If you are moving to start a new job or even the same job at a new job location, here are 10 tax tips on expenses that may be deductible on your tax return.
- Expenses must be close to the time you start work: moving expenses incurred within one year of the date you first report to work at a new job location.
- Distance Test: your new job location is at least 50 miles farther from your former home than your previous job location was from your former home.
- Time Test: you must work full time for at least 39 weeks during the first year at your new job location.
- Travel: lodging expenses (not meals) for yourself and household members while moving from your former home to your new home; transportation expenses, including airfare, vehicle mileage, parking fees and tolls you pay, but only one trip per person.
- Household goods: the cost of packing, crating and transporting your household goods and personal property, including the cost of shipping household pets.
- Utilities: the costs of connecting/disconnecting utilities.
- Nondeductible expenses: any part of the purchase price of your new home, car tags, a driver’s license renewal, costs of buying or selling a home, expenses of entering into or breaking a lease, or security deposits and storage charges.
- Form: use Form 3903, Moving Expenses.
- Reimbursed expenses: If your employer reimburses you for the costs of a move for which you took a deduction, the reimbursement may have to be included as income on your tax return.
- Update your address: be sure to update your address with the IRS and the U.S. Postal Service.