9 Helpful Tax Deductions You Can Legally Claim Without Having Receipts

Now that the 2024 tax-filing season is finally here, you might be kicking yourself for throwing out some of your receipts from the past year — especially if you were counting on tax write-offs to turn 2025 into the year you make money moves to improve your financial situation.

However, while some tax deductions require you to provide receipts to justify the write-off, there are a handful of deductions you can qualify for if you have other financial documents instead.

We’ll review those deductions below, but remember to discuss these options with your tax professional or accountant, as they’re the only ones who can offer advice specific to your unique financial situation.

Do you primarily work from home? If you have a designated office at home, you might be able to claim the space as a tax deduction. 

There are two ways to claim a home office on your taxes: by calculating (and deducting) the percentage of home expenses directly related to your home office, or by calculating the square footage of your home office and deducting $5 per square foot.

The first method is more complicated and requires quite a bit of math, not to mention extensive documentation, including receipts and utility bills. The second method is more straightforward; all you need to know is the size of the space.

For instance, having a 300-square-foot office would mean you can deduct $1,500 from your taxable income.

If you’re self-employed and rely on your phone as an essential part of your business, you can write off a certain percentage of your monthly phone bill. 

However, you’ll need to calculate the exact percentage of time you spend using your phone for work rather than personal reasons.

While you won’t need a receipt to do this, you’ll need copies of your monthly phone bill with itemized breakdowns of your phone usage so you can calculate the right percentage.

Contributing pre-tax money to an employer-sponsored 401(k) in 2024 already lowered your taxable income, so you can’t itemize your 401(k) or other pre-tax retirement plan contributions. 

However, if you contribute money to an IRA account that isn’t sponsored by an employer, you can typically deduct that money from your taxes as long as your income is below a certain level.

You’ll need to report exactly how much money you contributed to your traditional IRA when filing taxes. Gather bank statements and other financial documents related to your IRA contributions to calculate the exact write-off amount.

If you’re self-employed, you pay both the employer and employee halves of the Social Security and Medicare taxes, which is a rate of 15.3%. Luckily, half of that amount can be deducted from your taxable income.

Plus, even if you decide to take the standard deduction rather than itemizing your deductions, you can still deduct the employer portion from your overall taxable income. 

Your financial advisor can tell you more about taking advantage of this write-off.

If you or your spouse are paying interest on a student loan, or if you took out a student loan for a dependent, you might be able to deduct up to $2,500 worth of interest payments depending on your income level.

You don’t need receipts to claim this deduction. Instead, you need a copy of any financial statement from your student loan account showing how much interest you’ve paid so far.

If you’re self-employed and rely on your vehicle for work — for instance, if you drive for DoorDash or Uber — you can deduct certain expenses related to maintaining and driving the vehicle.

If you want to deduct the total amount of money you spent using the car for business reasons this year, you’ll need to comb through receipts to get an exact number. 

As an alternative, you can simply multiply the number of miles you drove for work this year by the IRS’s standard rate, which is $0.67 per mile for the 2024 tax year, and deduct the total amount.

As a self-employed individual, you have to cover your own health insurance premiums out of pocket. Fortunately, you can write off your monthly premium payments as a tax deduction.

Since your premium stays the same each month, you just need a copy of your health insurance policy rather than any receipts showing exactly what you paid.

If your work frequently requires you to travel away from the state where you typically pay taxes, you can write off some expenses related to these necessary business trips. 

Bear in mind that you can’t write off any expenses related to personal matters, like paying for your partner and kids to join you for the trip.

However, note that keeping track of your business trip-related receipts is the best way to calculate the exact amount you can deduct for business travel. If you don’t have those receipts on hand, this could be a tricky deduction to claim.

You can generally deduct charitable contributions from your taxable income up to a certain point. 

However, if you donate more than $250 to any charitable organization, you’ll need a written statement from the charity stating how much you donated and whether you received anything in return.

In the end, itemizing your tax deductions might not save you as much money as simply taking the standard deduction to reduce your overall taxable income.

If you want to learn how to keep more cash in your wallet this tax season, talk to a financial advisor about the specifics of your situation. They can help you decide if the standard deduction or itemized write-offs make the most sense for your bottom line.

Select "Category - Default - Syndication" from the dropdown