2026 tax year

Architect taxes and deductions

Architecture is written into the statute as an exception. The 20% deduction for business profit is withdrawn at higher incomes for law, accounting, medicine and consulting. And explicitly not for architecture. A successful architectural practice keeps a deduction an equally successful law firm loses.

Professional liability cover is the dominant insurance cost and is deductible, including the tail cover that runs after a project completes. Design software licenses are ordinary subscriptions. Travel to sites is business travel; the drive to your own studio is commuting.

The deductions with a rule attached

These are the lines where the answer is not simply "keep the receipt"each has a cap, a percentage or a test that decides how much of the spend you actually get:

Office rent, or the home office: Two methods. Simplified is $5 a square foot to a ceiling of 300 feet, $1,500, no records beyond the measurement, and no depreciation recapture when you sell the house. Actual apportions your rent or mortgage interest, utilities, insurance and repairs by floor area, usually gives more, and does bring recapture. Either way: space must be used regularly and exclusively for business. home office must be principal place of business.
Continuing professional education: Hours required to keep a license you already hold are the clearest case there is. Spending on continuing professional education to stay current is deductible; the training that qualified you to start is not. The test is about where you are, not what the course teaches, which is why the identical enrollment fee can be deductible for you and not for the person sitting beside you.

The rest of the architect deduction list

Ordinary and necessary business expenses, deductible in full in the year you pay them, provided they are genuinely for the business:

Professional liability insurance
Design and CAD software
Staff wages
Licensing fees state
Professional memberships
Travel to sites

Worth knowing

Architecture is specifically excluded from the trades that lose the 20% business profit deduction at higher incomes, unlike law, accounting or medicine, it keeps it.

That is what is specific to this trade. The larger deductions are the universal ones, see the full checklist.

What each deduction is worth to you

On $100,000 of profit with no state income tax, $1,000 deducted saves $305, 30.5%, because it comes off self-employment tax and income tax together:

Net profit	Saved per $1,000 deducted	Effective
$40,000	$231	23.1%
$100,000	$305	30.5%
$200,000	$297	29.7%

The last row is worth less than the one above it, and that is not a mistake: past the Social Security wage base the self-employment part of the saving drops from 15.3% to 2.9%, and the higher income-tax bracket does not quite make up the difference. A deduction is worth most in the middle.

Add a state income tax and every row rises. The 1099 calculator applies that layer.

Where this comes from

The rules on this page that are specific rather than general are cited below. Follow a link to read the provision itself rather than taking our word for it:

Architecture is excluded from the specified service trades that lose the deduction at higher incomesIRC 199A(d)(2)(A); Reg. 1.199A-5(b)(1)

What these words mean

Depreciation: Spreading the cost of something long-lasting, a vehicle, a camera, a tractor, across the years you use it, rather than deducting it all at once.
Depreciation recapture: When you sell something you had been depreciating, the tax office takes back part of the benefit by taxing the gain up to the amount you already deducted.

General information about how these deductions work, not tax advice. Whether a particular expense is deductible for you depends on facts this page does not have, check with a tax professional before claiming anything listed here.