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease, or payments for treatments affecting any structure or function of the body,” according to the IRS.
Here’s a list of the medical expenses that are tax-deductible.
Another way to get a tax break is with a medical flexible spending account, or FSA. An FSA lets you set aside before-tax money, up to a certain amount, with which to pay out-of-pocket medical expenses. FSA contribution limits are $2,750 for 2020 and 2021.
Two major benefits of the medical FSA:
“Many employers offer plans that allow you to pay a portion of your medical expenses with pretax dollars,” says Valrie Chambers, associate professor of accounting at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida.
“This is a very good deal – almost a guaranteed 15 to 25 percent discount for most services. It helps to absorb the economic shock of an illness,” says Chambers, who strongly encourages workers with access to an FSA to sign up.
If you have special needs, there are other costs you can write off, such as the cost of a wheelchair, crutches, equipment that enables a deaf person to use a telephone or devices that provide television closed-captioning. Don’t forget guide dogs for the blind or hearing-impaired, or the costs to retrofit your car with special hand controls or space to hold a wheelchair.
If you make renovations to your home for medical reasons, you can deduct the cost as a medical expense. Expenses related to making your home more accessible for a disabled resident also are deductible, but you likely won’t be able to write off the full costs.
Aging-in-place home remodels you can write off, include:
If the improvement increases the value of your property, that amount is subtracted from the project’s cost and the difference counts as a medical expense.
Here’s an example. Let’s say you spend $60,000 to install an elevator in your home because you have a heart problem and can’t walk flights of stairs anymore. Your home was worth $200,000; the elevator raised the value to $240,000. The cost of the elevator minus the increase in your home value is what you can deduct – in this case, $20,000.
Surgery that is strictly cosmetic, health club dues and weight-loss programs that aren’t medically necessary aren’t tax-deductible. Neither are hair transplant procedures or electrolysis.
For a complete list of tax-deductible and non-deductible medical expenses, check out IRS Publication 502. You might find a few things there that can help get you over the deduction threshold.
If you have enough expenses to exceed the standard deduction for your filing status, you can start itemizing expenses, including medical bills, to reduce your taxable income.
Itemized medical expenses and other itemized expenses are tallied on Schedule A of IRS Form 1040. Schedule A is separated into sections for different categories of deductible expenses. Once you have totaled the expenses for each category, add them up and put the grand total on your Form 1040.
