Most employees don’t have to bring their own supplies to work or pay for materials customers need. For example, workers at most places that use cash registers to total up customer purchases are not required to fund and bring their own registers to work. Most employees required to travel for work get reimbursed for that expense.
But K-12 teachers are expected to buy supplies for their workplace and their students and about 94% of public school teachers buy these supplies (U.S. Dept of Education, May 2018). I say “expected” because clearly, most teachers use their own funds to buy supplies and since 2015 there has been a permanent tax rule that allows these teachers to deduct for AGI up to $250 of that spending. An inflation adjustment increases that to $300 starting in 2022. Prior to 2015, the deduction was temporary.
S. 3992, the Educators Expense Deduction Modernization Act of 2022, proposes to increase the $300 per year amount to $1,000. Per Senator Sherrod Brown’s April 6 press release, he proposes to quadruple the deduction (using the 2021 and earlier maximum of $250 rather than the 2022 amount of $300). He notes that $250 is “far less than most teachers spend each year out of their own pocket on classroom supplies.”
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