(2021) When is the home office the centre of professional activity?

If the home office is the "centre of all business and professional activities", the costs are fully deductible as business expenses. This is the case if you carry out all your professional and business activities exclusively in the home office.

If you work partly in the home office and partly outside, the assessment of the home office as the centre depends on whether the qualitative focus of the overall activity is in the home office. This is the case if the essential and defining activities for the profession are carried out there. The "centre" is therefore determined by the substantive focus of the professional activity.

In this assessment, the decisive factor is not the duration of use. The temporal (quantitative) extent of use is at most an indication: extensive use suggests the centre, while only minimal use tends to argue against it.

However, the home office can also be the centre if the time spent there is less than 50% of the total professional and business activity and the external activities predominate in terms of time. It is important that the work in the home office is so significant for the profession that it defines it. It is not sufficient for the activities in the home office to have merely a supporting function.

Examples:

• For typical sales representatives and field staff, the qualitative focus of the overall activity is usually outside the home office in the business district. The work done in the home office does not define the profession but has only a supporting function.
• For a sales manager who is on average out of the office two days a week to supervise 13 field staff and look after some key accounts, the home office is the centre. This is because he performs the essential services for his profession there.
• For university lecturers and judges, the home office is not considered the centre, as they do not perform the activities at home that are essential and defining for their profession. For university lecturers, these are the lectures at the university, and for judges, the hearings in court.