For an appointment setter, the phone is not an office perk, it is the entire production floor. Dials, texts, follow-ups, calendar confirmations, Slack pings from the offer owner: the whole job runs through two utility bills. The IRS lets self-employed people deduct the business share of exactly these kinds of mixed-use costs, and for setters that share is usually substantial.
The business-use percentage on a setter's phone bill
You deduct the portion of your phone costs that reflects business use. If you use your personal phone roughly 70% for setting, texting leads, confirming appointments, running your dialer app, taking calls with the sales team, you deduct 70% of the plan cost, and the same share of the phone itself, either depreciated or expensed in the year of purchase. Two cleaner setups make this easier to defend. A dedicated second line or second phone used only for work is 100% deductible with no allocation argument at all. And many setters run their dials through software numbers, paid dialers, VoIP lines, texting platforms, which are pure business tools and fully deductible on their own.
Internet, headset, and the rest of the dialing stack
Home internet follows the same logic: estimate business use honestly and deduct that percentage of the monthly bill. A full-time setter online eight hours a day for work has a strong case for a majority share; a part-timer setting two hours a night should claim less. Around the two utilities sits a stack of fully deductible gear and software: the headset, a laptop or monitor by business-use share, CRM seats you pay for yourself, calendar and scheduling tools, tracking spreadsheets software, and any paid community or training that maintains your setting skills. Each item is small, but a setter's stack routinely adds up to a few thousand dollars a year, and every documented dollar cuts both income tax and the 15.3% self-employment tax, because deductions reduce the net profit both are computed on.
Records that survive an IRS question
The deduction is only as good as its paper trail. Keep the monthly bills, they arrive by email anyway, and write down how you picked your percentage: a week of screen-time reports, a call log showing work versus personal, or hours worked online versus total household use. Pay for work tools from a separate business checking account or card so the year's expenses assemble themselves. Then report everything on Schedule C: utilities and communication costs in the expense section, equipment either expensed or depreciated. What not to do: claim 100% of your only personal phone or your family's shared internet. Examiners see the single-line, whole-household claim for exactly what it is, and it invites scrutiny of an otherwise clean return. Claim the honest share, document how you got it, and the phone and internet deduction becomes one of the most reliable write-offs a setter has.