Tax declaration 2025: How to do the gym and medication

The state wants healthy taxpayers. Yes, really. Because the income of fitter workers will continue to offer the tax authorities from this in the future. Anyone who has to spend money to have diseases can be “exceptionally burdened” in the tax jargon. But when is that? And what exactly?

First prerequisite: The cost of recovery was only partially or not covered by the health insurance or private insurance. Second, the measures were prescribed by doctors or naturopaths: by prescription or certificate. Oral recommendations such as “do more sports” or “eat healthier” are not enough to deduct expenses for gym or diet products for tax. The tax office also recognizes the costs for over -the -counter pain relievers from the pharmacy, such as against migraines, the health insurers or insurers, the tax office at most appeals to the corresponding medical regulation or a certificate.

In principle, the following medically prescribed or attested recovery expenses can be asserted for tax purposes:

For employees, it can be worth collecting recipes, certificates, invoices and receipts for those expenses that they paid for themselves within one year. The measures must serve to heal a disease, make them more bearable or relieve their consequences.

In individual cases, costs for a training or fitness studio can also be asserted for tax purposes: the exercises must be prescribed by a doctor, i.e. medically necessary, and they must be guided and monitored by specialist staff, such as physiotherapists. And: the exercises must be shown separately by invoice. Evidence of the monthly contribution for a studio is not enough. The membership fee in a rehabilitation association, which keeps its courses in a gym, has opportunities for tax recognition-if membership is prescribed by a doctor.

In tax practice it shows that the tax offices are now very precisely examining the medical necessity and also the measures. For example, there are little chances of eligibility costs for alternative treatment methods that are not yet scientifically (yet) recognized. A massage device cannot be stopped either, since it is a cure that can also be used by healthy people. And stays in sanatoriums or climate therapy on the Dead Sea generally have no chance of tax recognition. In such and similar cases, the tax office will request expert opinion from the official doctor or the medical service of the health insurance companies (MDK).

So that’s not all: the desire for healthy taxpayers has limits. The legislator has set income limits for extraordinary burdens. In other words, illness costs are reasonable up to a certain amount, i.e. not effective for tax purposes.

So if you have more than 51,130 euros as a childless single, you have to bear extraordinary burdens, including illness costs, up to seven percent of it yourself, i.e. at least around 3,580 euros. These so -called reasonable loads are lower for taxpayers with children. So before you carry out the effort around receipts and evidence, the individual percentage calculation is worthwhile: do higher costs for extraordinary burdens come together a year than the legally reasonable? In addition to illness costs, this can also be care and health costs, disability-related costs, funeral costs and, under certain circumstances, the non-insurance-covered replacement costs for household items- for example after an apartment fire.

It turns out: German income tax law bears the welfare state trains. For workers’ households that make it particularly hard in one year, the limit of reasonable loads can be exceeded in total – and thus a financial compensation of the hardness. This applies especially to people with medium and lower incomes. But it also shows that without tax advice or the support of the income tax relief associations can hardly be made in such cases a declaration of tax.