What Expenses Can I Claim for Uber?

What Expenses Can I Claim on Form T2125- Statement of Business or Professional Activities ?

So now its time to put on our thinking hats and start the work of organizing the expenses that we are going to claim. There is no doubt that what we are doing as Uber drivers is a business. However, this does not mean that we can claim every single expense as a tax deduction. The expenses that will be claimed should be relevant to the business. I.E. The government will not be happy if we are claiming our morning cup of coffee from our our favorite Caffe. Claiming stuff like this will quickly put you under the view of the microscope from the Canada Revenue Agency.

For my personal 2016 return, these are some of the expenses that I have claimed:

• Capital Cost Allowance (Depreciation of My Car)
• Vehicle Payments
• Interest Paid on Vehicle Payments
• Vehicle Maintenance 
• Fuel
• Car Washes
• Uber Commission (25% that gets deducted from every ride)
• Toll Charges (407 ETR)
• License Fee (Sticker)
• New Laptop (For keeping track of expenses) 

Please note that for any expense claimed, we must have the original receipt as a back up. Bank statements will not suffice because they do not itemize the expense.

Basically what is happening here, is we are going to go through all of our receipts, categorize them, and add up the total of all the expenses.  The amount that will be claimed on Form T2125 will be a percentage based on the total KM driven for business vs personal. I.E. if you  drove 40,000 KM in 2016, and 30 thousand out of 40 thousand were business than the ratio would be: 30,000km/40,000km = 0.75. Multiply your total expenses by 0.75 and this will be the amount of expenses claim on form T2125.