2026 tax year

Personal chef taxes and deductions

Groceries you buy to cook for a client are cost of goods sold. The 50% limit that applies to business meals has nothing to do with them: that rule is about meals you eat, not food you sell, and applying it would halve your largest deduction for no reason.

Whether you bill groceries separately or fold them into the fee changes your gross receipts but not your profit. Knives, equipment and transport containers are deductible. Food handling certification and, in some states, a license are ordinary costs, and cooking in a client's kitchen rather than your own usually avoids the commercial kitchen requirement.

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:

Equipment: Section 179 property. Deduct the whole cost in the year it goes into service rather than spreading it over the asset's life, up to $2,560,000 a year, and 100% bonus depreciation is now permanent. The catch is the business-use test: anything used more than 50% for the business qualifies, and you deduct at that percentage rather than the full price. So anything you also use at home comes off at the share that is genuinely work, not the whole invoice.
Vehicle: Business driving counts; commuting does not. The rate changed mid-year: 72.5 cents a mile to June 30, 2026 and 76 cents from July 1, so a full year has to be split at that date rather than multiplied by one figure. A hundred business miles a week across the whole year is about $3,861 off your profit. You cannot use the standard rate at all on a vehicle you have already claimed MACRS depreciation, Section 179 or bonus depreciation on.

The rest of the personal chef deduction list

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

Food and ingredients
Liability insurance
Permits and licenses
Marketing
Uniforms
Software subscriptions

Worth knowing

Groceries bought for a client are cost of goods, not the 50% meals limit, that limit is about meals you eat.

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.

What these words mean

Section 179: A rule letting you deduct the whole cost of equipment in the year you start using it, instead of spreading it over the years you own it.
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.
MACRS: The standard federal timetable for depreciation, the schedule that decides how much of an asset’s cost you deduct in each year of its life.
Gross receipts: Everything the business took in, before subtracting any costs. A tax on gross receipts is owed even by a business making a loss, which is what makes it different from a tax on profit.

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.