When you own a home, you pay property taxes to help fund your local municipality and all the services they provide to you as a homeowner. Unfortunately, the cost of property tax can also be one of your largest costs outside of your mortgage payments.

The good news is that in some cases you can deduct property taxes from your tax owing. The main time this will be applicable is when you are using your home to generate rental income. In the case of rental properties, you can claim up to the full amount of your property taxes.

In order to determine how much you can claim, you need to simply divide the total price of property tax by the period of time your home was rented. For example, if you rented the whole year, you can claim all your property taxes, if you only rented for half the year, you could claim half.

The same may be true for renting a portion of your home - rent only a quarter of your home out and you can only claim a quarter of your property tax at most.

There are also some other scenarios when you can claim some of your property taxes. One such scenario is if you are working from home as an employee who makes a commission. Another would be if you are self-employed and use your home for business purposes.

Figuring out exactly how much you can claim may be complicated, so we recommend consulting with a tax professional.

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