Are hearing aids tax deductible?

What Pub 502 lets you include

The Hearing Aids entry is one sentence long, but it covers more than the device. You can include the cost of the hearing aid itself, batteries, and the repairs and maintenance needed to operate it. A person who pays $3,200 for a pair of aids, $240 a year in batteries and a $150 repair has three includible amounts, not one.

A neighbouring entry matters to many people with hearing loss. Under Telephone, Pub 502 says you can include the cost of special telephone equipment that lets a person who is deaf, hard of hearing, or has a speech disability communicate over a regular telephone, including teletypewriter (TTY) and telecommunications device for the deaf (TDD) equipment, and the cost of repairing that equipment.

Related costs that also qualify

Hearing aids rarely arrive alone. Pub 502 separately lists amounts you pay for diagnostic work and visits. Physician and medical practitioner fees count, and so do laboratory fees and the cost of equipment and diagnostic devices needed for treatment. Special education to teach lip reading to a hearing disabled person is covered under Special Education, which is a different kind of expense and has its own conditions.

Transportation primarily for and essential to medical care counts too. If you drive to an audiologist, you can include actual out-of-pocket car costs such as gas and oil, or the standard medical mileage rate. For 2025 returns that rate is 21 cents a mile, and you can add parking fees and tolls either way. You cannot include depreciation, insurance, general repair or maintenance of the car.

Limits to watch

The deduction only applies to what you actually paid and bore yourself. Pub 502 says you reduce your total medical expenses for the year by reimbursements from insurance or other sources, including Medicare. If a plan reimbursed you part of the cost, only the unreimbursed share can count. Amounts you paid with a tax-free distribution from a health savings account, and amounts fully reimbursed by a flexible spending arrangement you funded with pre-tax pay, are also excluded.

Timing matters. You include expenses in the year you paid them, not the year you receive the service in general. A charge on a credit card counts in the year of the charge, not the year you pay off the card. And you can include costs for yourself, your spouse and your dependents, as the publication’s rules on whose expenses count describe.

Illustration: a pair of hearing aids

This is an illustration, not an example from the publication. Suppose your AGI is $52,000, so the floor is 7.5%, or $3,900. You paid $3,200 for hearing aids and $390 for batteries, repairs and an audiology visit, and you had $1,700 of other qualifying costs, all unreimbursed. Your total is $5,290. Your deduction is $5,290 minus $3,900, which is $1,390. The hearing aids alone would not have cleared the floor; they mattered because they were added to the rest of the year’s costs. Whether $1,390 helps depends on whether your total itemized deductions beat the standard deduction, which the standard-versus-itemized calculator linked below can check.

How the floor, timing and itemizing apply here

For hearing aids, the same three rules from Publication 502 decide the final number. First, the deduction is only the part of your total medical and dental expenses that is more than 7.5% of your adjusted gross income, so a $1,000 cost does nothing until the year’s total passes the floor. Second, you include only what you paid during the tax year and were not reimbursed for, and you may include costs for yourself, your spouse and your dependents. Third, the deduction is claimed on Schedule A (Form 1040), so it helps only if your itemized deductions add up to more than your standard deduction. Amounts paid with a tax-free health savings account distribution cannot be counted again, and pre-tax flexible spending arrangement reimbursements are excluded.

Related medical expense topics

More from the same IRS publication: Is a wheelchair tax deductible?, Is an ambulance tax deductible?, Is acupuncture tax deductible?. For a full calculation across all your expenses, use the medical expense deduction calculator.

Sources

• IRS Publication 502, Medical and Dental Expenses (2025): the “Hearing Aids” entries, the 7.5% of AGI rule, the reimbursement rules and the transportation rules. Read November 2, 2026.

Edition read: Publication 502 (2025), for use in preparing 2025 returns. Dollar limits and rates in this publication are for 2025; the publication notes that later legislation (P.L. 119-21) may affect federal deductions, so check the current publication and the Schedule A instructions for your tax year. This page summarizes the publication and does not replace it. Marked for human review.