Wedding and event planner taxes and deductions

Money you collect for vendors is not your income, and money you pass to vendors is not your deduction. Run both through your books and you will report a business several times the size of the one you have.

Ask one question of every payment: is this mine? Deposits held for vendors are not income, vendor invoices you pass on are not deductions, and only your planning fee is either. Get it wrong and your gross receipts look several times larger than your business, which changes your 1099-K, your state registration thresholds and your bookkeeping all at once.

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:

Vehicle mileage: 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.
Required professional attire: Required professional attire, deductible only because it fails the suitable-for-everyday-wear test. That is the whole rule, and it is why a suit bought specifically for client meetings is not deductible however strictly the client expects it.
Phone: You get the business-use percentage of the bill, not the bill. Business-use percentage of total cost. A line you also use personally is a split, and the split needs to be defensible rather than round.
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.

The rest of the wedding and event planner deduction list

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

Vendor deposits, where you are billed directly
Event management software
Marketing photography
Liability insurance

Worth knowing

Deposits collected on behalf of clients are not income until earned. Vendor payments passed through to client are not deductible if reimbursed.

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

1099-K: The form a payment platform or marketplace sends when it has processed money on your behalf. It reports what came in, before fees and refunds, not your profit.
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.
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.
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.