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(2023) How to Claim Tax Relief for Your Gym

More exercise is one of the most popular New Year's resolutions. What many may not know: You can claim the costs for a gym as exceptional expenses on your tax return.

Reducing excess weight, quitting smoking, or alleviating back pain: exercise helps with many bad habits and ailments. Many people use a gym to get physical exercise. If you do this due to an illness, you can deduct your membership fee for tax purposes. Two conditions must be met, reports the Vereinigte Lohnsteuerhilfe e. V. (VLH):

1. The exercise alleviates or cures the illness

The costs for a gym are tax-deductible if the facilities are used for health reasons: the exercise must be necessary to alleviate or cure an illness – for example, a slipped disc. The tax office requires a corresponding certificate from the relevant public health officer.

For such a public health certificate, a certificate from your GP is initially required. Once your GP has issued such a certificate, you can arrange an appointment with the relevant health office and the public health officer. If they confirm the GP's diagnosis, the public health certificate will also be issued.

Very important: The certificate from the public health officer must be available before taking out a gym membership.

2. A doctor or alternative practitioner supervises the training

The relevant tax office also accepts the costs for a gym only if the training there takes place “according to precise individual prescription and under the responsibility of a doctor, alternative practitioner or other person authorised to practise medicine,” as the judges of the Federal Fiscal Court ruled on 14 August 1997. The exercise must therefore be carried out regularly under the supervision of a qualified person.

If both conditions are met – the public health certificate and regular supervision by a doctor, alternative practitioner or similarly qualified person – the gym fees can be claimed as exceptional expenses.

By the way: If the health insurance company covers the gym membership fee, the costs must not be entered in the tax return.

For exceptional expenses, there is a so-called reasonable burden. This depends on your income, marital status and the number of children and is calculated by the tax office. The reasonable personal burden is one to seven per cent of total income. If your expenses are below the reasonable personal burden, it is not worth entering the costs in the tax return.

The expenses are forfeited and there is no tax relief. You can calculate the amount of the individual reasonable burden yourself on the website of the Oberfinanzdirektion Niedersachsen.

Judgment 1: The Cologne Fiscal Court ruled that expenses for attending a fitness and health club are not deductible even if a doctor certifies the necessity of muscle-building training due to a serious physical condition. Rather, recognition of the relevant costs requires the prescription of a specific and individual therapy measure (judgment of 30.1.2019, 7 K 2297/17).

Judgment 2: The Lower Saxony Fiscal Court ruled that gym membership fees are not deductible as exceptional expenses if these fees also cover services that can be used not only by sick but also by healthy people, such as sauna use and aqua fitness courses. Proximity to home and cost savings cannot justify the compulsion of the contributions. The claim was only partially decided in favour of the claimant.

However, contributions to a rehabilitation club that conducts medically prescribed courses in a gym were recognised as exceptional expenses, as were travel costs to the gym incurred exclusively in connection with the medically prescribed courses.

However, it was left open whether the court would have decided differently if the claimant had had no reasonable alternative to carrying out the medically prescribed courses in a gym. The appeal is pending before the Federal Fiscal Court (Ref. I R 1/23).