A guide to a common question
This isn't tax advice! See a tax professional to get your taxes sorted out. (More legit disclaimer pending)
There is one single factor (in my research) that will determine if you can deduct coding bootcamp tuition from your taxes: were you in a programming career prior to attending? If yes, check out the Business Deduction for Work-Related Education section.
For everyone else, unfortunately the quick summary is that most education-related tax benefits do not allow you to deduct coding bootcamp tuition from your income, and I'll explain why below. If in doubt or you don't want to listen to a stranger on the internet, see a tax professional to get a definitive answer.
Most tax deductions and credits depend on your education expenses being made at an eligible educational institution. Unfortunately no coding bootcamp is considered an eligible educational institution at this time. Here's why, from the IRS website:
"An eligible educational institution is a school offering higher education beyond high school. It is any college, university, vocational school, or other post secondary educational institution eligible to participate in a student aid program run by the U.S. Department of Education."
Source: irs.gov: What is an Eligible Educational Institution?
Tax credits reduce your tax liability directly instead of reducting your taxable income. There are two that apply to education, these are the American Opportunity Credit and Lifetime Learning Credit. Both depend on you attending an eligible educational institution. Since coding bootcamps don't qualify, we won't cover these any further.
This deduction allows you to reduce the amount of your total taxable income, thus reducing taxes you would have to pay. Again, this deduction depends on you attending an eligible education institution.
From IRS.gov:
You can deduct the costs of qualifying work-related education as business expenses. This is education that meets at least one of the following two tests.
- The education is required by your employer or the law to keep your present salary, status, or job. The required education must serve a bona fide business purpose of your employer.
- The education maintains or improves skills needed in your present work.
However, even if the education meets one or both of the above tests, it isn't qualifying work-related education if it:
- Is needed to meet the minimum educational requirements of your present trade or business, or
- Is part of a program of study that will qualify you for a new trade or business.
Notice that this is the only tax deduction that doesn't explicitly require your expenses be from a eligible educational institution. This is possibly the one tax benefit that could apply to coding bootcamp graduates, if you were already in a programming career previously. However this is by far the minority of coding bootcamp graduates, as most of us are switching from a completely different career. If you think this might apply to you, see a tax professional as you may be able to deduct your bootcamp tuition.
Source: irs.gov: Business Deduction for Work-Related Education
None yet! Let us know if you think we missed one by filing an issue or making a pull request.
What is an Eligible Educational Institution?
Are Coding Bootcamps Tax Deductible?
- Read how to properly contribute to open source projects on Github.
- Fork the project.
- Use a topic/feature branch to easily amend a pull request later, if necessary.
- Write good commit messages.
- Commit and push until you are happy with your contribution.
- If your change has a corresponding open Github issue, prefix the commit message with
[Fix #github-issue-number]. - Squash related commits together.
- Open a pull request that relates to only one subject with a clear title and description in grammatically correct, complete sentences.
Source: Rubocop's contributing.md