A free guide from Deanna R. Ngueket, CPA, LLC
Drivers who paid for their own meals on the road were told to wait. The deduction was suspended, not repealed, and the suspension had an expiration date written into it. That date was 2026. It has now been removed from the law, and the waiting is over in the worst way.
Here is the part that gets missed, and it is the part worth your time: the deduction itself did not disappear. It moved.
The date that was supposed to matter
The 2017 law suspended miscellaneous itemized deductions – the category that held unreimbursed employee expenses – for tax years beginning after 2017 and before January 1, 2026. Two dates, an opening and a closing. A driver reading that in 2018 could reasonably plan around the closing one.
The 2025 act struck it. IRC section 67(h) now reads, in full: “Notwithstanding subsection (a), no miscellaneous itemized deduction shall be allowed for any taxable year beginning after December 31, 2017.”
Read it again and notice what is not there. There is no closing year in the sentence. For a W-2 driver buying meals out of pocket, that deduction is not suspended and it is not coming back. It is gone.
(If you go looking for this, look at subsection (h), not (g). Section 67(g) is now the educator-expense definition. The provision that matters here moved.)
The 80 percent rule never left
Now the other half.
IRC section 274(n)(3) is still in the code, unchanged. For “expenses for food or beverages consumed while away from home… by an individual during, or incident to, the period of duty subject to the hours of service limitations of the Department of Transportation,” the statute applies the meal limit “by substituting ‘80 percent’ for ‘50 percent.’”
Most business meals are deductible at 50 percent. A meal eaten during a period of duty subject to DOT hours of service is deductible at 80 percent. Congress did not touch that.
So the deduction survived in full. What changed is only who gets to claim it. It follows the person who actually bears the cost of the meal.
If you are an owner-operator
That person is you.
Meals on the road go on your Schedule C. You can use actual cost, or you can use the special transportation industry rate – $80 a day inside the continental United States and $86 a day outside it, under Notice 2025-54 – and take 80 percent of that.
Two limits on that figure that matter more than people expect. It applies only to travel away from home, which in practice means a trip requiring rest, not a long day. And per diem covers meals and incidental expenses only. Lodging comes off what you actually spent, with receipts.
If you drive for a carrier
That person is your employer.
Where a carrier pays a per diem allowance under an accountable plan at or below the federal rate, Rev. Proc. 2019-48 treats the amount as substantiated. It is not wages. It does not appear on your Form W-2, and no income tax withholding or employment tax applies to it.
That is why you have nothing to deduct – you were never out of pocket. It is the correct result, not a loss. The 80 percent limit then applies to the carrier’s deduction instead of yours.
So the question for a company driver in 2026 is not what can I write off. It is a different question: does my carrier run a per diem program at all, and is it a real accountable plan? A higher cents-per-mile rate is taxable wages. A properly run per diem is not. Two drivers with the same gross pay can take home noticeably different amounts depending on which one they are getting.
The two details that decide real cases
First, the special transportation industry rate is not available to everyone who travels. It is for work that directly involves moving people or goods by airplane, barge, bus, ship, train or truck, and that regularly requires stopping overnight in places with different federal rates. A local route that gets you home is a different analysis.
Second, the rate runs on a federal fiscal year, October through September, so the number itself is something to watch rather than something to memorize.
The $80 and $86 figures come from Notice 2025-54, and they are good through September 30, 2026. As I write this, they are still the current rates – the most recent Internal Revenue Bulletin, 2026-39 dated September 21, 2026, carries no per diem notice.
The IRS issues a replacement notice for the following fiscal year, and it has run late in September in recent years. Notice 2025-54 itself was released on September 24, 2025. So the next one is due about now, and the rate may or may not move when it lands.
New notices are published in the Internal Revenue Bulletin, which the IRS posts in date order here: https://www.irs.gov/irb. That is the page to check. If you are reading this after the replacement notice has been issued, use its figure rather than the one above.
The question worth asking
If you drive for a carrier, you now have one question that is worth more than any list of write-offs: do they pay per diem, or do they just pay a higher cents-per-mile? Ask, and ask whether the program is an accountable plan. The answer is worth real money and it is not on your pay stub.
If you own the truck, the answer is simpler. The deduction is yours. It needs records that survive a look, which is a separate conversation and one I have written about.
If you would like me to look at how your per diem is being handled before year end, you can reach me at https://deannacpa.com/contact-us/ or info@deannacpa.com.
Deanna R. Ngueket, CPA, LLC. This article is general information, not tax advice for your specific situation.
