TL;DR: Signing a contract before January 20, 2025 does not always lock you out of 100% bonus depreciation. The law looks at when you acquired the property, and the IRS has detailed rules for that date. If you bought a finished building, the date can…
TL;DR: A cost segregation firm should make your job easier, not hand you a project in the middle of filing season. Five things separate a firm worth sending clients to: a report built from an in-person site visit that holds up in an exam, a drafted …
TL;DR: On November 5, 2026, the IRS released its 2027 inflation numbers in Revenue Procedure 2026-35. For tax years beginning in 2027, you can expense up to $2,640,000 of equipment and other qualifying property under section 179, and the excess busi…
TL;DR: Whoever pays for the work is generally the one who depreciates it. Landlord pays, landlord depreciates. Tenant pays, tenant depreciates. What almost nobody gets right is the schedule: the lease term does not set it. A seven-year lease does no…
TL;DR Usually not. If you donate a building after cost segregation, the tax code cuts your charitable deduction by the depreciation recapture that would have been taxed as ordinary income if you had sold the building instead. That rule is Section 17…
TL;DR: A property is placed in service on the day it is ready and available for its intended use, not the day you close on it and not the day a tenant moves in. That date decides which tax year your depreciation starts, and it is the gate on everyth…
TL;DR Yes. If you pay an outside firm or a freelancer to do qualified research for you in the United States, you can generally count 65 percent of what you paid toward your R&D tax credit. The R&D credit rules call these contract research expenses. …
TL;DR: If nobody on your team has ever brought up cost segregation, it almost certainly wasn't a decision. It was an oversight. Every advisor around you has a lane: your tax professional prepares the return from what's in front of them, your wealth …
TL;DR: Electing out of bonus depreciation means telling the IRS you do not want the 100 percent first-year write-off on a class of property. It sounds like refusing free money, and most years it would be. But a deduction you cannot use this year is …
TL;DR To split land from building for rental property depreciation, divide your total cost in proportion to the fair market value of each piece. If you aren't certain of those values, IRS Publication 527 lets you use the ratio of assessed values fro…
TL;DR: Sometimes, and your contract already decided it. The R&D tax credit has an exclusion called funded research. It takes the credit away from work somebody else paid for unless two things are true: you were on the hook if the work failed, and yo…
TL;DR Filing on extension does not cost a startup the R&D payroll tax credit, but it does delay it. The credit starts reducing your payroll taxes in the first calendar quarter that begins after you file the income tax return that makes the election.…
TL;DR Every business claiming the federal R&D credit answers the Section 280C election on Form 6765, and most of them answer it by accident. Take the full credit and your domestic research deduction gets cut by the same number of dollars. Elect und…
TL;DR: Yes, if your business still has research costs from 2022, 2023, or 2024 sitting on an amortization schedule, you can deduct everything that is left on your 2025 return, or split it across 2025 and 2026. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act created …
TL;DR: The excess business loss limitation under Section 461(l) caps how much net business loss a noncorporate taxpayer can use against non-business income in a single year. For 2026 that cap is $256,000, or $512,000 on a joint return. That is lower…
TL;DR: If you own a commercial building that qualified for the 179D energy efficient building deduction and nobody ever claimed it, you may be able to claim it now on your current return with Form 3115, without amending old returns. The automatic ac…
TL;DR: Bonus depreciation lets you deduct the full cost of qualifying business property in the year you put it to work, instead of spreading that deduction over five, seven, or fifteen years. Congress created it in 2002, in the Job Creation and Work…
TL;DR: A land improvement is anything built on the dirt that is not the building itself. The parking lot, the sidewalks, the fence, the landscaping, the site lighting, the storm drains. The IRS puts those in their own asset class, separate from the …
TL;DR: Yes, and it is one of the most overlooked pieces of money in the startup world. A qualified small business can apply up to $500,000 of federal R&D; credit per year against its payroll taxes instead of its income taxes. That distinction is eve…
TL;DR: A mobile home park is mostly roads, pads, utility lines and site work, not a building. Those items are generally 15-year land improvements, and 15-year property qualifies for 100 percent bonus depreciation when it was acquired and placed in s…
TL;DR: More people than you would guess, for years to come. Congress ended new 179D eligibility for projects that begin construction after June 30, 2026, and that date is behind us. But the deduction did not vanish on July 1. Buildings that started …
TL;DR: Less than most owners fear, and none of it to find out whether a study is worth doing. What documents you need for a cost segregation study depends on how the building came to you. Buy it, and the closing statement and purchase agreement carr…
TL;DR: Yes. Once a defaulted COVID-era EIDL loan is referred to the Treasury, the government can take your federal tax refund without a lawsuit or a court judgment, and it can order your employer to withhold up to 15 percent of your pay. You are ent…
TL;DR: You pay some of the benefit back through depreciation recapture, and you keep the rest. Depreciation you claimed on reclassified 5, 7, and 15-year components gets taxed on sale, some of it at ordinary income rates, while regular building depr…
