Generally, you can deduct business travel expenses if the work assignment is “temporary.” (This includes transportation to and from a work site, lodging, 50 percent of meal costs, and so forth.)

On the other hand, if the work assignment is not temporary, your “tax home” is considered to shift to the work location, and your travel expenses are then considered to be non-deductible personal outlays.

When you travel away from your tax home overnight on business, you can deduct the round-trip transportation cost (for example, car expenses or airfare and parking), plus 100 percent of lodging costs for business days, plus 50 percent of meal costs for business days, plus 100 percent of incidentals (such as dry cleaning costs) for business days.

Your tax home is either

  • Your regular place of business or your principal place of business if you have more than one regular place of business; or
  • Your regular abode if you have no regular or principal place of business.

The purpose of allowing deductions for out-of-town business travel expenses is to give you a tax break for all the duplicative expenses incurred while at the temporary work location. However, an itinerant worker (such as a traveling salesman or self-employed casualty insurance adjuster who moves from one disaster site to the next) doesn’t have any tax home and therefore does not have any duplicative expenses. As a result, itinerant workers can only deduct transportation costs between work locations (no deductions for lodging, meals, and incidentals).

In general, an out-of-town work assignment at a single location is considered to be temporary, which is a prerequisite for deducting travel expenses, if it is realistically expected to last one year or less and does in fact last that long. If an away-from-home assignment is realistically expected to last more than one year, or there’s no realistic expectation that it will last one year or less (such as an assignment with an indefinite term), the assignment will be treated as indefinite regardless of how long it actually lasts. In this scenario, the travel expenses are non-deductible.

Of course, expectations can change. If so, the worker will not be penalized under these rules. For example, if an initial eight-month assignment is extended for six additional months, the assignment is treated as no longer being temporary when it is extended. But travel expenses for the first eight months can still be deducted, because the assignment was temporary during that period.

Instead of keeping records of actual expenditures for lodging, meals, and incidentals while out of town on business, an employee can choose to deduct a fixed daily (per diem) IRS-approved amount (subject to the 50 percent allowance rule for the portion of the per diem that is allocated to meals). More specifically, the per diem amount can be deducted regardless of actual expenditures for lodging, meals, and incidentals as long as the employee is able to prove with adequate substantiation the time, place, and business purpose of the travel. While receipts are not required to prove expense amounts when using the per diem method, you may find it convenient to keep lodging receipts (which conclusively prove the dates and places of your travel) on which you note the business purpose for the travel.

Finally, employees must treat unreimbursed business travel expenses as a miscellaneous itemized deduction item. If the travel expenses, when combined with other miscellaneous itemized deduction items (such as investment expenses, fees for tax preparation and advice, and union dues), exceed 2 percent of the employee’s adjusted gross income, the employee can deduct the excess.

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