Wedding officiant taxes and deductions

There is almost nothing to deduct here, which is exactly why the few things there are matter. Travel to ceremonies, registration where your state or county requires it, and the home office you write ceremonies in are most of the list.

Fees are self-employment income whether or not anyone issues you a form, and most couples will not. If you are ordained and also serve a congregation, the clergy rules are a completely different regime, see the clergy page, because the dual status there changes how the tax is paid.

The deductions with a rule attached

These are the lines where the answer is not simply "keep the receipt"each has a cap, a percentage or a test that decides how much of the spend you actually get:

Professional development: Courses that sharpen work you already sell are the clearest case there is. Spending on professional development to stay current is deductible; the training that qualified you to start is not. The test is about where you are, not what the course teaches, which is why the identical enrollment fee can be deductible for you and not for the person sitting beside you.
Home office: Two methods. Simplified is $5 a square foot to a ceiling of 300 feet, $1,500, no records beyond the measurement, and no depreciation recapture when you sell the house. Actual apportions your rent or mortgage interest, utilities, insurance and repairs by floor area, usually gives more, and does bring recapture. Either way: space must be used regularly and exclusively for business. home office must be principal place of business.
Phone: You get the business-use percentage of the bill, not the bill. Business-use percentage of total cost. A line you also use personally is a split, and the split needs to be defensible rather than round.

The rest of the wedding officiant deduction list

Ordinary and necessary business expenses, deductible in full in the year you pay them, provided they are genuinely for the business:

Travel
Marketing
Licensing fees state
Professional memberships
Software subscriptions

Worth knowing

A small, high-margin business with almost no overhead, where travel and registration are most of the deduction.

That is what is specific to this trade. The larger deductions are the universal ones, see the full checklist.

What each deduction is worth to you

On $100,000 of profit with no state income tax, $1,000 deducted saves $305, 30.5%, because it comes off self-employment tax and income tax together:

Net profit	Saved per $1,000 deducted	Effective
$40,000	$231	23.1%
$100,000	$305	30.5%
$200,000	$297	29.7%

The last row is worth less than the one above it, and that is not a mistake: past the Social Security wage base the self-employment part of the saving drops from 15.3% to 2.9%, and the higher income-tax bracket does not quite make up the difference. A deduction is worth most in the middle.

Add a state income tax and every row rises. The 1099 calculator applies that layer.

What these words mean

Depreciation: Spreading the cost of something long-lasting, a vehicle, a camera, a tractor, across the years you use it, rather than deducting it all at once.
Depreciation recapture: When you sell something you had been depreciating, the tax office takes back part of the benefit by taxing the gain up to the amount you already deducted.

General information about how these deductions work, not tax advice. Whether a particular expense is deductible for you depends on facts this page does not have, check with a tax professional before claiming anything listed here.