Business travel expenses

Scope, and what this page is not

This page describes US federal rules as stated by the IRS in Topic no. 511 and Publication 463, checked on 16 August 2026. It is not tax advice, state rules differ, and employees, partners and corporate officers are treated differently from the self-employed. Where your own situation turns on a detail, that is a question for an accountant.

The test is your tax home, not your house

Travel expenses are deductible when you are travelling away from your tax home for business. The IRS defines your tax home as the entire city or general area where your main place of business is located — regardless of where you keep your family home. A trip that never leaves that area is not business travel, however far you drove.

This catches people who live in one city and work mainly in another: the tax home follows the work, not the address. It also means a long day in your own metropolitan area does not qualify no matter how inconvenient it was. Local business driving is a different question with its own rules, and it belongs in a vehicle and mileage category rather than in travel.

The sleep-or-rest rule

You are travelling away from home, in the IRS's words, if your duties require you to be away from the general area of your tax home for substantially longer than an ordinary day's work and you need to get sleep or rest to meet the demands of your work while away. Napping in the car does not satisfy it; a genuine overnight does.

This one rule decides whether a whole trip's meals and lodging are in scope. It is worth knowing before you book rather than after, because a trip that is one hour short of qualifying is a trip whose meal receipts you will be sorting into a different pile.

What counts as a travel expense

Topic 511 lists them: travel by air, train, bus or car between your tax home and the business destination; taxis and other transport between the airport or station and your hotel or work location; lodging and non-entertainment-related meals; dry cleaning and laundry; business calls made on the trip; and tips paid on any of these.

Two boundaries are worth holding on to. Entertainment is treated separately from non-entertainment meals, so a client dinner and a client's theatre ticket are not the same line. And the personal portion of a mixed trip is not deductible — a conference with three days of holiday attached needs the split recorded at the time, not estimated later.

Meals are limited to 50%

The deduction for business meals is generally limited to 50% of the unreimbursed cost. Record the full amount you actually paid in your own books and let the limit be applied at filing; do not pre-halve your receipts, because your records should show what happened, not what is claimable.

Keeping the true figure also protects you when the rule changes, which it has done more than once, or when a specific exception applies to your situation. A record that has already had a percentage baked into it cannot be recalculated, and nobody remembers a year later which convention they used.

Write down who and why, while you are there

For each travel expense, note the amount, the date, the place and the business purpose — and for a meal or a meeting, who was there. That is the substantiation the rules ask for, and every part of it is easy on the day and unreliable four months later.

This is where travel differs from every other category: for travel, meals, gifts and listed property, the law bars estimation outright, so there is no fallback if the record is missing. The site's page on claiming deductions without receipts covers why that matters and what the limits of the alternative really are. The short version is that travel is the category with no safety net, which makes contemporaneous notes the whole game.

A routine that survives a trip

Photograph each receipt when it is handed to you, add six words of purpose immediately, and reconcile the whole trip on the journey home while it is still fresh. Twenty minutes on the return leg replaces an hour of guesswork at month end and produces a better record.

Two travel-specific habits are worth adding. Note the currency and, for anything large, the rate you were charged rather than the rate on the day — card conversions differ. And keep the itinerary or booking confirmation with the receipts, because it independently establishes the dates and the destination, which is half of what the record has to prove.

Where an app helps here specifically

Travel is where receipt capture is hardest to keep up and where the records are least forgiving, so it is the strongest case for photographing at the point of sale. Our AI Receipt Scanner extracts date, merchant and total into an editable record — scanning and organising free, export behind Pro — with the purpose note something you still type yourself.

Nothing automates the part that matters most on a trip: why the spend happened and who was there. A tool can save you the transcription of an eleven-euro taxi docket. It cannot know the meeting it was for, and a travel record without that is the one an enquiry asks about.