What receipts do you actually need to keep for your Australian tax return?

The rules about which receipts you must keep for tax are more specific — and more forgiving — than most people assume. They come from the ATO's substantiation requirements, and once you know the three big numbers ($300, five years, $75) the rest falls into place. Everything below is the general rule for individuals; the ATO's own pages at ato.gov.au are the authority, and your accountant knows your specifics.

The $300 threshold

If your total work-related expense claims for the year are $300 or less, you don't need written evidence. You still need to be able to show how you worked out the claim, and the money must actually have been spent — "no receipts needed" is not "no questions asked".

Two things people get wrong about this rule:

• It's $300 in total, not per item. One $250 course plus $80 of stationery puts you over, and then everything needs evidence — not just the amount above $300.
• It doesn't cover car, travel allowance, or meal allowance expenses — those have their own substantiation rules regardless of amount.

There's one other well-known carve-out: laundry of work clothing can be claimed up to $150 without written evidence, using the ATO's per-load rates. That $150 sits inside the $300 total, not on top of it.

The practical read: if you claim anything at all beyond trivial amounts, plan on keeping receipts for everything. The threshold is a mercy for people with tiny claims, not a strategy.

What counts as acceptable evidence

For an expense to be substantiated, the ATO wants a document from the supplier that shows:

• the supplier's name
• the amount
• the nature of the goods or services
• the date the expense was incurred
• the date the document was produced

An ordinary receipt, a tax invoice, or an emailed order confirmation showing those details all qualify. If a document is missing one detail — commonly the nature of the goods — you're allowed to write it on yourself before filing it away, as long as you do it promptly.

Bank and card statements alone are generally not enough for work-related expenses, because a line reading "OFFICEWORKS 84.95" doesn't show what was bought. A statement is fine supporting evidence alongside a receipt, and can carry small or hard-to-document claims in some situations, but building your record-keeping on statements is building on sand. (If you've already lost a receipt, all is not lost — see proving a purchase without one, which covers the tax angle too.)

Digital copies are fine

The ATO explicitly accepts electronic records: photos of paper receipts, PDFs, and emailed receipts are all acceptable provided they're a true and clear reproduction of the original and stay readable for the full retention period. You can bin the paper once you have a clear copy. The details — and the one condition that trips people up — are in digital receipts and the ATO.

Five years

Records must be kept for five years from the day you lodge the return that relies on them (longer in some cases — depreciating assets, capital gains, or if you're in a dispute with the ATO). Five years is precisely the window in which thermal-paper receipts fade to blank and retailers' emailed receipts quietly stop rendering, which is why "I kept everything" and "I can still produce everything" turn out to be different claims.

What you need for the common claim types

• Tools, equipment and office costs — the receipt. Items over $300 (per item, this time) are depreciated rather than claimed outright, so their receipts need to survive the asset's whole effective life plus five years.
• Working from home — a record of your actual hours plus, depending on method, your utility bills. Detailed enough that it gets its own article.
• Car expenses — cents-per-km needs a record of how you calculated work kilometres (up to 5,000 km); the logbook method needs a valid 12-week logbook plus receipts for running costs.
• Self-education — receipts for course fees, books, travel; the course must connect to your current income-earning work.
• Donations — the receipt from the deductible gift recipient. Bucket donations under $10 are claimable to a small total without receipts.

What you don't need to keep

Purely private spending — groceries, the family car's fuel, streaming you don't claim — has no tax record-keeping requirement at all. (Warranty and insurance reasons to keep some of it are a separate question.) Nor do you need receipts for expenses your employer reimbursed — those aren't deductions, they're the employer's records.

Making the five-year requirement easy

The whole obligation compresses to: capture every claimable receipt once, keep it readable for five-plus years, and be able to find it. That's exactly the job The Paper Keep automates — receipts come in by inbox scan, forwarding or photo, the original is stored untouched, and the tax-year summary rolls up your deductible categories with a CSV export for the accountant.

This works even better inside The Paper Keep — start a 14-day free trial.