Are Engineering Firms Leaving R&D Tax Credits on the Table?
Engineering firms solve hard problems for a living. Whether designing infrastructure, developing structural systems, or solving complex technical challenges for clients, engineers do exactly the kind of work that federal tax law was written to reward. Yet many engineering companies have never claimed the R&D tax credit — or have claimed far less than they're entitled to. Why Engineering Qualifies The R&D tax credit applies to activities that involve developing or improving a product, process, or technique through a process of experimentation rooted in hard science or engineering. For most engineering firms, this describes day-to-day project work. Activities that commonly qualify for r&d tax credits for engineering firms include designing new structural or mechanical systems, performing computational modeling and simulation, developing novel construction methods, testing materials or approaches where the outcome is uncertain, and creating proprietary software tools u...