DOT Per Diem for Truckers: $80 a Day, 80% Deductible

The IRS special meal rate for truckers is $80 a day for travel in the continental US and $86 outside it, and the $80 rate has applied since October 1, 2024, so it covers all of 2025 and 2026 and runs through September 30, 2027. Drivers under DOT hours-of-service rules deduct 80% of it, or $64 for a full day, and departure and return days count at 75%. In the 280-day example below, that’s $16,800 deducted on Schedule C with no meal receipts, backed by a travel log.

What’s the per diem rate for truckers?

The IRS allows transportation workers to use a special simplified per diem rate for meals and incidental expenses (M&IE), instead of tracking actual meal costs. The General Services Administration publishes location-specific per diem rates each year, but the IRS also publishes a single “transportation industry” rate that applies to all CONUS travel without requiring you to look up each city.

The current rates, effective October 1, 2026 (Notice 2026-60), unchanged from the year before:

• CONUS (continental United States): $80 per day
• OCONUS (outside the continental US, including Alaska, Hawaii, and Canada): $86 per day

These rates cover meals and incidental expenses only. They don’t cover lodging (most OTR truckers sleep in the cab, so there’s no lodging cost to deduct). They don’t cover fuel, repairs, tolls, or any other operating expense. Those are separate deductions on your Schedule C.

The rates reset each October 1, not January 1. If the rate changes mid-tax year, you use the old rate for January through September and the new rate for October through December. For calendar year 2026, you use the $80 CONUS rate for the full year: IRS Notice 2026-60 kept the transportation-industry rate at $80 ($86 OCONUS) for October 1, 2026 through September 30, 2027.

Why do truckers get the 80% deduction instead of 50%?

Under the general rule in IRC 274(n)(1), business meals are only 50% deductible. But Congress carved out an exception for transportation workers. Under IRC 274(n)(3), employees or self-employed individuals subject to the Department of Transportation’s hours-of-service regulations can deduct meals at 80%.

You qualify if you hold a commercial driver’s license and operate a commercial motor vehicle under DOT hours-of-service rules. That covers virtually every OTR owner-operator and company driver in the trucking industry. It also covers interstate bus drivers, certain railroad employees, merchant mariners, and airline flight crews, but for trucking purposes, if you’re driving a CMV and logging hours under 49 CFR Part 395, you’re in.

The math difference is significant. At $80 per day, the standard 50% rate produces a $40 deduction. The DOT 80% rate produces $64. Over 280 days on the road, that’s $6,720 in additional deductions, which at a 30% combined marginal rate saves roughly $2,000 in tax. A preparer who applies the wrong percentage is costing you real money.

How do I determine my “tax home”?

Your tax home is the key to the entire per diem deduction. You can only claim per diem for days you’re traveling away from your tax home overnight. If you can’t establish a tax home, you can’t claim per diem at all.

Under IRC 162(a) and the case law interpreting it, your tax home is generally the metropolitan area where your principal place of business is located, not necessarily where your family lives. For an owner-operator, this is typically the area where you dispatch from, park your truck when you’re not on the road, pick up loads, and handle administrative work. For most OTR truckers, the tax home is the metro area surrounding their residence, because that’s where they return between trips and where they do their dispatching and bookkeeping.

The IRS looks at three factors to determine whether you have a tax home:

1. You perform part of your business in the area and use it as your home base for lodging while working there.
2. You have living expenses in the area that you duplicate when traveling.
3. You haven’t abandoned the area (you still maintain a residence there or have a historical connection).

If you satisfy at least two of those three, you generally have a tax home. Most owner-operators who maintain a residence, keep their truck domiciled there between trips, and do administrative work from home satisfy all three.

The problem case is the itinerant driver: someone who has no fixed home base, sleeps in the truck full-time, and doesn’t maintain a residence anywhere. The IRS and the Tax Court have consistently held that an itinerant worker’s tax home is wherever they happen to be, which means they’re never “away” from it, which means no per diem deduction. If you’re in this situation, establishing a fixed home base (even a rented room or apartment where you return regularly) is worth the cost, because the per diem deduction it unlocks far exceeds the rent.

How do full days and partial days work?

Not every travel day is a full per diem day. The IRS distinguishes between full days and partial days (also called travel days or departure/return days).

A full day is any calendar day where you’re away from your tax home for the entire 24-hour period. If you leave your home terminal Monday morning and don’t return until Friday evening, Tuesday through Thursday are full days. You claim the full per diem rate ($80 CONUS) for each.

A partial day is the day you depart your tax home or the day you return. On those days, you claim 75% of the applicable per diem rate. At the $80 CONUS rate, a partial day is $60. After the 80% DOT deduction, that’s $48 of effective deduction per partial day, compared to $64 for a full day.

For a typical weekly trip (leave Monday, return Friday), that’s three full days and two partial days: (3 x $80) + (2 x $60) = $360 of per diem claimed for the trip, of which 80% ($288) is the deductible amount.

Some truckers are on the road for weeks at a time. If you leave on January 5 and don’t return until February 2, January 5 and February 2 are partial days. Every day in between is a full day. The longer the trip, the smaller the partial-day dilution as a percentage of the total.

Who can claim the per diem deduction after the TCJA?

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) eliminated the employee deduction for unreimbursed business expenses starting in 2018. Under IRC 67(g), miscellaneous itemized deductions subject to the 2% floor, which included employee meal expenses, are not deductible. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act made this elimination permanent (it had been scheduled to expire after 2025, but the sunset was removed).

What this means in practice:

Self-employed owner-operators are not affected. You deduct per diem on Schedule C, Line 24b, as a business expense. The TCJA suspension applies to employee deductions, not to self-employment deductions. If you’re filing Schedule C, you’ve been claiming per diem throughout the TCJA period and you can continue doing so.

W-2 company drivers cannot currently claim per diem as an employee deduction on their personal return. Before 2018, company drivers could deduct unreimbursed meal expenses (including per diem) as an itemized deduction on Schedule A, subject to the 2% AGI floor. The TCJA killed that deduction. A company driver’s only option now is to receive per diem from the employer through an accountable plan.

Employers paying per diem through an accountable plan can still reimburse drivers at the per diem rate. The payment is excluded from the driver’s W-2 wages (it’s not income to the driver), and the employer deducts it as a business expense at the applicable rate (80% for DOT-subject drivers). If you’re a company driver and your employer doesn’t offer per diem reimbursement, the deduction is simply unavailable to you (the OBBBA made the suspension permanent). That’s one of several tax advantages of being an owner-operator versus a company driver.

What substantiation does the IRS require?

Per diem is one of the few deductions where you don’t need receipts, but you do need a log. Under IRC 274(d), travel expenses (including meals) require adequate records or sufficient evidence corroborating the taxpayer’s own statement. For per diem, that means a contemporaneous travel log.

The log must show, for each trip:

• The date of departure and the date of return
• The location (city or general area) for each overnight stay
• The business purpose of the travel (for truckers, this is generally “freight transport under DOT hours-of-service”)

You don’t need to record what you ate, where you ate, or how much individual meals cost. That’s the entire point of the per diem method: the flat rate replaces actual meal tracking.

“Contemporaneous” means the log is created at or near the time of travel, not reconstructed months later at tax time. In practice, most truckers keep a simple spreadsheet, a dedicated per diem app, or notes in their ELD system. Your ELD data (which records your location and hours for every day you’re driving) is powerful corroboration of your travel log, because it independently proves where you were and when.

If the IRS audits your per diem deduction and you don’t have a log, the deduction is disallowed. There is no Cohan rule flexibility for travel expenses: the Tax Court has held repeatedly that estimated or reconstructed travel records don’t satisfy the strict substantiation requirements of IRC 274(d). This is different from most other business deductions, where the Cohan rule allows the court to estimate a reasonable amount. With per diem, it’s all or nothing.

Can I use per diem and actual meal receipts together?

No, not for the same trip. The IRS requires you to choose one method per trip: either the per diem rate or actual expenses. You can’t claim $80/day in per diem and then also deduct a $45 steakhouse receipt on the same day.

However, you can use different methods for different trips during the year, as long as you’re consistent within each trip. In practice, almost every trucker uses the per diem method for every trip, because it’s simpler and usually produces a larger deduction than tracking actual meal costs. The only scenario where actual receipts might win is if you’re eating expensive meals daily and keeping every receipt, but even then, the record-keeping burden usually isn’t worth the marginal difference.

What are the most common per diem mistakes?

The per diem deduction seems straightforward, but it produces more audit adjustments than almost any other trucking deduction. The common errors:

Claiming per diem for days at home. Per diem only applies to days you’re away from your tax home overnight. If you leave Monday morning and return Monday night (a local day trip), there’s no per diem for that day, even if you bought lunch on the road. The overnight requirement is non-negotiable. Dispatchers who work from home and occasionally drive a local route can’t claim per diem for those local days.

Using 50% instead of 80%. This is a preparer error, not a driver error, but it costs real money. If your tax preparer isn’t familiar with the DOT exception under IRC 274(n)(3) and applies the standard 50% rate, you’re losing about 37.5% of your per diem deduction. It’s one of the first things to check on an existing return.

No travel log at all. Some truckers claim per diem based on a rough estimate of days on the road, with no log to back it up. In an audit, the IRS disallows the entire deduction. ELD records help, but the IRS has been clear that ELD data alone isn’t a substitute for a per diem log, because ELD records don’t always show overnight status in the format the IRS expects. The safest approach is a dedicated per diem log (app, spreadsheet, or notebook) corroborated by ELD data.

Mixing per diem with actual meal receipts on the same trip. If you claim the per diem rate for a trip, you can’t also deduct a separately tracked meal expense from the same trip. Doing so double-counts the cost and will be adjusted on audit.

Counting local days as travel days. If you’re a local driver who goes home every night, you have no per diem deduction. Per diem is for OTR and regional drivers who sleep away from home. The tax home analysis matters here: if you drive regionally and sleep at home five nights a week but spend two nights in a hotel or the cab, only those two overnight days qualify.

Claiming per diem on days the truck is parked at home. Rest days at home between trips aren’t travel days. If you return Thursday evening and leave again Monday morning, Friday through Sunday are not per diem days. Only the days you’re actually away from your tax home overnight count.

How does per diem interact with other deductions?

Per diem covers meals and incidental expenses only. It has no effect on your other Schedule C deductions. You still deduct fuel, depreciation, insurance, repairs, tolls, and every other operating cost separately. Per diem is a standalone line item (Line 24b on Schedule C), and it doesn’t reduce or interact with any other deduction category.

One interaction worth knowing: per diem reduces your Schedule C net profit, which reduces your self-employment tax base. Since SE tax runs 15.3%, every $1,000 of per diem deduction saves you roughly $153 in SE tax on top of the income tax savings. That’s one of the reasons per diem is more valuable for a self-employed owner-operator than it was for a W-2 driver (when the employee deduction was available), because the W-2 driver’s itemized deduction reduced income tax but not FICA.

Per diem also interacts with the S-corp decision. If you’ve elected S-corp treatment, per diem is still deductible on the corporate return (reducing pass-through income), but the mechanics change. The S-corp can either reimburse you under an accountable plan (excluded from W-2 income) or you can take it as a pass-through deduction on the K-1. The accountable-plan route is generally cleaner.

What if I drive in Canada or other OCONUS locations?

Trips to Canada, Alaska, and Hawaii use the OCONUS rate ($86/day, effective October 1, 2026) instead of the CONUS rate. The same rules apply: overnight requirement, contemporaneous log, 80% DOT deduction rate, and partial-day proration for first and last days.

If a single trip spans both CONUS and OCONUS days (for example, you pick up a load in Michigan and deliver to Toronto), each day uses the rate for the location where you stopped for the night. The day you slept in the US uses the CONUS rate; the day you slept in Canada uses the OCONUS rate. Your log should note the overnight location for each day to support the correct rate.

Cross-border trucking has additional tax considerations beyond per diem, including multi-state tax nexus and potential Canadian tax filing requirements, but the per diem methodology is the same.

What should I do if I haven’t been claiming per diem?

If you’ve been filing returns without the per diem deduction and you were eligible, you can amend prior-year returns (generally three years back under the normal statute of limitations) to claim the deduction retroactively. For an OTR driver spending 250+ days on the road, the per diem deduction on a single year’s return can be $15,000 to $20,000. Across three amended years, that’s potentially $45,000 to $60,000 in additional deductions, producing $13,000 to $18,000 in refunded tax.

The catch is substantiation. You’ll need to reconstruct a travel log for those prior years, and it must be supportable. ELD records, dispatch logs, settlement statements, and fuel card records can all corroborate your days on the road. The IRS is more skeptical of reconstructed records than contemporaneous ones, but if the underlying evidence supports the travel days, an amended return with per diem is defensible.

Going forward, start the log now. An app, a spreadsheet, or even a paper notebook works. Record the date, the city where you stopped overnight, and whether it was a departure day, a return day, or a full day on the road. Five seconds a day protects a five-figure annual deduction.

This guide is general information, not tax advice for your specific situation. Which points apply, and how, depends on your facts.