How to Write Off Travel Expenses on Your Taxes

You can write off travel expenses on your taxes by deducting the ordinary and necessary costs of trips taken away from your tax home for business. If you’re self-employed, those costs go on Schedule C and reduce both your income tax and your self-employment tax. The deduction covers transportation, lodging, 50% of business meals, and incidentals, but only when the trip has a real business purpose and you have contemporaneous records to back it up.

What Counts as Deductible Business Travel

Two things have to be true before any travel expense is deductible. The trip has to take you away from your tax home, and it has to keep you away long enough that you reasonably need sleep or rest before returning.¹

Your tax home is the city or general area where your main place of business sits, not where you sleep at night. Live in Denver but run your business out of Boulder? Boulder is your tax home, and a Boulder client meeting isn’t travel. A same-day round trip to a client two hours away doesn’t qualify either. An overnight stay for a two-day conference does.

Each expense also has to be ordinary and necessary for your line of work. Ordinary means common and accepted in your trade. Necessary means helpful and appropriate, not indispensable.² Flying business class on a long-haul might pass; chartering a private jet for a routine sales call probably won’t. Costs can’t be lavish or extravagant.

The One-Year Rule for Extended Assignments

If work sends you to another city for a while, the IRS splits assignments at one year. An assignment you realistically expect to last a year or less is temporary, and travel costs to and from that location stay deductible. An assignment expected to last longer than a year is indefinite, which means the new location becomes your tax home and the travel isn’t deductible.³

The rule works prospectively. Take a nine-month contract, then learn it will run 14 months, and the assignment stops being temporary the day your expectation changes. Costs claimed after that date can be disallowed even though nothing about the trip itself changed.

Which Expenses You Can Actually Write Off

Once the trip qualifies, several categories of cost are deductible:

Transportation to and from the destination: airfare, train, bus, and rental cars. If you drive your own vehicle, you can use either the IRS standard mileage rate of $0.70 per mile for 2026 or your actual vehicle expenses prorated for business use.⁴
Local transportation at your destination, including taxis, rideshares, and transit used for business.
Lodging for the nights you need to be away, at the full reasonable nightly rate.
Business meals while traveling, deductible at 50% of the actual cost. You or an employee has to be present, and the meal can’t be lavish. Workers subject to Department of Transportation hours-of-service rules, like truck drivers and airline pilots, get 80%.⁵
Incidentals: tips for porters and housekeeping, dry cleaning and laundry, Wi-Fi charges, and business phone and fax costs.

Entertainment is not deductible. Since 2018, tickets to sporting events, concerts, and golf outings have been off the table even when a business discussion happens.⁶ Take a client to dinner and then to a basketball game and the dinner is 50% deductible if it’s billed separately; the tickets are zero.

Trips That Mix Business and Personal Time

The IRS treats mixed trips differently depending on where you go.

Domestic Trips

Inside the United States, transportation is all or nothing. If the primary purpose of the trip is business, the full round-trip transportation cost is deductible. If the primary purpose is personal, none of it is. There’s no proration of the airfare by day count. The IRS weighs all the facts, but the ratio of business days to personal days is the main one.⁷ One week of meetings followed by five weeks of vacation is a personal trip.

Even on a primarily personal trip, expenses at the destination that directly relate to business stay deductible. Fly to Miami for vacation, give a paid talk one afternoon, and the speaking-related costs count even though the flight doesn’t.

Foreign Trips

Travel outside the U.S. follows tighter rules. If the trip runs more than seven days and more than 25% of the time is personal, you have to allocate transportation between business and personal days.⁸ The deductible share equals the total transportation cost times the ratio of business days to total days. Ten days abroad with seven business days and three personal days gets you 70% of the airfare.

Two safe harbors let you skip the allocation. A trip of seven consecutive days or fewer (not counting the departure day) keeps its full transportation deduction if it’s primarily for business. So does any trip where less than 25% of the time outside the U.S. is personal.⁸ For these rules, the “United States” is the 50 states and D.C. Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands count as foreign travel.

Bringing a Spouse or Family Member

You generally can’t deduct travel costs for a spouse, dependent, or anyone else who comes along unless three things are all true: the person is your employee, the travel serves a bona fide business purpose, and the expenses would be deductible on their own.⁹ Taking meeting notes or attending a social dinner doesn’t clear that bar.

Your own deduction survives even when your spouse’s doesn’t. You just can’t claim the extra cost their presence adds. If a single room is $150 and a double is $200, deduct $150. A rental car costs the same regardless of who’s in the passenger seat, so the full rental is deductible. Their separate meals, separate airfare, and similar additions are not.⁵

Using Per Diem to Skip Some Receipts

The IRS lets you substitute a flat daily allowance for actual meal and incidental tracking. Rates are updated each fall for the fiscal year starting October 1.

For the period starting October 1, 2025, which covers most of the 2026 tax year, the simplified high-low method sets two tiers within the continental U.S.: $319 per day in high-cost cities and $225 per day everywhere else. The meal portion of those (subject to the 50% limit) is $86 and $74 respectively.¹⁰ The meal-and-incidental-only per diem is $86 for high-cost localities and $74 for other CONUS locations. Transportation industry workers get a flat $80 per day for any CONUS location.

One catch for the self-employed: you can only use per diem for meals and incidentals, not lodging. Lodging still requires actual receipts.¹¹ Per diem also doesn’t eliminate documenting the date, destination, and business purpose of each trip; it just saves you from keeping every restaurant slip. You have to follow the procedures in Rev. Proc. 2019-48 or its successor and use the same method for the whole trip.¹²

Records the IRS Expects

This is where most travel deductions collapse. The IRS requires “adequate records” for every travel expense, and the burden of proof is on you. Records made at or near the time of the expense carry far more weight than a spreadsheet rebuilt in March from credit card statements.

For each expense, write down four things: the amount, the date, the place, and the business purpose. For meals, add the business relationship of the people you ate with.¹³ Missing any of these lets the IRS disallow the whole expense.

When You Need a Receipt

Documentary evidence such as a receipt, invoice, or credit card statement is required for any lodging expense regardless of amount, and for any other individual expense of $75 or more. The exception is transportation charges where receipts aren’t readily available.¹⁴ For expenses under $75 (other than lodging), the four elements still need to be recorded even if a receipt isn’t strictly required. Keeping every receipt anyway is the safer habit.

Mileage Logs

Using your personal vehicle and claiming the standard mileage rate means keeping a log with the date, starting and ending locations, business purpose, and miles driven for each trip. Record your odometer at the beginning and end of the tax year so you can calculate business-use percentage. Individual-trip odometer readings aren’t required, but without the year-end readings you’ll struggle to prove total business miles.

How Long to Keep Them

Hold travel records at least three years from the date you filed the return, or three years from the return’s due date, whichever is later. Early returns count as filed on the due date.¹⁵ If income is substantially underreported, the IRS has six years to audit, so longer retention is prudent when anything about a return is uncertain.

How to Claim It on Your Return

Sole proprietors, single-member LLC owners, and independent contractors report travel deductions on Schedule C (Form 1040), which feeds into your personal return.¹ Transportation and lodging go on the “Travel” line. Meals go on the “Meals” line, but only the 50% deductible portion. Laundry, Wi-Fi, and tips fit under “Other expenses.”

These deductions reduce net profit before it reaches your Form 1040, so they cut both income tax and the 15.3% self-employment tax. Because Schedule C deductions are above the line, you get the full benefit whether you take the standard deduction or itemize. A $5,000 travel deduction for someone in the 22% bracket saves roughly $1,100 in income tax plus about $765 in self-employment tax.

If You’re a W-2 Employee

The employee side changed in 2018 and became permanent in 2025. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act suspended the deduction for unreimbursed employee business expenses through 2025, and the One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act signed on July 4, 2025, made that elimination permanent.¹⁶ Most W-2 employees can’t deduct unreimbursed travel on their returns anymore, no matter the amount.

The workable path is reimbursement through an employer accountable plan. Under one of those, the employer reimburses substantiated travel costs, the employee returns any excess (generally within 60 days), and the payments don’t show up as taxable wages.¹⁴ A nonaccountable plan doesn’t require substantiation or lets employees keep excess reimbursements; those payments hit the W-2 as wages, and the employee can’t deduct the offsetting expenses.

A narrow set of employees can still deduct unreimbursed travel as an adjustment to income on Schedule 1: qualified performing artists, fee-basis state or local government officials, Armed Forces reservists, and employees with impairment-related work expenses.¹⁷ For reservists specifically, travel is deductible only when duties require going more than 100 miles from home, and the deduction is capped at federal per diem rates.¹⁸

What Happens If You Can’t Back It Up

Claiming travel you can’t substantiate isn’t just a lost deduction. If the disallowance produces a substantial understatement of tax, the IRS can add a 20% accuracy-related penalty on top of the additional tax. For individuals, a substantial understatement means understating tax by the greater of 10% of the correct tax or $5,000.¹⁹ If you also claim the qualified business income deduction under Section 199A, the threshold drops to 5% of the correct tax or $5,000, whichever is greater.

Schedule C travel and meals are among the areas the IRS looks at hardest on small business returns. Large travel numbers relative to revenue, round figures, and thin documentation all draw attention. The reliable defense is unglamorous: save receipts as you go, log trips the day they happen, and keep a plain record of why each trip was necessary for the business. Records that wouldn’t convince a skeptical stranger won’t convince an auditor.

1
Internal Revenue Service. Topic No. 511 – Business Travel Expenses
2
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 USC 162 – Trade or Business Expenses
3
Thomson Reuters. IRS Letter Explains How One-Year Rule Affects Exclusion of Travel Reimbursements
4
Internal Revenue Service. Standard Mileage Rates
5
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 USC 274 – Disallowance of Certain Entertainment, Etc., Expenses
6
Internal Revenue Service. Tax Cuts and Jobs Act: A Comparison for Businesses
7
eCFR. 26 CFR 1.162-2 – Traveling Expenses
8
eCFR. 26 CFR 1.274-4 – Disallowance of Certain Foreign Travel Expenses
9
Internal Revenue Service. Spousal Travel
10
Internal Revenue Service. 2025-2026 Special Per Diem Rates – Notice 2025-54
11
Internal Revenue Service. Per Diem Payments Frequently Asked Questions
12
Internal Revenue Service. Rev. Proc. 2019-48
13
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 USC 274 – Disallowance of Certain Entertainment, Etc., Expenses
14
Internal Revenue Service. Revenue Ruling 2003-106
15
Internal Revenue Service. Topic No. 305 – Recordkeeping
16
Internal Revenue Service. One, Big, Beautiful Bill Provisions
17
Internal Revenue Service. Instructions for Form 2106
18
Internal Revenue Service. IRS Courseware – Military Adjustments to Income
19
Internal Revenue Service. Accuracy-Related Penalty