Away from home. Home is your permanent duty station (which can be a ship or base), regardless of where you or your family live. You are away from home if you are away from your permanent duty station substantially longer than an ordinary day’s work and you need to get sleep or rest to meet the demands of your work while away from home.
Examples of deductible travel expenses include:
- Expenses for business-related meals (generally limited to 50% of your unreimbursed cost), lodging, taxicabs, business telephone calls, tips, laundry, and dry cleaning while you are away from home on temporary duty or temporary additional duty, and
- Expenses of carrying out official business while on No Cost orders.
Transportation expenses. Transportation expenses are the ordinary and necessary costs you have to get from one workplace to another while not traveling away from home and for certain other business-related transportation. These expenses include the costs of transportation by air, bus, rail, taxi, and driving and maintaining your car. Transportation expenses incurred while traveling away from home are travel expenses. However, if you use your car while traveling away from home overnight, see the rules in chapter 4 of Publication 463 to figure your car expense deduction.
If you must go from one workplace to another while on duty (for example, as a courier or to attend meetings) without being away from home, your unreimbursed transportation expenses are deductible. However, the expenses of getting to and from your regular place of work (commuting) are not deductible.
Temporary work location. If you have one or more regular places of business away from your home and you commute to a temporary work location in the same trade or business, you can deduct the expenses of the daily round-trip transportation between your home and the temporary location.
Generally, if your employment at a work location is realistically expected to last (and does in fact last) for 1 year or less, the employment is temporary.
If your employment at a work location is realistically expected to last for more than 1 year or if there is no realistic expectation that the employment will last for 1 year or less, the employment is not temporary, regardless of whether it actually lasts for more than 1 year. If employment at a work location initially is realistically expected to last for 1 year or less, but at some later date the employment is realistically expected to last more than 1 year, that employment will be treated as temporary (unless there are facts and circumstances that would indicate otherwise) until your expectation changes.
Caution: If you do not have a regular place of business, but you ordinarily work in the metropolitan area where you live, you can deduct daily transportation expenses between your home and a temporary work site outside your metropolitan area. However, you cannot deduct daily transportation costs between your home and temporary work sites within your metropolitan area. These are nondeductible commuting costs.
Armed Forces reservists. A meeting of an Armed Forces reserve unit is a second place of business if the meeting is held on a day on which you work at your regular job. You can deduct the expense of getting from one workplace to the other. You usually cannot deduct the expense if the reserve meeting is held on a day on which you do not work at your regular job. In this case, your transportation generally is a nondeductible commuting expense. However, you can deduct your transportation expenses if the location of the meeting is temporary and you have one or more regular places of work.
If you ordinarily work in a particular metropolitan area but not at any specific location and the reserve meeting is held at a temporary location outside that metropolitan area, you can deduct your transportation expenses. If you travel away from home overnight to attend a guard or reserve meeting, you can deduct your travel expenses. See Armed Forces Reservists under Adjustments to Income, earlier.
