Financing

Tax Benefits

If you plan on paying any amount of the costs for your service dog out of pocket than you should know your tax rights. You may be eligible to write off the costs of your service "DOG". This includes any costs, such as food, grooming, and veterinary care, incurred in maintaining the health and vitality your Service Dog so that it may perform its duties. 

In general, you may be able to write off expenses for a service animal who is specially trained to alleviate or cure your medical condition. Guide dogs for the blind are an obvious example. So are service animals for the hearing impaired, who alert their humans when the doorbell rings or the oven timer goes off.

But here's an example of a dog who would not qualify for a deduction: the pet dog of a family with an autistic child. Even if the dog spends time with the child and seems to calm him down, the IRS would not consider this dog a deductible service animal because she isn't certified to alleviate that medical condition. The way the math works is that having a medical condition plus having a pet does not equal a deductible animal. So what is the equation missing? Training and certification. The golden rule is that you need to be able to prove a close tie between the medical condition and what the trained animal does to alleviate it.

What can you write off? What's eligible for a tax deduction falls under two categories: acquisition and maintenance. The year you acquire the dog, you can write off the cost of buying her. Every year during the life of the dog, you can write off expenses for her maintenance. That includes products and services like veterinary care, food, toys, grooming and training. The dog's veterinary checkup, a leash, her rabies vaccine — those all qualify as deductible expenses.

Now, not every taxpayer is even eligible to write off these costs, because the IRS has a 10 percent floor on medical expenses. We'll translate that for you: You can only deduct these costs if they exceed 10 percent of your annual income. The thinking behind this is that if your income is high enough, you can afford your medical expenses (including your service dog) without government assistance, so you don't get to write them off.

So now you're asking, "What if these expenses are less than 10 percent of my income? Do I get no help at all?" Not so fast. There is a second way to pay for service dog costs, and that's with money from your flexible spending account (FSA) or health savings account (HSA), if you have either one. There's no 10 percent floor if you want to use FSA or HSA money to pay for your service dog, and, hey, using pretax money to pay these bills is better than paying completely out of pocket, right?

What documents do you need? 

What will you need to provide to your accountant when filing your taxes, or if you get audited? You should keep these documents:

• Records of the training that the dog received
• Documentation of any certifications the dog has earned
• Receipts for your purchase of the service animal, plus receipts for all of her expenses

We would also recommend documentation from a doctor or medical provider that explains how a service animal helps you alleviate your medical condition. So if you have a guide dog, you should keep a doctor's statement of the fact that you are visually impaired, for instance, along with certification that your dog has been trained as a guide dog, and receipts to prove the amount of money you spent to buy and care for the dog.

Protect Your Investment w/ Open Range Puppy Portal

The Open Range Puppy Portal helps you know that your investment is in the right hands. We take this service seriously and to show it we have developed the Puppy Portal. This takes our service 1 step further by providing you with "proof" of your pups progress. How do we do this? We provide you weekly improvement report cards through the Puppy Portal, weekly training videos, live streaming training sessions, daily activity display shows when your pup starts working everyday and who they are working with, we provide you weekly pictures, veterinary docs and updates, and you can even chat with the staff working with your Service Dog.