Does cost of purchasing data count toward educational expenses?

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
April 5, 2024
3 replies
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I'm an international F1 Ph.D. student, and I get scholarships. I recently purchased expensive data to use for my research and dissertation. My question is whether I can count it as an educational expense.

edit: data refers to research dataset (database).

Hal_Al

Employee

Q. My question is whether I can count expensive data, I purchased, to use for my research and dissertation as an educational expense.

A. No, you cannot count it, as a qualified expense, for claiming the Lifetime Learning Credit (LLC). Qualified expenses are only tuition, fees and materials required to be purchased from the school.

You can count it, as a qualified expense, for a 529 plan distribution.

Vanessa A

As an F-1 student are you filing as a resident or non resident alien?

If you are a non-resident alien, then you would need to contact a company like sprintax.com for help with determining what is deductible on your 1040NR.

What do you mean by expensive data? Like a data plan for the internet? Or facts and figures from a scholarly source? Or something else? Basically, only expenses that are required as a condition of enrollment are qualified education expenses for claiming education credits.

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John WilliamsAuthor

Here, data refers dataset for research.

DaveF1006

It depends on if it was required by the school to use for your research and dissertation. Please review this link for further information.

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John WilliamsAuthor

To DaveF1006:

My entire dissertation revolves around this dataset, and hence, it was necessary for continuing my studies given my current research topic. But I didn't "have" to purchase this dataset, as nobody forced me to. I could use another thesis topic with another dataset or another topic with no dataset at all.

TLDR: Once I chose this topic, I had to purchase this dataset. However, I could choose many different topics that did not need purchasing a dataset.