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Quotes for the same study vary widely: a few hundred dollars from a software tool, several thousand from an engineering firm. A software tool and an engineering firm sell different products under the same name.
The fee depends on the work involved, and the work depends on your building. The spread between the fee and the deduction it pulls into earlier years stays wide, and 100% bonus depreciation widened it further for property acquired and placed in service after January 19, 2025.
So how much does a cost segregation study cost? For most commercial buildings, roughly $5,000 to $15,000. The size and type of the property, how detailed your records are, and whether the study is current-year or a look-back sets the price. The fee typically stays well under the deduction it frees up.
A larger, higher-basis building takes more analysis and carries more to reclassify, so size lifts the fee and the payoff together.
A restaurant or storage facility, dense with short-life property, is more work than a bare warehouse, and returns more.
Detailed construction costs make it faster; a lump-sum purchase price means more estimating.
Reaching back several years adds a change-in-accounting-method filing.
Price should never buy a study that cannot be defended in a review under the IRS framework. A cheap spreadsheet with nothing behind it fails when it is tested.
The gap comes from what the fee buys, not from the building:
pulls from averages and returns a report in minutes, with little behind each classification.
identifies each component and documents it against the IRS framework.
The IRS judges a study on that documentation, not the fee you paid. A cheap report that cannot support its numbers gets adjusted back under review, and you lose the deduction you counted on.
Set against the first-year deduction it produces, the fee is small.
a $1 million commercial property.
about $250,000 moved into 5, 7, and 15-year lives.
the full $250,000 under 100% bonus depreciation.
low five figures.
The year-one deduction is a federal benefit. Some states, including California, do not conform to bonus depreciation, so your state result can be smaller and spread over a longer schedule.
If you have owned the building for years without a study, you have not missed the window. A change in accounting method claims every dollar of missed depreciation at once, as a section 481(a) adjustment, in a single year when it favors you, with no amended returns, per the Form 3115 instructions.
Dimov Tax does the study, the filing, and the modeling against your return in one place. A deduction you cannot use this year, because the loss is passive or your income is low, is wasted without that planning.
The deduction the study frees up is the number worth measuring, and these figures track it.
About a quarter of the clients' returns that I look at are not fully utilizing the deductions that they have available. I think that number is even more.
The billing process is very reasonable and clear and the service is well worth what you pay.
A study may not worth it in these cases:
Below a certain cost, the fee eats the benefit.
Sell soon and the depreciation comes back as recapture; the timing benefit shrinks.
Little income to offset, and passive-loss rules can suspend it.
A residence or dealer property does not qualify.
The deduction it frees up decides whether a cost segregation study is worth its cost, so that is the number we put in front of you first.
You do not have to commit to learn whether a study is worth it. A short look at the property, its cost, type, and placed-in-service date, tells you whether the deduction beats the fee.
A short note with the building, its cost, and when it went into service is all it takes to get the payoff read back to you, before you spend a dollar.
