Business Meals and Travel: What You Can Deduct

Yes — if you're running a business or working for yourself, you can generally deduct 50% of the cost of business meals that have a real business purpose and aren't extravagant, and you can generally deduct ordinary travel costs (transportation, lodging, and meals) when you're away from your regular place of business overnight for work. What you generally cannot deduct: entertainment (tickets, rounds of golf, club dues), your everyday commute, or the personal side-trip you tack onto a business trip. These are two of the most commonly audited small-business deductions, so the IRS wants clean records to back them up.

This page walks through the current rules in plain English. The authoritative source is IRS Publication 463, "Travel, Gift, and Car Expenses," on irs.gov — read it (or have your tax preparer confirm it) before you file, because Congress has changed the meal rules before (there was a temporary 100% deduction for restaurant meals during 2021–2022 that has since expired) and has continued to adjust them.

Business meals: the 50% rule

As of this writing, the standard rule is that you can deduct 50% of the cost of a business meal, whether you're eating alone on a work trip or hosting a client, vendor, or business associate. To qualify, the meal generally has to meet a few conditions:

• It has a genuine business purpose — you're discussing business, building a business relationship, or the meal happens during business travel.
• You (or an employee of your business) are actually present at the meal.
• The food or drink isn't "lavish or extravagant" under the circumstances — the IRS doesn't define an exact dollar ceiling for this, it's a facts-and-circumstances judgment.
• You keep the required records (more below).

Confirm the current percentage before you file. Congress has adjusted these rules more than once. A 2025 law (the One Big Beautiful Bill Act) eliminated the deduction for certain employer-provided meals — such as meals furnished in a company cafeteria or for the employer's convenience — starting in 2026, with narrow exceptions; and Congress temporarily allowed a 100% deduction for restaurant meals in 2021–2022. The general 50% limit on your own business meals described here is current, but because these rules do change, the safest habit is to confirm the deduction percentage on irs.gov (Pub 463 or the IRS newsroom) each filing season rather than assuming last year's rule still applies.

Entertainment is generally not deductible

Since a 2018 tax-law change, entertainment expenses are, with narrow exceptions, not deductible at all — even if business was genuinely discussed. That includes things like sporting event tickets, concert or theater tickets, golf outings, fishing trips, and private club dues. This trips people up because before 2018 a version of entertainment was partially deductible; it no longer is.

If you combine a meal with entertainment — say, dinner and then a ballgame — the meal portion can still be 50% deductible, but only if the food and drink cost is separately stated on the bill, invoice, or receipt from the entertainment cost. If it's all lumped into one ticket or package price with no breakout, the whole thing is generally treated as nondeductible entertainment.

Business travel away from your tax home

Your "tax home" is generally the entire city or general area where your main place of business is located — not necessarily where your family lives. When you travel away from your tax home for business long enough that you need sleep or rest to do your job, you're generally traveling on business, and a range of costs become deductible:

• Transportation — plane, train, bus, or car costs to get to your business destination, and between your lodging and where you're doing business.
• Lodging — hotel or other lodging costs while away overnight for business.
• Meals — subject to the same 50% limit described above, whether you keep actual receipts or, in some cases, use an IRS-published per-diem meal allowance instead of tracking every receipt (Pub 463 explains when a per-diem rate can be used and how — confirm the current rate on irs.gov, as it changes).
• Other ordinary and necessary costs tied to the trip — things like business-related shipping, dry cleaning during an extended trip, or business calls.

What is not deductible

• Commuting. The cost of getting from your home to your regular place of business is a personal expense, not a business one, no matter how long the drive is.
• Personal side-trips. If you extend a business trip for a vacation, or bring a spouse or friend along who isn't there for a business purpose, their share of the costs (and the personal portion of your own extra days) isn't deductible. Only the costs allocable to the business purpose count.
• Lavish or purely social spending dressed up as a business meal or trip with no real business purpose.
• Club dues and most entertainment, as covered above, even on a business trip.

If a trip is primarily personal but you conduct some business while you're there, you generally can't deduct the trip's transportation cost at all, though business-specific costs incurred during the trip may still qualify. If a trip is primarily business with some personal time mixed in, the transportation cost is generally still deductible, but the personal-day lodging and meals are not. This is exactly the kind of line-drawing where a CPA earns their fee — if a trip is mixed-purpose and the dollar amounts are meaningful, it's worth a conversation before you file.

Recordkeeping: what the IRS actually wants to see

Meals and travel are audited often because the deduction is easy to claim and easy to overstate. The IRS generally expects you to be able to show, for each expense:

1. Amount — what you actually spent.
2. Time and place — the date and location of the meal or trip.
3. Business purpose — what business topic you discussed or what business need the trip served.
4. Business relationship — who you were with and their business connection to you (client, vendor, prospective customer, etc.).

A crumpled receipt with nothing written on it is weak proof months or years later when you can't remember why you were there. A simple habit — jotting a note on the receipt or in an app the same day ("lunch w/ Jane Doe, ABC Supply, discussed Q3 order") — is far more persuasive than trying to reconstruct your reasoning during an audit.

What to do

1. Keep the receipt for every meal or travel expense you plan to deduct, especially anything of meaningful size.
2. Write down the business purpose and who you were with at the time, not months later — a note in a spreadsheet, mileage/expense app, or on the back of the receipt is enough.
3. Separate meal costs from entertainment on any combined receipt so the deductible meal portion is clear.
4. Separate business days from personal days on a mixed-purpose trip, and only claim lodging and meals for the business portion.
5. Check irs.gov before you file for the current meal-deduction percentage and any per-diem rates you plan to rely on — these are the kind of figures that change and shouldn't be assumed from memory or an old article.
6. Talk to a CPA or tax preparer if a trip is genuinely mixed business-and-personal, if you're unsure whether a meal is deductible, or if the dollar amounts involved are significant to your return.

Where this fits with the rest of your taxes

Meal and travel deductions reduce your business's taxable income, which in turn affects both your income tax and your self-employment tax (the combined Social Security and Medicare tax that self-employed people pay directly, since no employer is withholding it for them). Good expense records throughout the year make your quarterly estimated tax payments and your year-end return much easier to prepare accurately — sloppy records this year become a stressful scramble next April.

Free help is available if you don't want to pay for guidance on every question: the IRS website has forms, publications, and FAQs at no cost, and your local Small Business Development Center or SCORE chapter (both linked from sba.gov) offers free or low-cost one-on-one advice for exactly these kinds of questions.

This is general business and tax information, not legal, tax, or financial advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client or accountant-client relationship. For guidance specific to your situation, talk to a qualified CPA, enrolled agent, or tax attorney, or consult IRS Publication 463 and irs.gov directly.