For the Self-Employed in Switzerland!
For self-employed professionals in Switzerland, your mobile phone isn’t just a lifeline to clients and customers – it can also save you money at tax time.
This guide breaks down how Swiss freelancers and business owners can deduct phone subscription costs on their taxes. We’ll cover everything from making your phone a business asset to splitting personal use, all in plain English.
Turning Your Phone into a Business Asset
The Swiss tax office cares that any expense you deduct is business-related. If your phone helps you make money – say by enabling client calls, emails, or running your business apps – then it qualifies.
Claiming a phone as a business tool might invite scrutiny. Tax authorities can ask “Is this really for work?” So make sure you could show, for example, that clients call you on that number or you use it for business communications. If it’s clearly a work tool, you’re on solid ground.
Let’s be honest – most of us use the same phone for business and personal chit-chat. The good news is you can still deduct your phone costs if you’re self-employed, even with mixed use. The catch: you should only deduct the portion related to business use. In other words, you need to split the costs between “work” and “play.”
Think about your usage. You might estimate, for example, that 60% of your phone time is work-related and 40% is personal. In that case, you could claim 60% of your phone expenses as a business deduction. Some Swiss freelancers default to a more conservative split – one common guideline is about 20% business use as a reasonable estimate in many cases – but your actual percentage might be higher if you practically live on your phone for work.
If roughly 40% of your calls, data, and usage are for personal stuff (WhatsApp with friends, streaming music) and 60% for business (client calls, emails, work apps), you’d claim CHF 600 as a business expense and treat CHF 400 as personal.
You can let your company pay the full bill, but in your accounting or records, you’d allocate that CHF 400 personal portion as a non-deductible expense. This way, you’re not claiming personal use as a tax deduction, which keeps everything squeaky clean.
Well if juggling one phone for dual purposes gets messy, consider using dual-SIM cards or separate phone numbers for work and personal. It’s not required, but it can make tracking easier. And if you ever decide to carry two phones (one solely for work), then 100% of the work phone’s bills could be deductible since you’d keep personal use on the other phone.
Being self-employed in Switzerland lets you deduct only the business share of these items
So, you splurged on the latest high-end smartphone for your business? Great – but if it cost a small fortune, you might not deduct the whole price in one go.
Switzerland, like many countries, has depreciation rules for larger assets. Depreciation is just a fancy way to say “spread the cost over its useful life.”
Imagine you bought a professional-grade phone for, say, CHF 2,000. Instead of counting all CHF 2,000 as an expense in year one, you might depreciate it over, for example, 4 years – meaning you deduct CHF 500 per year for four years.
Why do this? Tax-wise, it can be smoother and it reflects the fact that you’ll use the phone for several years to earn income.
Set a threshold for what’s considered a long-term asset vs. a simple expense. Oh, and remember: depreciation only matters for the phone’s purchase price (the device). Your monthly service bills aren’t depreciated; they’re just expensed as they come.
While the exact threshold can vary, a good rule is that if your phone is above a certain value (often around CHF 1,000) and is vital for your work, it should be treated as a capital asset and depreciated.
Don’t worry, you don’t have to guess the depreciation rate yourself. Swiss tax authorities provide standard depreciation rates for various assets, and electronics like phones typically can be depreciated fairly quickly.
Paperwork isn’t glamorous, but it’s what keeps deductions bullet-proof.
Treat the plan as business infrastructure, not a perk. More uptime, fewer refund headaches. Gryps’ tax optimiser reminds that private calls belong outside the books.
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