Healthcare mileage deduction for IRS Tax calculation
Turbo tax prompted me to enter miles traveled to healthcare visits. I traveled to physical therapy over 40 times last year so I have a fair amount of miles I could add.
My question is should i calculate this distance as from my work to the healthcare provider to home? This is how i always traveled there.
Or should i calculate it as a roundtrip distance from my place of residence to the provider (this is shorter and I did not do this trip).
And to be sure the only healthcare expenses you can declare is ones that weren't reimbursed by ones HSA because that money is already pre tax.
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In general when calculating miles for medical, charity and work, the only thing you can claim is extra miles.
For example:
- home-to-doctor-to-home: the entire trip
- work-to-doctor-to-work: the entire trip
- work-to-doctor-to-home: (the entire trip) minus (work-to-home).
you are only counting the miles you had to detour for the medical visit.
If you don't have the exact miles I have found that web pages that give turn by turn directions can be handy to make these calculations.
You can also claim parking and tolls, but again only the extra parking and tolls.
You cannot deduct mileage from your transportation to and from your regular place of employment. You can only deduct mileage that was driven specifically for medical treatment. Therefore, I would only deduct mileage that was over and above what you would have driven if you had gone straight home from work.
The standard mileage deduction for medical related transportation in 2016 is 19 cents per mile. (In 2017, it went down to 17 cents per mile.) Alternatively, you can deduct actual car expenses, but this is often difficult to calculate.
Remember, that you can only deduct medical expenses if you are itemizing your deductions, and you can only deduct the amount of medical expenses that exceed 10% of your adjusted gross income. And you are correct, you cannot include the expenses that were reimbursed by your HSA. I don't know what your income was, or the amount of miles that you drove, but unless you have other unreimbursed medical expenses, it is almost certain that you didn't do enough driving to claim a medical expense deduction. However, since you have the HSA, you could theoretically take a reimbursement from the HSA for your miles.
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