Do you have a tax home?
Almost every rule about meals, lodging and travel on the road starts with the same condition: being away from a tax home. So this is the question to answer first, and it is not the question most people think it is.
A tax home is not simply where your house is, and it is not created by the job title. Driving across the country all year does not by itself establish one, and neither does having family somewhere.
What the rules say
26 U.S.C. § 162(a)(2) allows a deduction for traveling expenses only while away from home in the pursuit of a trade or business, so the existence of a tax home is a precondition rather than a consequence of the work performed.
Publication 463 describes the tax home as the regular or main place of business, and where there is no regular or main place of business it looks to whether there is a regular place of abode, treating a taxpayer with neither as an itinerant whose tax home is wherever work is performed.
The factors the guidance names
- Whether there is a regular or main place of business, which Publication 463 treats as the starting point for identifying a tax home.
- Where there is no regular or main place of business, whether there is a regular place of abode in a real and substantial sense.
- Whether living expenses are duplicated while working away from the claimed home.
- Whether work at a location is realistically expected to last one year or less, which Publication 463 distinguishes from indefinite assignments.
Work through it
Four questions, taken straight from the factors above. Nothing is saved and nothing is sent anywhere. Where the answers do not settle it, the result says so.
- Is there a regular or main place where you do your work or run your business?
- Do you do part of your work in the area where you say your main home is?
- Do you keep paying to keep that home going while you are out on the road?
- Is that area still where you live, rather than somewhere you have moved on from?
The answers point to a tax home
On these answers there is a place the rules would treat as your tax home. That is the door being open, not the deduction being granted: what you can actually claim still depends on the rules for how you are paid.
The answers point to no tax home at all
Some drivers have no regular place of business and no regular place they live. The guidance treats that as a real situation with a name, and someone in it is not travelling away from a tax home, because there is nothing to be away from.
This one depends on the full facts
Your answers land in the middle, and the guidance says outright that this is where the whole picture matters. There is a real test here, but it does not resolve from a handful of yes-and-no answers.
Not enough answered yet
We cannot answer that from what has been entered. The rules turn on facts we do not have, so we would rather say so than guess.
What we are not saying here
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.
- 26 U.S.C. § 162 — Trade or business expensesUnited States Code (GPO, govinfo) · 2023 edition · read 2026-08-15
- 26 C.F.R. § 1.162-2 — Traveling expensesElectronic Code of Federal Regulations · current eCFR · read 2026-08-15
- IRS Tax Topic 511 — Business travel expensesInternal Revenue Service · current page · read 2026-08-15
- IRS Publication 463 — Travel, Gift, and Car ExpensesInternal Revenue Service · 2025 · read 2026-08-15
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.
- No state-level trucker research has been performed. No state conclusion of any kind exists in this vertical.
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.