For the first example if your home is 2 000 square feet and your home office is 200 square feet divide 200 by 2 000.
Home office number of rooms method. Calculating by number of rooms you take 1 divided by 8 and end up with 12 5 business area. For example if your home is 2000 square feet and your home office is 400 square feet your office space is 20 of the total area of your home. That gives you a home office percentage of 10. The irs allows you to use any other reasonable method to determine the percentage of business use so if the rooms in your house are of approximately equal size you can divide the number of rooms used as office space by the total number of rooms to find the percentage of business use.
For example if you use one room for your home office and you have eight rooms in your house in total divide one by eight to get your deduction percentage of 12 5. If the rooms in your home are all about the same size you can figure the business percentage by dividing the number of rooms used in your business by the total number of rooms in the house. In this case you have four rooms which means your expenses for the year are 3 750 per room. But this space need not actually be an office it can be a conference room a lab area storage room or some other type of business usage.
If your home operating expenses were 10 000 then you d get to claim 500 for your home office deduction before claiming depreciation because 500 is 5 of 10 000. Divide the number of rooms used for business by the total number of rooms in the home use this method if the number of rooms is about the same. However the net square footage method takes 270 divided by only 2 000 making your business area 13 5 of the total house. The most exact way to figure this proportion is to measure the square footage devoted to your home office and find what percentage it is of the total area of your home.
However the square foot method is more precise. But did you know that if the rooms in your home are roughly the same size that you can figure the percentage based upon the number of rooms in your house. The qualification requirements for the home office deduction state that a portion of your residence be used regularly and exclusively for business purposes.