Servicefradrag: how to get up to 26% back on your cleaning
There is a tax deduction sitting in the Danish system that pays back roughly a quarter of what you spend on cleaning your home. It has existed for years. A surprising number of people in Copenhagen, particularly people who moved here from somewhere else, have never claimed it once.
Part of that is the name. Servicefradrag does not translate into anything obvious, and it gets confused with håndværkerfradrag, which is a different deduction for a different thing. Part of it is that the rules look fiddly until someone lays them out. They are not fiddly. There are four conditions, and if you meet them the money is yours.
What you actually get back in 2026
For 2026 you can deduct up to 18,300 kroner per person. That was 17,500 in 2025, and it rises again to 19,100 in 2027.
The word "deduct" is where people lose the thread. You are not getting 18,300 kroner back. You are deducting that amount from your taxable income, and Skattestyrelsen puts the value of that at approximately 26 percent. Pay 1,000 kroner for cleaning and you save around 260 kroner in tax.
Use the full allowance and you are looking at roughly 4,758 kroner back.
The allowance is per person, not per household, and every adult in the home who is 18 or older and liable to pay tax in Denmark gets their own. Two adults therefore have 36,600 kroner between them in 2026, worth about 9,516 kroner in tax. Spouses and partners with a shared economy can split it however they like regardless of who actually paid the invoice, though each of you has to enter your own share yourself.
What cleaning work qualifies
SKAT publishes the list, and for household cleaning it is broader than most people assume. It covers wiping down surfaces, cleaning the toilet and shower, vacuuming, floor washing and polishing, dishwashing, laundry and ironing, and cleaning carpets, curtains and blinds. Window cleaning counts on both the inside and the outside of the building.
One trap in there. Washing, ironing and dry cleaning only qualify if the work happens in your home. Send your shirts out and you have lost the deduction on them.
Another: you cannot claim for an au pair living in the home where the work is done, and more generally you cannot claim for work done by someone who lives in that home. Paying your flatmate to clean does not work.
The deduction covers labour and nothing else. Not the products, not the equipment, not the drive over. This is why the invoice matters so much, and why we split labour and materials into separate lines on everything we send rather than quoting one blended number.
The four conditions
Four things have to be true.
You have to be 18 or older by the end of the tax year and liable to pay tax in Denmark. You have to live in the home while the work is being done, and if you have more than one year-round home it has to be the one where you are registered in Folkeregisteret. You have to pay for the work yourself, out of your own pocket.
The fourth one is where claims most often die: you have to pay electronically. Bank transfer, card, MobilePay, giro. Cash disqualifies you completely, at any amount, no exceptions. That rule is not really aimed at you. The whole scheme exists to pull domestic work out of the cash economy, which is also why the allowance keeps getting more generous every year.
Renting does not disqualify you
This is the one that stops people in Copenhagen from claiming, and it is based on a misunderstanding.
Tenants are entitled to the deduction. So are andelshavere and apartment owners. What matters is not whether you own the place but whether you pay for the service yourself, have the right to maintain the area in question, and live there while the work happens.
Where it does fall apart is if the cost reaches you through your rent, through a maintenance account, or through provisions made by your housing association. Cleaning you arrange and pay for directly is yours to claim. Stairwell cleaning bundled into your husleje is not.
If you are on the 27 percent tax scheme, read this part twice
Around 11,000 people in Denmark are taxed under forskerskatteordningen, the flat-rate scheme for researchers and high-earning specialists recruited from abroad. If you moved here for a senior role at a pharma company or a tech firm, there is a reasonable chance you are on it.
The scheme charges a flat 27 percent plus AM-bidrag, coming to 32.84 percent. In exchange, you cannot offset deductions against the income covered by the scheme. Not commuting costs, not union fees, and not this. You do not even get the personal allowance.
So if all of your Danish income sits inside the scheme, servicefradrag will very likely do nothing for you, and any provider telling you otherwise has not thought about it. If you have income outside the scheme, that income is taxed under the ordinary rules and the picture changes. This is genuinely a question for your accountant rather than your cleaning company, and it is worth asking before you assume either way.
Your partner, if they are taxed normally, still has their own full 18,300 kroner allowance. That gets missed constantly in households where one person is on the scheme and the other is not.
Getting the paperwork right
An invoice that does not contain the right fields is not a valid basis for the deduction, and this is where claims quietly fail.
SKAT wants your name, the company's CVR number, a description of the work, the date it was carried out, and the labour cost stated separately from any materials or transport. If several separate jobs were done, the labour has to be broken out for each of them.
If the person cleaning your home has no CVR number because they are a private individual rather than a business, you need their CPR number and a signed service declaration. They also have to be 18 and fully liable to tax in Denmark. Which is a polite way of saying that the arrangement has to be declared. An undeclared cleaner cannot give you a valid claim, and the deduction is one of the better reasons not to go down that route in the first place.
Keep the documentation. You are not required to upload it, but you are required to have it if SKAT asks.
How and when to claim
For work done during 2026, log into TastSelv, open your forskudsopgørelse, find Håndværkerfradrag og Servicefradrag and enter the amount in field 461. Doing it there adjusts your tax during the year rather than making you wait.
For a year that has already closed, you enter it on your årsopgørelse instead, in the same field.
Nothing is filled in automatically. Your cleaning company does not report it for you and SKAT does not know what you spent. If you do not type the number in, no deduction happens.
The deadline that catches people: work carried out in one year has to be paid for by 28 February of the following year to count for that year. Pay later than that and the deduction moves into the year you actually paid. December invoices sitting unpaid into March are the classic way to lose an allowance you had already earned.
What this does to the real hourly price
Spend the full 18,300 kroner allowance on cleaning labour at 375 kroner an hour including VAT and you have bought roughly 48 hours of work. After the deduction comes back, your effective rate is around 278 kroner an hour.
That is the comparison worth making when a quote lands in your inbox. The undeclared 200 kroner an hour cannot be claimed against anything, carries no insurance, and leaves you exposed if something goes wrong. The declared rate, after the deduction the state deliberately built to make declared work competitive, ends up much closer than the sticker prices suggest.
Most of our customers claim it. The ones who do not usually just did not know the field existed.
Figures are for the 2026 tax year and taken from skat.dk. Rates change annually and individual circumstances vary, particularly around tax liability and special schemes. We are a cleaning company, not tax advisers, so verify your own position at skat.dk or with an accountant before filing.