You can write off products you review on your taxes, but only if your reviewing qualifies as a real business, the product is ordinary and necessary for that business, and you can document the business-use portion with something better than memory. Miss any of those three, and the deduction either shrinks or disappears.
Business or Hobby: The Threshold That Decides Everything
The IRS treats activities “not engaged in for profit” completely differently from businesses. If your reviewing is classified as a hobby, you cannot use losses from it to offset your other income.1Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 USC 183 – Activities Not Engaged in for Profit For a lot of creators who spend more on products than they earn from ads or sponsorships, that’s the whole ballgame.
There’s a presumption that helps. If your activity turned a profit in at least three of the past five tax years, it’s presumed to be a for-profit business.1Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 USC 183 – Activities Not Engaged in for Profit Miss that mark and the burden flips to you to show genuine profit intent. The IRS weighs whether you keep proper books, whether you’ve changed methods to improve profitability, how much time you put in, and whether you depend on the income to live. Posting occasional reviews with no financial tracking and no growth plan looks like a hobby, and it gets treated like one.
Newer creators who haven’t yet hit three profitable years can file Form 5213, which postpones the IRS’s determination of the profit presumption until the end of your fourth tax year in the activity.2IRS.gov. Form 5213 – Election To Postpone Determination The tradeoff: filing it automatically extends the period the IRS can assess a deficiency against you for any year in that window.
Free Products Are Income Before They’re Deductions
This is where a lot of reviewers get it wrong. Products you receive for free are not tax-free. Federal law defines gross income as “all income from whatever source derived,” including non-cash compensation for services.3Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 USC 61 – Gross Income Defined When a company sends you a product and you review it, the IRS treats that as a barter transaction: you provided a service, you received goods, and you owe tax on the fair market value of what you received.4Internal Revenue Service. Topic No. 420, Bartering Income
Once the product is reported as income, you can generally also deduct it as a business expense, assuming it meets the standards below. The two sides often wash. But claiming the deduction without reporting the income is the kind of mismatch that flags returns. Expect a Form 1099-NEC from companies that pay you $600 or more in compensation (including product value); the income is reportable whether a 1099 shows up or not.
What Makes a Reviewed Product Deductible
Once your activity clears the business hurdle, each expense has to independently qualify as “ordinary and necessary” for your trade.5Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 USC 162 – Trade or Business Expenses Ordinary means common and accepted in your line of work. Necessary means helpful and appropriate; it doesn’t have to be essential, just reasonable. A tech reviewer buying a phone to test on camera clears both easily. That same reviewer buying a hot tub with no connection to any content does not, however creative the justification.
Every product you claim needs a clear, documentable link to specific revenue-generating content. The connection should be obvious enough that an auditor can follow it without taking your word for anything. Vague claims that a purchase “helps the brand” without a direct tie to published content are where deductions fall apart.
The Mixed-Use Problem Trims Most Deductions
Most product deductions get cut down here. A laptop you review becomes your daily personal computer. A kitchen gadget you test on camera gets used every morning afterward. When a product serves both business and personal purposes, you can only deduct the business-use percentage.6eCFR. 26 CFR 1.162-1 – Business Expenses
Use a camera 70% of the time for filming content and 30% for personal photography, and you deduct 70% of the cost. Estimating splits without documentation invites trouble. A simple usage log tracking dates and hours of business versus personal use turns a guess into a defensible number. Without one, you’re asking an auditor to trust your memory.
Products used for a single review and then absorbed into your household are trickier. The business use is limited to the review period, which may be a small slice of the item’s total useful life. Claiming full deductions on items with obvious personal value, like gaming consoles, luxury watches, or premium headphones, without strong documentation is one of the faster paths to an audit adjustment.
Expensing Products vs. Depreciating Them
Not every deductible product gets written off in full the year you buy it. How you take the deduction depends on what it is, what it cost, and how long it stays useful.
Consumables and the De Minimis Safe Harbor
Products that get used up quickly, such as beauty supplies, food items, and cleaning products, are typically deducted as materials and supplies in the year you use them. For tangible items that aren’t strictly consumable but cost $2,500 or less per item, you can make a de minimis safe harbor election on your tax return to expense them immediately instead of capitalizing and depreciating them. That covers a large share of what most reviewers buy. You make the election annually by attaching a statement to your return; there’s no separate form.
Section 179 and Bonus Depreciation for Bigger Purchases
For more expensive equipment, such as a high-end camera system or a professional lighting setup, Section 179 lets you deduct the full cost in the year you place the item in service rather than spreading it across multiple years.7Internal Revenue Service. Depreciation Expense Helps Business Owners Keep More Money The 2026 deduction limit is $2,560,000 with a phase-out starting at $4,090,000 in total equipment purchases, numbers irrelevant for most solo creators but confirming there’s plenty of headroom for your gear.
Bonus depreciation reaches the same result by another route. For qualifying property acquired after January 19, 2025, 100% bonus depreciation is now permanently available, letting you write off the entire cost of eligible equipment in year one.8Internal Revenue Service. Treasury, IRS Issue Guidance on the Additional First Year Depreciation Deduction Both Section 179 and bonus depreciation apply only to the business-use percentage. A $3,000 camera used 80% for business yields a $2,400 first-year deduction, not $3,000.
Standard Depreciation
If you don’t elect Section 179 or bonus depreciation, or the item doesn’t qualify, you depreciate the asset over its recovery period using IRS tables. Most electronic equipment and cameras fall into a five-year recovery period, so the deduction is spread across those years.9Internal Revenue Service. Publication 946, How To Depreciate Property High-value items you keep, like luxury watches or vehicles, often land here. Misclassifying a depreciable asset as an immediate expense can trigger a 20% accuracy-related penalty on the resulting underpayment.10Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 USC 6662 – Imposition of Accuracy-Related Penalty
Related Costs You Can Also Deduct
Beyond the products you review, the tools you use to create the content are deductible on the same ordinary-and-necessary standard. Cameras, lighting, microphones, and tripods qualify as business equipment. Recurring costs like video editing software subscriptions, cloud storage, and website hosting are deductible in the year you pay them.
Education can also qualify if it sharpens skills you already use in your business. A photography course that improves your product shots or a video editing bootcamp counts because it maintains or improves skills in your current work.11Internal Revenue Service. Topic No. 513, Work-Related Education Expenses Education that qualifies you for an entirely new line of work does not. A reviewer enrolling in law school can’t deduct tuition as a content creation expense.
Records That Protect the Deduction
Every deduction is only as strong as the paper trail behind it. The IRS doesn’t take your word for business-use percentages, product-to-content links, or fair market values on gifted items. For each product, keep:
- An itemized receipt showing the date, vendor, item description, and amount paid.
- A log connecting the product to specific published content, including the publication date.
- Usage records showing business versus personal use, especially for mixed-use items.
- Screenshots of the published review or content featuring the product.
- Valuation notes for gifted products; retail price at the time of receipt is the most straightforward method.
Digital records are fine. The IRS requires that any electronic storage system can produce legible copies on demand and includes controls against unauthorized changes; in practice, organized cloud storage with consistent file naming clears the bar for most solo creators.12IRS.gov. Revenue Procedure 97-22
Keep everything for at least three years from the date you file the return.13Internal Revenue Service. How Long Should I Keep Records If you underreport your income by more than 25% of what’s shown on the return, the IRS has six years to assess additional tax, so holding records longer is smart insurance if your income swings from year to year.14Internal Revenue Service. Topic No. 305, Recordkeeping Storage is cheap and audits are expensive. Keeping everything for six or seven years is the safer habit.