Editor’s Note: This article is intended to provide helpful information for healthcare professionals working in the US tax system and should not be considered tax advice. Please contact a tax professional to understand the full details of your CME expenses and deductions.
Heading into tax season each year, most clinicians are hoping to make as many work-related deductions as possible. But is continuing medical education tax deductible? Like most tax questions, the answer depends on several factors. All healthcare professionals should ensure they adequately track their continuing medical education (CME) credits, however, because doing so could yield significant savings on their tax bills.
Let’s start with the basics.
Employment status and continuing medical education tax deduction
CME expenses that relate directly to your current job or profession and that aren’t reimbursed may qualify as a miscellaneous itemized deduction.
But eligibility depends on your employment status:
- If you’re self-employed—such as a private practice or locum tenens clinician—you can deduct costs for obtaining CME credits as ordinary and necessary business expenses, provided they meet certain requirements.
- If you’re employed by a healthcare system or organization, you cannot deduct CME expenses from tax years 2018 through 2025. Why? The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 eliminated the miscellaneous itemized deductions—including CME credits—for this time period.
Keep in mind that, regardless of your employment status, you can’t deduct CME costs for which the healthcare organization has already reimbursed you.
What kind of CME credits count towards deductions?
The next step is to determine whether the CME program qualifies for a continuing medical education tax deduction. To qualify, it must either:
- Maintain or improve skills required for your current position, or
- Be necessary to maintain your current employment status or rate of compensation.
If they don’t apply directly to your profession, continuing education expenses are not tax deductible. If a cardiologist is an amateur historian, for example, she cannot deduct costs related to a seminar on the treatment of battlefield infections during the Civil War. She likely could deduct educational courses or audio lectures on polypharmacy or congenital heart disease, however.
If your education is work-related, you can deduct an array of expenses, including solutions with built-in CME credits, tuition/registration fees, books, supplies, labs, and, in some cases, travel costs. If you’re traveling for both personal and business reasons, you should prorate your costs and only deduct qualified expenses.
While it doesn’t constitute as official advice, the IRS’ interview-based tool can help you determine whether your CME expenses are deductible.