Yahoo Finance Coronavirus: Germans to get €600 tax rebate for home-office costs
Millions of people have been working from home for the bulk of this pandemic year, many from their kitchen tables. As well as the general stress of suddenly carving out work space in their apartments, they also faced a significant increase in utility bills from being at home all the time.
In Germany, it is possible to knock the cost of your home office off your taxable income, but only if you have a designated room used as an office, which is often not the case.
This could soon change, under a new law proposed by the government this week. It plans to support home workers with a tax rebate of €5 per day or up to €600 (£533, $711) a year to offset the increased utility bill costs, even if they don’t have a designated office in their house.
The proposed legislation, which finance minister Olaf Scholz described as “not a big fiscal challenge for the state,” is expected to be approved this month in parliament.
It is still unclear if this €600 per year rebate will be included in the overall €1,000 per year that people can tax deduct for work-related costs like transport.
German labour minister Hubertus Heil has also been pushing a new law, the Mobile Work Act, this year that would give people the right to work from home for 24 days a year. It looks like that won’t happen however, but will be instead watered down to something that a worker has the right to negotiate with their boss.
Merkel said there was a lot about the proposed legislation that needed to be discussed, and that the Act was unlikely to pass in the current legislative period.
READ MORE: Merkel pours cold water on Germany's draft work-from-home bill
German Employers’ Association president Ingo Kramer called it “utter nonsense,” and said the law could risk companies outsourcing jobs abroad.
Jana Schimke, a conservative member of parliament, said the new law would just create more bureaucracy for companies to deal with. "Why must the state interfere in … occupational process, when we see that in the end it takes care of itself?" Schimke said.
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