Yes, in nearly every case. A website you buy to bring in work for a business you already run is an ordinary and necessary business expense, and that is the whole test. The argument is almost never whether you can deduct it. It is when.
The test is ordinary and necessary
IRS Publication 583, Starting a Business and Keeping Records, revised December 2024, puts it plainly. “An ordinary expense is one that is common and accepted in your field of business, trade, or profession. A necessary expense is one that is helpful and appropriate for your business, trade, or profession.”
A plumber with a website is common and accepted. A website that brings in calls is helpful and appropriate. That clears the bar, and nothing about a website makes it a special case.
This is not legal or tax advice. Every number below sits on a page you can open yourself, but how it lands on your return depends on your business type, your accounting method, and your state. Ask your own accountant before you file, and check state questions with your state tax office.
Search the IRS books for the word website
Here is something you can check in two minutes.
Open the full text of Publication 946, How To Depreciate Property, on the IRS site. That page was last reviewed or updated April 30, 2026. It is the IRS book on what you write off and how fast. Press Ctrl+F and search for “website”. Every hit is in the government banner that sits on top of every federal page. Zero hits in the publication itself.
Do the same on Publication 334, Tax Guide for Small Business, for use in preparing 2025 returns. That page was last reviewed or updated April 30, 2026 as well. Past the banner, every hit is a web address for another agency: the Social Security Administration, the Small Business Administration, and the Government Publishing Office. Not one is about a deduction.
Publication 535, Business Expenses, used to be where people looked. It is gone. The IRS guide to business expense resources says “We have discontinued Publication 535, Business Expenses; the last revision was for 2022.” That page was last reviewed or updated June 27, 2026.
So there is no rule written for websites. There is a general rule, and your website sits under it. Anyone quoting you a precise website rule is stretching software guidance over something the guidance never named.
A write-off is not a discount
A deduction lowers the income you get taxed on. It does not hand the money back.
Spend a dollar and you save whatever your tax rate is on that dollar. The rest of the dollar is still spent. Say your rate works out to 22 cents on the dollar. A build that costs $4,000 then saves you about $880, and you are still out about $3,120.
So here is the part nobody selling websites says out loud. Do not buy a website for the tax break. Work out whether the site earns its keep first, then take the deduction as a side effect. If the site does not stand up on its own, the deduction does not rescue it, and you should not buy anything.
Judge the spend by itself. The website build page lists what is inside a build, and the pricing page shows the three monthly plans and what each one includes.
When you paid changes the answer
If you were already open for business, the simple case applies. Publication 583 calls the expenses you deduct “the current operating costs of running your business,” and it says that on the cash method you usually deduct or capitalize expenses in the tax year you pay them. That covers most people reading this.
If you were not open yet, it lands somewhere else. Publication 583 calls start-up costs “the expenses you incur before you actually begin business operations” and says they may include costs for advertising. Those are generally capital expenses.
The same publication sets the amounts. You can elect to deduct up to $5,000 of business start-up costs. That $5,000 is reduced by the amount your start-up costs run over $50,000. Anything left has to be amortized. Section 195 of the tax code, the law behind that paragraph, spreads the rest “ratably over the 180-month period beginning with the month in which the active trade or business begins.”
180 months is 15 years. A website paid for six weeks before your first paying job can end up spread across fifteen years of returns instead of one. That is worth a phone call to your accountant before you sign anything.
Whether you pay monthly or in one lump also changes what you hand that accountant each year. Monthly website plans versus paying once works through how those two deals compare.
Where the software rules come in, and where they stop
Some accountants treat a website like software. That is a fair read, and the software rules at least are written down.
Publication 946 lists off-the-shelf computer software among the property that qualifies for the Section 179 deduction. Software passes its tests if it is readily available for purchase by the general public, is subject to a nonexclusive license, and has not been substantially modified. If you depreciate software instead, the same publication says to use the straight line method over a useful life of 36 months.
The Section 179 ceilings sit in that publication and in Publication 334. For tax years beginning in 2025, the maximum deduction is $2,500,000, reduced by the amount your Section 179 property placed in service during the year runs over $4,000,000. Those numbers sit so far above a contractor website that Section 179 is rarely the interesting part of this question.
One more split is worth knowing. Revenue Procedure 2025-28, printed in Internal Revenue Bulletin 2025-38 on September 15, 2025, restates the tax code this way: “any amount paid or incurred in connection with the development of any software is treated as a research or experimental expenditure.” That same document keeps acquired, leased, or licensed computer software on a separate track under Revenue Procedure 2000-50.
Now the honest limit in all of it. Those rules are about software. Buying a finished site from a web company looks more like buying a service, and no IRS page says which side a contractor website falls on. Two careful accountants can read this differently, and neither one has an IRS sentence to point at. That gap is for your accountant to close, not a salesperson.
One last boundary. Sales tax on a design invoice is a different tax, set by your state, and it has nothing to do with the income tax deduction covered here. Sales tax on website design covers that one.
What to do next
Four plain steps.
- Ask your web company for an itemized invoice, with build work on one line and monthly work on another. What a website quote should include shows how those parts break down, and an itemized bill is easier to hand to an accountant.
- Write down two dates. The day the site went live, and the day the business first took paying work. That second date decides which bucket applies.
- Give the invoice and both dates to your accountant and ask which line it belongs on. That call is theirs, not your web company’s.
- File the invoice with the rest of your records and leave it alone.
Then stop thinking about tax. A website is worth buying when it turns searches into booked calls. The write-off is a rebate on a decision that had to stand up on its own first.