Per diem and meals: four questions, not one

Per diem gets talked about as if it were one thing. It is four separate questions, and mixing them up is where drivers go wrong. A percentage limit and a dollar-a-day figure are different answers to different questions, so they never belong in the same sentence.

Travel and meal rules only start to apply when someone is away from a tax home. Having a tax home does not create a deduction on its own, and it does not switch on a rule that the law closes for your situation.

What the rules say

Question 1: is the travel away from a tax home at all?

This is the gate. If there is no tax home to be away from, the other three questions never come up, however many nights were spent in the sleeper.

Everything below is downstream of one condition: being away from a tax home. Where that is not established, these rules are not reached at all.

Publication 463 states that in general only a stated percentage of business-related meal expenses may be deducted unless an exception applies; the percentage itself is carried in a dated rate schedule.

Publication 463 states that a higher percentage applies to meal expenses while traveling away from the tax home if the meals take place during or incident to any period subject to the Department of Transportation's hours-of-service limits, and it lists interstate truck operators under Department of Transportation regulations among the individuals subject to those limits; the percentage itself is carried in a dated rate schedule.

Rev. Proc. 2019-48 provides an allowance method under which a stated amount is treated as substantiated in lieu of actual expense records, so the method governs proof of an amount and is not itself an entitlement to any amount.

Notice 2025-54 states special meals-and-incidental-expenses figures for taxpayers in the transportation industry for travel inside and outside the continental United States for the federal fiscal year it covers, and the governing revenue procedure limits the transportation-industry category to taxpayers whose work directly involves moving people or goods and who regularly travel to localities with differing rates; the figures are carried in dated rate schedules.

Question 2: what percentage limit applies?

The percentage of an otherwise allowable meal expense that may be deducted under 26 U.S.C. § 274(n). It limits an amount already determined; it never supplies the amount.

Question 3: how is the amount proved?

How the expense is proved: actual expense records under 26 U.S.C. § 274(d) and 26 C.F.R. § 1.274-5, or an allowance method that treats a stated amount as substantiated. A method carries no percentage and no dollar figure.

Question 4a: the locality daily figures

A dollars-per-day meals-and-incidental-expenses figure that varies by locality. No value has been retrieved in this project.

Question 4b: the transportation-industry daily figure

A single dollars-per-day figure available under special rules to taxpayers in the transportation industry in lieu of locality figures, retrieved in T3 from the governing IRS notice for the stated federal fiscal year. Eligibility for the special rules, and being away from a tax home at all, remain facts questions this project does not decide.

Why the percentage and the daily figure are different answers

One of them is a limit on an amount that has already been worked out. The other is a way of arriving at the amount in the first place. Putting them into a single phrase produces a sentence that is not true of anybody, which is how the line about drivers getting a flat percentage of a daily rate spread in the first place.

The answer is not the same for an employee

Everything below is downstream of one condition: being away from a tax home. Where that is not established, these rules are not reached at all.

Publication 463 states that in general only a stated percentage of business-related meal expenses may be deducted unless an exception applies; the percentage itself is carried in a dated rate schedule.

Publication 463 states that a higher percentage applies to meal expenses while traveling away from the tax home if the meals take place during or incident to any period subject to the Department of Transportation's hours-of-service limits, and it lists interstate truck operators under Department of Transportation regulations among the individuals subject to those limits; the percentage itself is carried in a dated rate schedule.

Rev. Proc. 2019-48 provides an allowance method under which a stated amount is treated as substantiated in lieu of actual expense records, so the method governs proof of an amount and is not itself an entitlement to any amount.

The figures above exist regardless of who is reading them. Whether a particular driver ends up subtracting anything is a separate question, and for a driver paid on a W-2 it is answered by the employee rules.

Lodging is its own question

Lodging away from a tax home sits under the same condition, and is a separate question from meals.

26 U.S.C. § 162(a)(2) treats lodging while away from home in the pursuit of a trade or business as a traveling expense, and the percentage limitation of 26 U.S.C. § 274(n) applies to food and beverage expense rather than to lodging.

Where this comes from

Every rule stated on this page comes from the law, the regulations, or IRS guidance, and each one is linked so it can be read directly.

Still being read

These are questions on this page we have not finished reading the authority for. We list them rather than fill the space with a guess.

Where to go next

How we research this

Nothing here works out an amount for one person. It explains which rules apply so a driver knows what they are looking at, and what to bring to whoever prepares the return.

This page is educational. It is not tax advice, and it is not a determination about any one driver's return. A tax professional who can see the whole situation is the right person to apply these rules to it.