Can You Write Off Furniture for Rental Property?

Furniture you buy for a rental property is a deductible business expense, and writing off furniture for a rental property in 2026 usually means claiming the full cost in the year you place it in the unit.¹ The IRS treats furnishings the same way it treats insurance or repairs: a legitimate cost of earning rental income. How you claim the deduction depends on what each item costs and which provision you elect, and the wrong choice can push your tax benefit out by years or create a surprise when you sell.

What Counts as Deductible Rental Furniture

Furniture qualifies when it’s used in your rental activity and is “ordinary and necessary” for that activity. Ordinary means common among landlords; necessary means helpful for running the rental.² A bed frame in a furnished apartment clears both bars easily.

The deduction clock starts on the date you place the furniture “in service,” which just means the day it’s set up in the rental and ready for a tenant to use. You don’t need a signed lease or an occupied unit. Furnish a vacant apartment in March, sign a tenant in June, and March is your start date.³ A couch sitting in your garage doesn’t count. It has to actually be in the rental and available for use.

Items $2,500 or Less: The Simplest Path

If a single piece of furniture costs $2,500 or less, including tax, shipping, and assembly, you can deduct the whole amount immediately under the de minimis safe harbor.⁴ This is the cleanest option for lamps, nightstands, small desks, kitchen chairs, and most standard furnishings. No depreciation calculations. It’s treated like any other operating expense on Schedule E.

The threshold applies per item, not per invoice, so five $2,200 dressers bought together all qualify. To use the safe harbor you have to attach a statement titled “Section 1.263(a)-1(f) de minimis safe harbor election” to your return for that year. It just needs your name, address, taxpayer identification number, and a declaration that you’re making the election.⁴ Once made, it covers every qualifying purchase for that year.

Bigger Items: Three Ways to Deduct

Furniture that doesn’t fit the safe harbor, or that you choose not to expense that way, gets deducted through depreciation. You have three routes, and they differ in speed and in whether they can create a loss.

MACRS Depreciation Over Five Years

The standard method spreads the cost over five years. The IRS classifies furniture used in residential rental property as five-year property under the Modified Accelerated Cost Recovery System.¹ This catches many landlords off guard: office furniture is seven-year property, but furniture inside a residential rental gets the shorter recovery period.⁵

The default is 200% declining balance with a half-year convention, meaning a first-year deduction based on half a year of use regardless of when you actually placed the furniture in service. Publication 946 has percentage tables that do the math: you multiply the original cost by the year’s percentage.⁵

Section 179: Full Deduction, With an Income Limit

Section 179 lets you deduct the entire cost of qualifying furniture in year one, regardless of price. For tax years beginning in 2025, the maximum Section 179 deduction is $1,250,000, phasing out when total qualifying purchases exceed $3,130,000.¹ The limits adjust each year for inflation.

The catch: your Section 179 deduction cannot exceed your net taxable business income. If your rental shows a loss before Section 179, you can’t use Section 179 to increase that loss. The unused portion carries forward. For a landlord with one or two properties, this income cap is usually the real constraint, not the dollar ceiling. Section 179 covers appliances, carpets, and window treatments alongside furniture, but not the building itself, land improvements like fences, or structural components.¹

100% Bonus Depreciation

The One Big Beautiful Bill signed into law in 2025 reset bonus depreciation to 100% on a permanent basis for qualifying property acquired after January 19, 2025.⁶ Buy furniture for your rental in 2026 and you can deduct the entire cost that year. Unlike Section 179, bonus depreciation has no income limitation, so it can create or increase a rental loss.

That difference is the reason to pick one over the other. Section 179 can’t push your rental into a loss; bonus depreciation can. For a landlord with high W-2 wages and a rental that’s near breakeven, bonus depreciation combined with the passive loss rules below may deliver the bigger immediate benefit. For a landlord already showing a rental loss, bonus depreciation just deepens a loss that may be suspended anyway.

The Passive Loss Trap

This is where aggressive furniture write-offs often stall. Rental real estate is a passive activity by default under Section 469, and passive losses cannot offset wages, self-employment income, or investment income except under a specific exception.⁷ You could buy $20,000 in furniture, claim 100% bonus depreciation, generate a $15,000 rental loss, and find you can’t use it this year.

The main exception is the $25,000 special allowance. If you actively participate in managing the rental, you can deduct up to $25,000 of passive rental losses against your other income.⁸ Active participation means real management decisions: approving tenants, setting terms, authorizing repairs. It’s a lower bar than material participation, and most hands-on landlords meet it. You also need to own at least 10% of the property by value.

The allowance phases out as modified adjusted gross income rises above $100,000 and disappears at $150,000. For married couples filing separately who lived together during the year, it’s zero.⁸ Landlords above $150,000 can’t use the special allowance, so any rental loss from aggressive expensing gets suspended and carried forward until they have passive income to offset it or dispose of the property.

The takeaway: before you elect 100% bonus depreciation or Section 179 on a large furniture purchase, test it against the passive loss rules. A big deduction that becomes a suspended loss you can’t use for years isn’t always better than spreading the cost over five years through MACRS, where smaller annual amounts stay within income you can actually use.

Mixed Personal and Rental Use

If you also use the property yourself, like a vacation home you rent part of the year, you have to split furniture costs between personal and rental use. The IRS formula is rental days divided by total days of combined rental and personal use, and the resulting percentage is what you can deduct.¹

A day counts as rental use only when the unit is actually rented at fair market price. Vacant, available-to-rent days don’t count in this calculation. Rent a beach house 90 days at market rates and use it personally for 30, and your rental percentage is 75%. Apply 75% to the furniture cost. If you’re renting a room in your own home, allocation by square footage works: a 200-square-foot rented room in a 2,000-square-foot house means 10% of shared-space furnishings are deductible.

What Happens When You Sell

Every dollar of depreciation you claim on furniture creates a potential tax bill later. When you sell depreciable personal property at a gain, the IRS requires you to “recapture” the depreciation you previously deducted and pay tax on it as ordinary income, not at capital gains rates.⁹ Furniture is Section 1245 property for this purpose. Recapture applies to the lesser of your gain or the depreciation claimed.

This matters most when you sell a furnished rental as a package. The sale price must be allocated between real estate and furniture based on fair market value. The furniture portion runs through Form 4797, with the recapture calculated in Part III.¹⁰ Sell a dining set for $800 after claiming $3,000 in depreciation on a $3,500 original cost, and your adjusted basis is $500, your gain is $300, and that $300 is ordinary income.

If you throw furniture away or donate it, there’s no recapture because there’s no gain. You may be able to claim a loss on the remaining undepreciated basis. Either way, keep records of what happened, because the IRS expects you to account for every asset you depreciated.

Records and Forms

Your cost basis for each piece of furniture is more than the sticker price. Add sales tax, shipping, delivery fees, and assembly costs.¹¹ A $2,400 sofa with $180 shipping and $75 assembly has a depreciable basis of $2,655. Getting this right at purchase avoids audit headaches.

For each item, record the purchase date, the placed-in-service date, the full cost including incidentals, and the depreciation method you elected. These dates drive which convention applies and whether bonus depreciation or Section 179 is available for the year. A spreadsheet is fine; the IRS doesn’t require a specific format.¹¹ Keep every receipt or invoice. Legible digital scans are acceptable. The IRS baseline is three years after filing the return that claimed the deduction, but hold depreciation records longer, because a sale of the property years later can pull those figures back into play.¹²

On your return, rental income and operating expenses go on Schedule E (Form 1040).¹³ Any depreciation, Section 179 election, or bonus depreciation claim runs through Form 4562, and the total transfers to the depreciation line on Schedule E (line 18).¹⁴ Safe harbor items under $2,500 skip Form 4562 and go directly on Schedule E as operating expenses. If you dispose of furniture during the year, Form 4797 handles the gain or loss.¹⁰

State Taxes May Not Follow the Federal Rules

Your state income tax return may require entirely separate depreciation math. A significant number of states don’t conform to federal bonus depreciation, so you might deduct 100% federally but be required to spread the same furniture cost over five years for state purposes. Some states let you add back the federal deduction and subtract a portion over several years; others require pre-2018 schedules. If your state doesn’t conform, plan on maintaining two depreciation schedules for the same furniture, one federal and one state.

1
Internal Revenue Service. Publication 527 (2025), Residential Rental Property
2
Internal Revenue Service. Tips on Rental Real Estate Income, Deductions and Recordkeeping
3
Internal Revenue Service. Publication 527 (2025), Residential Rental Property – Section: Depreciation of Rental Property
4
Internal Revenue Service. Tangible Property Final Regulations
5
Internal Revenue Service. Publication 946 (2024), How To Depreciate Property
6
Internal Revenue Service. Treasury, IRS Issue Guidance on the Additional First Year Depreciation Deduction Amended as Part of the One, Big, Beautiful Bill
7
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 USC 469 – Passive Activity Losses and Credits Limited
8
Internal Revenue Service. Publication 925 (2025), Passive Activity and At-Risk Rules
9
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 USC 1245 – Gain From Dispositions of Certain Depreciable Property
10
Internal Revenue Service. 2025 Instructions for Form 4797 – Sales of Business Property
11
Internal Revenue Service. Publication 551 (12/2025), Basis of Assets
12
Internal Revenue Service. How Long Should I Keep Records
13
Internal Revenue Service. About Schedule E (Form 1040), Supplemental Income and Loss
14
Internal Revenue Service. About Form 4562, Depreciation and Amortization