- Airfare (including first class or flying your own plane)
- Hotel rooms, from basic to resort-level
- Rental cars, even luxury brands if reasonable for the trip
- Travel by ship, including cruises, when they meet the business travel rules
Whether you’re heading to a beach resort or visiting family a few states away, mixing in legitimate, well-documented business can convert a simple vacation into a strategic tax move.
Two Main Categories of Travel Deductions (2026 Rules)
When you travel for business, the IRS looks at two big buckets of expenses:
1. Transportation
This is how you get to and from your destination: airfare, train, mileage, etc.
For travel within the 50 states and Washington, D.C., the rule remains all or nothing in 2026:
- If most of your trip days are business days, you can generally deduct 100% of your direct-route transportation.
- If most of the days are personal, the transportation deduction is typically zero.
There is no partial deduction on U.S. transportation based on a percentage of business vs personal days. The primary purpose of the trip controls.
2. Lodging & Meals (“Life” Expenses)
These are the costs of existing while you’re away:
- Hotel or other lodging
- Meals while traveling for business
For 2026:
- Lodging on business days is generally 100% deductible if the trip qualifies as business travel.
- Business travel meals remain generally 50% deductible, as long as:
-
- They are ordinary and necessary
- Not lavish
- Tied to your business
- You (or your employee) are present
You do not deduct lodging or meals for purely personal days on the same trip.
Important 2026 twist (OBBBA change):
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act tightened the rules on employer-provided meals and snacks on your business premises starting January 1, 2026. Those “we feed the staff in the office” meals and break-room snacks are, in most cases, no longer deductible, with narrow exceptions (for example, certain fishing and processing operations get 100% deductibility for qualifying meals).Wikipedia+4PwC+4Dent Moses, LLP+4
This does not change the basic treatment of away-from-home business travel meals, which stay under the familiar 50% deduction rules.
The Core Rule Still Applies: “Ordinary and Necessary” Travel
Under Internal Revenue Code §162, you can deduct travel expenses that are:
- Ordinary
- Necessary in carrying on your trade or business. Congress.gov+1
Courts interpret this broadly:
- “Ordinary” doesn’t mean every other business does it. It just can’t be wildly out of character for a business like yours
- “Necessary” means “appropriate and helpful”, not “absolutely essential”
So the real question is not whether you needed to go somewhere, but whether you can reasonably explain how the trip supports your business.
From court decisions and IRS guidance, the practical rules shake out into five tests you want to satisfy.
Five Practical Rules for Defensible Business Travel in 2026
1. Show a Real Profit Motive
You need a concrete business reason for the trip that is reasonably expected to:
- Bring in new revenue
- Protect or grow existing business
- Improve long-term profitability
You don’t have to prove that the trip actually made money; you do need a plausible, documented expectation that it would help your business.
Best practice: Before (or during) the trip, note the purpose in your calendar, CRM, or trip file, for example:
- “Travel to Denver to meet with ABC Distributors and evaluate expansion into the Rocky Mountain territory”
- That one small note can do a lot of heavy lifting if the IRS ever asks questions
2. Stay Overnight Away from Your Tax Home
- To treat something as business travel, you generally must be:
- Away from your tax home (usually your main place of business)
- Long enough to require sleep or rest
Same-day trips are still business expenses, but they fall under different rules and don’t count as “travel away from home” in this context.
If you don’t stay overnight, you lose the classic “business travel” treatment.
3. Use the “For Only” Test
Look at the trip honestly and ask:
-
“Would a reasonable business owner make this trip only for the business reason if the personal element disappeared?”
- If the answer is clearly yes, your business purpose is strong.
- If the trip makes no sense without the personal component, deductions fail.
4. Pass the Primary Purpose Test (U.S. Travel)
For trips inside the U.S., the primary purpose of the travel controls whether transportation is deductible.
The simplest way to satisfy this in 2026:
- Count the total days of the trip
- Classify each day as either business or personal
- Make sure business days are in the majority
Typical business days include:
- Days spent in meetings, site visits, or conferences
- Reasonable travel days to and from your business destination
- Weekends or holidays between two business days when it would not be practical to go home in between
Personal days are pure vacation, sightseeing, or family days with no business conducted.
If business days are the majority:
- The primary purpose is business
- U.S. transportation costs (direct route) are generally fully deductible
5. Maintain Audit-Proof Records
You can do everything else right and still lose the deduction if your records are weak.
For business travel, you should be able to show:
- What you spent: amounts paid for transportation, lodging, and other travel costs
- When you traveled: dates of departure and return, plus which days were business vs personal
- Where you went: cities or areas visited
- Why you went: the specific business purpose or expected benefit
Calendars, emails, itineraries, meeting notes, and receipts all help. Put together, they tell a coherent story that matches your tax return.
How Courts Have Viewed “Working Vacations”
Here are a few real-world-style scenarios that mirror how courts and the IRS tend to view these situations.
Resort-Style Board Meetings
A corporation holds its annual board meetings in destinations like New Orleans, Las Vegas, or Puerto Rico and:
- Brings actual board members
- Invites key attorneys, brokers, lenders, and other business contacts
- Holds formal board sessions
- Uses the rest of the time for structured business discussions and relationship-building
Outcome: Travel costs for people with legitimate business roles are generally deductible. Non-business spouses and guests are not. The attractive location is acceptable if it reasonably helps secure participation and fosters real business discussions.
Trips to Expand a Sales Territory
A salesperson travels outside their normal territory to meet potential clients and evaluate a new region for expansion.
Outcome: If they can document meetings, leads, and a real plan to expand business, the travel is typically viewed as undertaken with a profit motive and can qualify as deductible business travel.
If the “expansion” has no real documentation or follow-through, the IRS may reclassify it in hindsight as a personal trip with a thin business excuse.
Conventions & Seminars in 2026
Conventions are still a common business reason to travel. Some 2026 pointers:
- Inside North America: Travel can be deductible if the convention meaningfully relates to your trade or business.
- Outside North America: The content must be directly tied to your business, and the location must be reasonably justified.
- Virtual options: If you could have attended the same content virtually from home and the primary reason to travel was leisure, the IRS can challenge the travel portion.
- Investment-only events: Seminars that relate only to personal investing, not your trade or business, usually do not support business-travel deductions.
What Commonly Fails
A few patterns that routinely lose in audits and court cases:
- Trips where entertainment is clearly the main point: Super Bowl junkets, golf weekends, “client trips” heavy on entertainment and light on substance rarely survive scrutiny, especially now that entertainment is still nondeductible in 2026.
- No real profit motive: If the trip looks more like a guided tour or group experience with no clear business strategy, it fails the business-purpose test.
- Poor or missing records: Vague claims like “met with prospects” without names, dates, or any paper trail are a quick way to lose otherwise legitimate deductions.
Current-Law Snapshot for 2026
To help anchor this in the 2026 landscape:
- Business travel rules (ordinary & necessary, overnight, primary purpose, business vs personal days) remain intact.
- Business meals, including travel meals, are still generally 50% deductible if they meet the usual requirements.Dent Moses, LLP+2Hawkins Ash CPAs+2
- Entertainment expenses (sporting events, golf, concerts, clubs) are still nondeductible.Dent Moses, LLP+1
- Employer-provided meals and office snacks on your business premises, which were partially deductible through 2025, are generally not deductible beginning in 2026, except for narrow industry-specific exceptions (for example, certain fishing and processing operations, which now get 100% deductibility for qualifying meals).Wikipedia+4PwC+4Dent Moses, LLP+4
Crucially, those changes hit in-office food, not your away-from-home business travel deductions.
Takeaways
If you are planning a trip in 2026, you can often make a portion of it deductible by:
- Building in real business activity with a clear profit motive
- Making business days the majority of the trip
- Ensuring the trip would still make sense even without the personal element
- Keeping clean documentation of who, what, where, when, and why
Do that, and your vacation with business mixed in starts to look, for tax purposes, like a business trip with some personal time on the side.
