For residential and light commercial contractors
That is one strategy, and it is the easiest one. There are fourteen more. This is the checklist, free, with the published 2026 numbers behind every line so you can check the math yourself.
Fifteen questions about your own business. No tax knowledge needed, no email to see your result, and you find out roughly what each gap is worth before you finish.
Where the $18,360 comes from
Most tax pages quote a number and ask you to trust it. Here it is worked out, on rates anyone can look up.
Every dollar of that profit carries self-employment tax at 15.3 percent. That is 12.4 percent Social Security up to the 2026 wage base of $184,500, plus 2.9 percent Medicare with no ceiling at all.
The salary has to be reasonable for the work you actually do. Lowball it and you have painted a target on your return, which is exactly why reasonable compensation is the first item on the checklist rather than an afterthought.
It never sees the 15.3 percent. That is roughly $18,360 that stays in the business instead of leaving it, every year, for a filing you were making anyway.
The election carries real costs: payroll filings, a separate return, and bookkeeping that actually reconciles. Those costs typically eat the savings until net income clears roughly $60,000 to $80,000. Below that, the honest answer is that this one is not yours yet. Run the numbers before you elect rather than electing because someone at a supply house told you to.
The pattern
A return preparer is paid to report what already happened, accurately and on time. That is a real job and most of them do it well. But every strategy on this checklist has to be in place before December 31 to count. By the time your return is on someone's desk in March, the year is closed and nothing anybody does gets it back.
None of these are aggressive positions. They are all things that were available and were not elected.
What you are getting
The checklist puts a dollar range next to each one so you can start with the biggest instead of reading it front to back. Those ranges are estimates the checklist makes, not results we are claiming. Which ones are actually yours depends on your entity, your payroll and your equipment, and that is the part a PDF cannot do.
The three that move the most money, and the three almost nobody has set correctly.
Four reimbursements that are ordinary business expenses when documented and taxable wages when they are not.
Money already leaving your household, redirected through the business where the code allows it.
The ones that need a real balance sheet behind them. Most contractors qualify for at least one.
Plus fifteen standard deductions to verify, every federal deadline in 2026, the entity and retirement decisions that shape all of the above, and the year-end list that has to happen between October 15 and December 31.
2026, the numbers that moved
$184,500
Social Security wage base
The 12.4 percent Social Security portion stops here. The 2.9 percent Medicare portion never stops.
$2,560,000
Section 179 expensing limit
Phases down dollar for dollar past $4,090,000 of qualifying purchases and is gone at $6,650,000.
$32,000
Section 179 cap on an SUV
Applies between 6,000 and 14,000 pounds GVWR. Trucks and vans over 14,000 pounds have no such cap.
72.5¢
Standard mileage rate
Reimbursed through an accountable plan, this leaves the business as an expense and reaches you untaxed.
The July 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act roughly doubled the Section 179 caps and made them permanent and indexed, so they keep drifting up. It also made the QBI deduction permanent, which is what turns managing around the phaseout from a one-year trick into something worth building a plan around.
It is free, it is yours either way, and there is nothing to sit through to get it. If you read it and want to know which of the fifteen survive contact with your actual numbers, there is a call on the other side of the download. If you read it and fix three of them yourself, that was the point.
Score yourself in four minutes →The scorecard asks for nothing. If you want the PDF as well we ask for a phone number, because the fastest thing we do is call and answer one question in ten minutes. Say so on the call if you would rather we did not, and we will not.
Free, and no. You give us an email and a phone number, the PDF arrives, and that is the whole transaction. The call is offered once and is not a condition of anything.
No. Most of what is on this checklist is work your return preparer is not scoped to do, so the two are not in competition. Plenty of people keep the preparer they have and change nothing else.
No. Today CFO is not a CPA firm and does not hold itself out as one. Tom holds an MBA. Where a filing requires a licensed preparer, that work goes to one.
Some of it, honestly, yes. The S-Corp election does not pay for itself until net income clears roughly $60,000 to $80,000, and the advanced plays need a balance sheet behind them. The accountable plan, the mileage reimbursement and the meals treatment work at any size, and the checklist marks which is which.
Every figure on this page is a published 2026 federal limit, or worked out from one. Tax figures move every year and some moved in 2026, so check anything you are about to act on against the current year before you act on it.
