The 2026 numbers
- The special transportation-industry rate is $80 per day for travel in the continental United States, and $86 per day for travel outside it, effective October 1, 2025, unchanged from the prior year.
- Drivers subject to DOT hours-of-service limits deduct 80 percent of the rate. That makes a full CONUS day worth $64 of deduction ($80 × 80%).
- Partial days, the days you leave home and the days you return, are customarily claimed at three-quarters of the daily rate.
- The rate covers meals and incidental expenses only. Lodging is separate: it is deducted from actual receipts, and a sleeper berth is not a lodging expense.
Quick math: 280 nights out × $80 × 80% is a $17,920 deduction, before partial days. This is not a rounding error on a tax return.
Who can claim it, and who can't
Eligibility is where most of the bad advice lives, because the answer changed in 2018 and half the internet didn't update.
- Owner-operators and other self-employed drivers: yes. The per diem is a business expense on Schedule C, alongside everything else the truck costs.
- Company drivers (W-2): not as a personal deduction. The 2018 tax law suspended unreimbursed employee expense deductions, so a W-2 driver cannot write off per diem on their own return. The benefit reaches company drivers only through an employer-run per diem plan that pays part of compensation as a nontaxable travel reimbursement.
- Local drivers: no. The deduction requires travel away from your tax home long enough to need rest, the sleep-or-rest rule. A driver who starts and ends at home daily doesn't qualify, which is also roughly the population exempt from ELDs under the short-haul rules.
What counts as a qualifying day
A qualifying day is one spent away from your tax home on work that requires rest before returning, which for practical purposes means nights out. Your tax home, in IRS terms, is your regular place of business or residence, and drivers without a fixed base should be especially careful here, because an itinerant driver with no tax home has no "away from home" and therefore no per diem at all.
The count itself is mechanical: full days away at the full rate, departure and return days at three-quarters. What the IRS wants behind the count is substantiation of time, place, and business purpose for each day. Meal receipts, no. Proof you were where you say you were, yes.
Your ELD is the substantiation
Before electronic logging, proving 280 nights out meant keeping every trip sheet and hoping the shoebox survived. Now the proof is a byproduct of compliance: duty-status records with timestamps and locations for every day of the year, exportable on demand.
Two habits make tax season painless. Export and archive your logs at least quarterly, because the six-month retention rule means your ELD provider is not obligated to hold a full tax year for you. And reconcile nights out monthly while you still remember the month, flagging departure and return days, so the three-quarter days are counted right instead of estimated in April.
Duty-status logs are time-, place-, and purpose-stamped by design. Archive them quarterly and the per diem count audits itself.
Employer per diem plans: the fine print
Fleets increasingly restructure driver pay so a portion arrives as per diem, nontaxable up to the federal rate under an accountable plan. The paycheck math is genuinely attractive: the same gross costs the company less and nets the driver more, because the per diem portion skips income and payroll taxes.
The trade-offs deserve eyes-open consent. A lower taxable wage means lower reported earnings for Social Security credit, 401(k) matching, workers' comp, and any loan application that asks for W-2 income. Some carriers also charge an administrative fee per mile for running the plan. None of that makes the plans bad, plenty of drivers come out ahead, but the driver who signs up should be the one who did the arithmetic.
