Depreciation Calculator – Every Year of the Write-Off, Before You Buy
An asset does not lose its value all at once, and how you spread that loss changes every year’s profit and tax bill. Type in what it costs, what it will be worth at the end, and how long it will serve — and see the whole story at once: a full year-by-year schedule from straight-line, declining balance, sum-of-years’-digits, and the IRS MACRS tables, with the accumulated write-off and the book value left standing at the end of each year.
The asset
Advanced options — declining-balance rate, switch to straight-line, and MACRS recovery period
MACRS pays no attention to salvage value: the IRS tables write the full cost down to zero, on a 200% declining balance with the half-year convention, switching to straight-line near the end. That is why the MACRS schedule runs one year longer than the recovery period.
Declining-balance rate, switch to straight-line, and MACRS recovery period are already included in the result with their default values — open Advanced options to change them.
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The write-off at a glance
The full picture
What this means
Same asset, four very different first years: declining balance takes $4,000.00 in Year 1, sum-of-years’-digits takes $3,000.00, MACRS takes $2,000.00, and straight-line takes $1,800.00. The three book methods all write off the same $9,000.00 in total and retire the asset at its $1,000.00 salvage value — they only argue about the pace. MACRS plays by tax rules instead: it ignores salvage and writes the whole $10,000.00 down to zero. Front-loaded methods cut early profits and early taxes; straight-line keeps every year level.
Why the book value never drops below salvage. Salvage value is the floor: the moment a year’s charge would push the book value under it, the charge is trimmed to land exactly on the floor. On the defaults, double declining balance would ask for $518.40 in Year 5 — but only $296.00 of room is left above the $1,000.00 salvage value, so $296.00 is what Year 5 gets.
The schedule, year by year — straight-line
This table is the real deliverable of depreciation: the charge each year, everything written off so far, and the book value still standing. Change the asset or switch methods above and the whole schedule rebuilds.
| Year | Depreciation | Accumulated | Book value (end of year) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Year 1 · 2026 | $1,800.00 | $1,800.00 | $8,200.00 |
| Year 2 · 2027 | $1,800.00 | $3,600.00 | $6,400.00 |
| Year 3 · 2028 | $1,800.00 | $5,400.00 | $4,600.00 |
| Year 4 · 2029 | $1,800.00 | $7,200.00 | $2,800.00 |
| Year 5 · 2030 | $1,800.00 | $9,000.00 | $1,000.00 |
| Total | $9,000.00 |
Straight-line is the flat skyline: the same charge every year, so the book value walks down in even steps and lands exactly on the salvage value at the end of Year 5.
All four methods on the same asset
Method choice is a timing choice. Here is the same asset seen through all four lenses at once — the totals match because the destination never changes, only the road does.
| Method | Year 1 | Year 2 | Total written off | Final book value |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Straight-line | $1,800.00 | $1,800.00 | $9,000.00 | $1,000.00 |
| Declining balance (200%) | $4,000.00 | $2,400.00 | $9,000.00 | $1,000.00 |
| Sum-of-years’-digits | $3,000.00 | $2,400.00 | $9,000.00 | $1,000.00 |
| MACRS · 5-year (IRS) | $2,000.00 | $3,200.00 | $10,000.00 | $0.00 |
The odd one out is MACRS, and the reason is on the label: tax rules ignore salvage value, so MACRS writes off the whole $10,000.00 cost, and its Year 2 is bigger than its Year 1 — the half-year convention only allows half a year’s charge in Year 1 and makes it up in Year 2. The declining balance column follows your rate and straight-line-switch choices above; the MACRS column follows your recovery period.
- Start with the depreciable base: cost minus salvage value — $10,000 minus $1,000 is $9,000 — and every schedule on the page spends exactly that, never a cent more.
- Straight-line spends the base in equal slices, while declining balance spends a fixed percentage of whatever book value remains, so its charges shrink every year.
- The methods differ in timing, not in total: how you spread the write-off changes every year’s profit and tax bill even though the totals agree.
How it works, in 3 steps
Set the base
Start with what the asset cost, subtract what it will be worth when you are done with it, and you have the depreciable base — the total amount any book method is allowed to write off. Cost $10,000, salvage $1,000: the base is $9,000, and every schedule on this page spends exactly that, never a cent more.
Pick the pace
Straight-line spends the base in equal slices. Declining balance spends a fixed percentage of whatever book value remains, so the charges shrink every year. Sum-of-years’-digits spends shrinking fractions of the base. MACRS follows the IRS percentage table for the asset’s recovery period, with salvage ignored entirely.
Read the schedule
Each year’s charge joins the accumulated column, and the book value — cost minus everything written off so far — falls year by year until it rests on the salvage value (or on zero, for MACRS). That book value is the figure your balance sheet carries, and the one a sale is measured against.
How each method is worked out
Straight-line, on the defaults. The base is $10,000 − $1,000 = $9,000, spread over 5 years: $9,000 ÷ 5 = $1,800 a year, every year. The book value steps down evenly — $8,200, $6,400, $4,600, $2,800 — and parks exactly on the $1,000 salvage value. Nothing to adjust, nothing to cap: the straight line is the method with no surprises in it, which is precisely why small businesses and simple books default to it.
Declining balance, on the defaults. Double declining means a rate of 2 ÷ 5 = 40% of the remaining book value each year: Year 1 takes 40% of $10,000 = $4,000, Year 2 takes 40% of $6,000 = $2,400, then $1,440, then $864. Year 5 asks for 40% of $1,296 = $518.40 — but the book value is not allowed through the salvage floor, and only $296 of room remains, so Year 5 is capped at $296 and the book closes exactly on $1,000. With the straight-line switch on (the default here, and what MACRS itself does), each year also compares the straight-line charge on what is left — $296 in Year 5 — and takes the bigger of the two; the cap then settles it either way.
Sum-of-years’-digits, on the defaults. Add the years: 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 = 15. Year 1 earns the biggest slice, 5/15 of the $9,000 base = $3,000; Year 2 takes 4/15 = $2,400; then 3/15 = $1,800, 2/15 = $1,200, and the last year takes the final 1/15 = $600. It front-loads like declining balance but with tidier manners: the slices are fixed fractions of the base, so the total is guaranteed to land on the base exactly, with no cap ever needed.
MACRS, on the defaults. US tax depreciation does not ask about salvage value at all. A 5-year asset under the general depreciation system uses the IRS table from Publication 946 — 20.00%, 32.00%, 19.20%, 11.52%, 11.52%, 5.76% of the full cost — giving $2,000, $3,200, $1,920, $1,152, $1,152 and $576 across six tax years, and a book value of exactly zero. The percentages already contain the half-year convention and the built-in switch to straight-line; your only jobs are the right recovery period and the right cost.
Deep dives
Because a dollar of deduction this year is worth more than a dollar of deduction in five years. Depreciation is not cash leaving the business — the cash left when the asset was bought. It is a charge against profit, and profit is what tax is figured on. A front-loaded method like double declining balance charges $4,000 of the default asset’s $9,000 base in Year 1, shrinking Year 1’s taxable profit by that much more than straight-line’s $1,800 would. The $2,200 difference is not saved tax, it is deferred tax: the later years carry correspondingly smaller charges and correspondingly bigger profits. Used well, that timing is worth real money — the deferred tax is an interest-free loan from the future to the present.
The same timing cuts the other way in the reported numbers. Front-loaded depreciation makes a young asset’s early years look less profitable and its later years look more profitable, because by Year 5 the declining charge has shrivelled to $296 while straight-line is still charging its full $1,800. A business being valued, loaned against, or sold is read partly through those profits, so the method choice quietly shapes the story the accounts tell — one more reason it is made deliberately, by asset class, and then kept consistent year after year rather than swapped to flatter a particular year.
What never changes is the ending. Every book method retires the asset at its salvage value having written off exactly the depreciable base — $9,000 on the defaults, whether it arrived in five level steps or one lunge and a shuffle. If two schedules for the same asset disagree about the total, one of them is not a method difference, it is an arithmetic error. That is the check this page makes impossible to fail: the totals row always has to read the same number as the base.
Most businesses quietly keep depreciation twice. The financial statements — the books shown to owners, banks and buyers — use a method chosen to reflect how the asset is really consumed, most often straight-line over a realistic useful life. The tax return, in the United States, has no such freedom: it uses MACRS, with the recovery period and the percentage table the IRS assigns to that class of asset, conventions and all. The same machine can honestly be worth $6,400 in one set of books and $4,800 in the other at the end of Year 2, and neither figure is wrong — they are answering to different rulebooks.
The gap is temporary, and accountants track it on purpose. Because both books eventually write the asset down (to salvage in the accounts, to zero for tax), the difference between them unwinds over the asset’s life. In the meantime it sits on the balance sheet as a deferred tax item — a small IOU between the business and its future tax bills. This is why a profitable company can show a surprisingly small tax charge in a year it bought heavy equipment, and a bigger one later when the tax write-offs have run ahead of the book charges.
And MACRS is not the whole of tax depreciation. Separate US provisions — Section 179 expensing and bonus depreciation — let many businesses write off some or even all of an asset’s cost in the year it is placed in service, outside the MACRS tables entirely, within limits that change over time. This calculator deliberately stays inside the published MACRS percentage tables for 3, 5 and 7-year property under the half-year convention; real property (27.5 and 39-year), the alternative depreciation system, and the mid-quarter convention follow different tables and are out of its scope. For a filing decision, the tables here are the map — a tax professional is the guide.
The four first years, side by side
The comparison table on this page already gives the headline for the default asset, a $10,000 purchase with a $1,000 salvage value over 5 years, but the year-by-year schedules are where the methods really separate. Click through the four method buttons and the schedule table rewrites itself for the same asset, so every figure below can be reproduced by selecting the method and reading the schedule. The three book methods, straight-line, declining balance and sum-of-years’-digits, all write off the same $9,000 depreciable base and all retire the asset at its $1,000 salvage value. They differ only in pace, and pace is everything when the deduction lands in a particular tax year.
| Method | Year 1 | Year 2 | Year 3 | Year 4 | Year 5 | Year 6 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Straight-line | $1,800.00 | $1,800.00 | $1,800.00 | $1,800.00 | $1,800.00 | — |
| Declining balance (200%) | $4,000.00 | $2,400.00 | $1,440.00 | $864.00 | $296.00 | — |
| Sum-of-years’-digits | $3,000.00 | $2,400.00 | $1,800.00 | $1,200.00 | $600.00 | — |
| MACRS · 5-year (IRS) | $2,000.00 | $3,200.00 | $1,920.00 | $1,152.00 | $1,152.00 | $576.00 |
Straight-line is the control case: $9,000 divided by 5 years is $1,800 every year, and the book value falls in equal steps from $10,000 to $8,200, $6,400, $4,600, $2,800 and finally $1,000. Nothing about it surprises, and that is its virtue in accounts where predictability matters more than timing. Declining balance at 200 percent, double the straight-line rate of 20 percent, takes 40 percent of the opening book value in Year 1, which is $4,000, then 40 percent of what remains: $2,400 in Year 2, $1,440 in Year 3 and $864 in Year 4. Year 5 is where the method shows its discipline: 40 percent of the $1,296 book value would be $518.40, but the schedule takes only $296.00, exactly the amount that lands the book value on the $1,000 salvage value and no lower. Without that cap, or the switch to straight-line that the page offers, declining balance would either overshoot the salvage value or dribble on forever, approaching it without ever reaching it. Sum-of-years’-digits sits between the two in its first year and then declines in equal steps rather than by a percentage: the year-sum for 5 years is 15, so Year 1 takes 5 fifteenths of $9,000, which is $3,000, Year 2 takes 4 fifteenths, $2,400, then $1,800, $1,200 and $600. By Year 3 the declining-balance and sum-of-years’ schedules cross in the other direction, with declining balance falling below sum-of-years’ digits for the first time, at $1,440 against $1,800.
MACRS breaks the pattern in two ways, and both are tax rules, not arithmetic choices. First, it ignores the salvage value entirely: the schedule writes the full $10,000 down to $0.00, not to $1,000, so its total is $10,000 against the book methods’ $9,000. Second, it runs for six tax years for a five-year property, because the half-year convention treats the asset as placed in service halfway through the first year. The percentages are 20 percent in Year 1 ($2,000), 32 percent in Year 2 ($3,200, the biggest single year on this page), 19.2 percent in Year 3 ($1,920), 11.52 percent in each of Years 4 and 5 ($1,152 each) and 5.76 percent in Year 6 ($576). Notice that MACRS Year 1 is smaller than both declining balance and sum-of-years’ digits, despite MACRS being the tax method people reach for when they want speed: the half-year convention defers part of the first year’s charge, and the catch-up lands in Year 2, which is why Year 2, not Year 1, is the largest MACRS year. Anyone comparing methods on Year 1 alone will misrank MACRS, and the schedule table exists to prevent exactly that mistake.
Why the totals agree, and why the timing still matters
For the three book methods, the agreement of the totals is not a coincidence; it is forced by the definition of the depreciable base. Cost minus salvage value is $9,000, and every book method is a different way of slicing that same $9,000 across the same 5 years. Straight-line slices it evenly, declining balance slices it front-loaded by percentage, and sum-of-years’-digits slices it front-loaded by a fixed arithmetic ladder. Add any column of the table above and you get $9,000, and the final book value is $1,000 in all three cases. The choice between them therefore never changes how much is written off in total; it changes only which years carry the charge, and in financial reporting that timing changes reported profit year by year even though the five-year total profit is identical. A company that wants smooth earnings picks straight-line. A company that wants to match a charge to an asset’s genuinely faster early loss of usefulness picks declining balance or sum-of-years’ digits, and the difference between those two is itself a timing choice within the early years: declining balance is far more aggressive in Year 1 ($4,000 against $3,000) but falls below sum-of-years’ digits by Year 3 ($1,440 against $1,800).
MACRS is a different kind of answer because it answers a different question. The book methods ask how an asset’s cost should be spread for accounting purposes, respecting the salvage value the owner expects to recover. MACRS asks how the tax code allows the cost to be recovered, and the tax code’s answer ignores salvage value, imposes its own percentage tables and stretches the recovery over an extra half-year at each end through the convention. The $1,000 gap between the MACRS total ($10,000) and the book total ($9,000) is not an error in either schedule; it is the salvage value, counted as recovered for tax and as retained for accounting. When the asset is eventually sold, that gap reconciles: a sale at the $1,000 salvage value gives no further gain or loss on the books, while for tax the entire proceeds are measured against a zero basis. The page’s scope note is explicit that real property, the alternative depreciation system and the mid-quarter convention follow different tables and are outside this calculator, and that boundary matters: applying the 5-year table here to a building, or to a year in which most purchases fell in the final quarter, would produce a schedule the IRS would not accept, however neatly it adds up.
Two variant checks, both run through this page’s own calculator, show how sensitive the schedules are to the inputs. First, set the salvage value to $0 with everything else at the defaults. The depreciable base becomes the full $10,000, straight-line rises from $1,800 to $2,000 a year, and the final book value falls to $0.00, which is the same endpoint MACRS already had, but reached by a different route. Second, keep the defaults except for a $20,000 cost, a $2,000 salvage value and a 10-year life. The base doubles to $18,000 and the life doubles to 10 years, so straight-line stays, by coincidence, at exactly $1,800 a year, $18,000 divided by 10, with a final book value of $2,000. The coincidence is instructive: doubling both the base and the life leaves the annual charge unchanged, and anyone who doubled the cost alone, expecting the charge to double, would be right, while anyone who doubled the life alone, expecting the charge to halve, would also be right. Depreciation arithmetic is linear in the base and inverse in the life, and the calculator lets you feel both levers separately, one field at a time.
Choosing a method without fooling yourself
The honest way to choose is to start from the constraint, not from the biggest Year 1 number. If the schedule is for tax, the constraint is the IRS table for the property class, and the page’s MACRS mode is the only mode that speaks that language, with its half-year convention and its zero endpoint. If the schedule is for management accounts, the constraint is the pattern of usefulness: an asset that loses value fastest when new, such as a vehicle or a computer, suits declining balance; an asset whose usefulness fades steadily suits straight-line; sum-of-years’ digits suits the middle case, where the early years are genuinely heavier but not dramatically so. If the schedule is for a loan application or an investor presentation, the constraint is comparability, and straight-line is the method a reader will least suspect of being chosen for effect, precisely because it never flatters any single year.
Three traps recur, and the page’s own design guards against each of them if you let it. The first trap is comparing Year 1 figures across methods that start in different years: MACRS Year 2, not Year 1, is its biggest year, so a Year 1 comparison understates MACRS and overstates declining balance. The second trap is forgetting the salvage value in the book methods: a $0 salvage value is a real choice, not a default, and it raises every year’s charge, as the variant above shows. The third trap is treating book value as market value. The page’s own frequently asked question says it plainly, and the schedules prove it: after Year 1 on declining balance the book value is $6,000, but that figure is an accounting remainder, $10,000 minus $4,000, and it says nothing about what a buyer would pay for a one-year-old asset of this kind. Book value answers “how much cost is left to spread”; market value answers “what would someone pay”, and the two meet only by accident. Keep those questions separate and the schedules on this page do exactly what they promise: they show every year of the write-off, before you commit, with the totals forced to agree where they should and forced apart where the tax rules say they must.
Car depreciation: the same methods on a vehicle
A car is the asset most readers meet depreciation through. The methods above apply unchanged; the tax treatment does not, and the distinction matters.
For book purposes, a car depreciates like any other asset: choose a method, a life, and a salvage value, and the schedule follows. A $30,000 car written off over 5 years by straight-line, with no salvage value, loses $6,000 a year and reaches zero at the end of year 5. By 200% declining balance, the same car loses $12,000 in year 1, $7,200 in year 2, and progressively less, reaching the same zero only with the switch to straight-line that the method needs, as the declining-balance section above explains. The shape of the two schedules is the whole lesson of the methods comparison: straight-line spreads the cost evenly, declining balance loads it early, and the totals agree, because the car costs $30,000 however it is spread. For a personal car, that book schedule is a planning figure — it tells you what the car has cost you over time, not what it will sell for, because market value follows condition, mileage, and demand, and the book value and the market value meet only by accident.
For tax purposes, a car used for business follows the MACRS rules, not the book methods, and the MACRS tab above reproduces the IRS Publication 946 table for 5-year property under the half-year convention. Applied to a $30,000 car used 100% for business, the percentages give the following deductions:
| Year | MACRS rate | Deduction on $30,000 |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 20.00% | $6,000 |
| 2 | 32.00% | $9,600 |
| 3 | 19.20% | $5,760 |
| 4 | 11.52% | $3,456 |
| 5 | 11.52% | $3,456 |
| 6 | 5.76% | $1,728 |
The six years for five-year property are the half-year convention at work: half a year in year 1, five full years, and half a year in year 6, which is why the schedule runs one year longer than the recovery period, as the FAQ above explains. Two limits apply before this table is used for a real car. First, mixed use: a car used partly for business and partly personally is depreciated only on the business-use share, so a car used 60% for business depreciates 60% of the table figures, and the personal share is never deductible. Second, listed-property limits: passenger automobiles are subject to annual depreciation caps that change by year, and to substantiation requirements for business use, and the caps can reduce the deduction below the table figures in the early years. Bonus depreciation and Section 179 can accelerate the deduction further for qualifying business use, under rules and limits that change with legislation. None of that is computed on this page, which prices the methods, not the tax filing: for a business vehicle, run the MACRS figures past a tax professional with the actual business-use percentage and the current-year caps before relying on them.
Depreciation questions, answered
What is depreciation?
Depreciation is the accounting way of spreading the cost of a long-lived asset over the years it earns its keep. A $10,000 machine used for five years does not really cost $10,000 in year one and nothing after — it is consumed a slice at a time, and each year’s slice is charged against that year’s income. The total charged over the whole life is the cost minus the salvage value: what the asset will still be worth when you are finished with it.
Which depreciation method should I use?
It depends on what the schedule is for. For financial statements, straight-line is the default for most assets because it is simple and matches assets that wear out evenly; declining balance and sum-of-years’-digits suit assets that lose most of their value or usefulness early, like vehicles and computers. For a US tax return there is usually no choice at all: the IRS prescribes MACRS, with a set recovery period and table for each class of asset. When in doubt, the comparison table above shows what each choice does to the same asset before you commit to one.
What is salvage value, and can it be zero?
Salvage value (also called residual or scrap value) is your estimate of what the asset will be worth at the end of its useful life — what you could sell or scrap it for. It is subtracted from the cost before any book method runs, because that slice of value is never consumed. Zero is a perfectly sensible salvage value for assets that will be worthless when worn out, and it is what the tax system assumes anyway: MACRS ignores salvage value entirely and writes the full cost down to zero.
Why does declining balance need a cap or a switch to straight-line?
Because a percentage of what is left never quite reaches the floor. Double declining balance on a book value that has fallen to $1,296 asks for $518.40 — but if the salvage value is $1,000, only $296 of room is left, and charging more would write the asset down below what it is still worth. Real accounting handles this two ways: cap the final charge at the remaining room, or switch to straight-line on the remaining balance when that gives the bigger charge, which lands exactly on salvage. This calculator does both — the switch is on by default and the cap always applies.
Why does MACRS take one year longer than the recovery period?
Because of the half-year convention. MACRS pretends every asset entered service halfway through its first tax year, whatever the real date, so Year 1 only carries half a year of depreciation — a 5-year asset takes 20% in Year 1 instead of the full 40% a double-declining year would give. The other half has to go somewhere, so the schedule spills into a sixth year, which collects the final 5.76%. The same convention is baked into every row of the IRS percentage tables in Publication 946.
Is book value what the asset is actually worth?
No — book value is an accounting figure, not a valuation. It is simply the original cost minus the depreciation charged so far, and it follows the method’s script whether the real market agrees or not. A delivery van carried at its $1,000 salvage value might sell for $2,500, or for $400; the difference only surfaces when the asset is sold, as a gain or loss against the book value. Depreciation schedules answer an accounting question — how the cost is spread — not the market’s question of what someone would pay today.
Why is the last declining-balance year so small?
Because the schedule is capped at the salvage value. On the defaults, declining balance at 200 percent would take 40 percent of the $1,296 Year 4 book value in Year 5, which is $518.40, but only $296.00 remains above the $1,000 salvage value, so Year 5 takes $296.00 and stops exactly at $1,000. Without that cap, or the switch to straight-line the page offers, declining balance would either overshoot the salvage value or approach it forever without reaching it.
Why does MACRS have six years for five-year property?
Because of the half-year convention. The IRS treats the asset as placed in service halfway through the first year, so only half a year’s charge lands in Year 1 (20 percent, $2,000 on the defaults) and the other half spills into a sixth tax year (5.76 percent, $576). That is also why MACRS Year 2, at 32 percent or $3,200, is the biggest year on this page, not Year 1.
What changes if I set the salvage value to zero?
The whole depreciable base becomes the cost. On the defaults, straight-line rises from $1,800 a year to $2,000 a year, because $10,000 divided by 5 is $2,000, and the final book value falls from $1,000 to $0.00. A zero salvage value is a real choice, not a neutral default: it says you expect to recover nothing at disposal, and it raises every year’s charge accordingly.
Is book value the same as market value?
No. Book value is an accounting remainder, cost minus accumulated depreciation: after Year 1 on declining balance it is $6,000, simply $10,000 minus $4,000. Market value is what a buyer would pay, which depends on condition, demand and the second-hand market, none of which any depreciation schedule knows. The two figures meet only by accident, so never price a sale off the schedule’s book value column.
What is the difference between depreciation and amortisation?
Depreciation spreads the cost of a tangible asset — machinery, vehicles, buildings — over its useful life. Amortisation spreads the cost of an intangible asset — a patent, a copyright, a loan premium — or, in lending, the repayment of a loan through scheduled payments of principal and interest. The maths is related, because both allocate a cost over time, but the assets, the rules, and the schedules differ, and a loan amortisation schedule is not a depreciation schedule: one pays down a debt, the other writes down an asset. The amortisation calculator prices the loan side.
Does land depreciate?
No. Land is not depreciated, because it does not wear out, become obsolete, or get used up in the way a building or a machine does. When a property is bought, the purchase price must be split between the land, which is never depreciated, and the buildings and improvements on it, which are — and the split decides the depreciable basis, as the rental schedule guide explains. Land improvements with a determinable life, such as fencing, paving, and landscaping, can be depreciated over their own lives, but the land itself is carried at cost indefinitely, however much its market value rises or falls.
Can depreciation take book value below zero?
No, not under any method on this page. The book value floors at the salvage value: straight-line stops when the accumulated depreciation equals cost minus salvage value, declining balance is capped or switched before it crosses the floor, and MACRS treats salvage value as zero and stops at zero. A schedule that shows a negative book value has an error in it — usually a salvage value entered with the wrong sign, or a declining-balance schedule run without the cap. If the asset is sold for more than its book value, the difference is a gain on disposal, taxed under its own rules; it is not negative depreciation.
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Related guides
Planning arithmetic on your figures — not tax or accounting advice.
The schedules assume a full year of service in every year shown; assets bought or sold mid-year, partial first years and fiscal years that differ from calendar years need prorating that this page does not do. The MACRS tab reproduces the IRS Publication 946 general depreciation system tables for 3, 5 and 7-year property under the half-year convention only — real property, the alternative depreciation system, the mid-quarter convention, Section 179 and bonus depreciation follow different rules and are outside its scope. Depreciation choices have real tax consequences, and the right one depends on your books and your jurisdiction: for filings and purchases that matter, run the numbers past a qualified accountant.