You slept in the berth about two hundred and eighty nights last year. You know that number the way you know your own fuel mileage, which is to say roughly, and not in any form the IRS would accept.
That vagueness has a price on it. Roughly a truck payment.
The IRS published Notice 2026-60 on Thursday. It sets the special per diem rate for transportation workers from October 1 through the end of September 2027, and the figure is $80 a day inside the continental US, $86 outside it. Same as last year. Same as the year before that.
The last time it moved was October 2024, when it went from $69 to $80. Three fiscal years parked at the same number now, and groceries haven't been parked anywhere near it.
Eighty dollars isn't generous for feeding yourself out of truck stops for a full day. But it's the number, and a frozen deduction you actually claim beats a bigger one you don't.
How eighty dollars becomes a deduction
Two haircuts, in this order.
Partial days come first. The day you pull out and the day you get back aren't full days away, so you take three-quarters of the rate for each one. Sixty dollars instead of eighty.
Then the 80% limit. Meals are half-deductible for most businesses. For anyone subject to DOT hours-of-service rules, Congress set it at 80% instead, which is one of the few corners of the tax code where trucking gets treated better than everybody else.
So take a year with 240 full days out and 40 days that were half-trips. That's $19,200 on the full days and $2,400 on the partial ones, so $21,600 claimed. Times 80%. A $17,280 deduction.
It comes off your income tax and your self-employment tax both, because it lands on Schedule C before either one gets figured. Depending on your bracket, call it four to six thousand dollars that stays in your account instead of going to Washington. For writing down where you slept.
The receipts aren't the record
Nobody wants your meal receipts. That's the entire point of the per diem method. You claim a flat rate for every day you were away instead of proving what you actually spent on food, so a shoebox full of truck stop receipts does nothing for you at all.
What you have to prove is that you were away. Where you were, on what date, and that the trip ran long enough to need real sleep away from your tax home.
Which means the records that earn their keep are the ones that put you in a place on a day.
- Fuel purchases. Time-stamped, located, already sitting in your card statement.
- Tolls and scale tickets.
- The settlement or the rate con, which shows the lane and the dates you ran it.
- Your ELD, which has been quietly keeping the best per diem log in the truck this entire time and will hand it over as a report if you go ask it for one.
Almost nobody turns any of that into a day count until tax season, and by then it's a memory exercise. Memory rounds down.
Two ways to not qualify
If you're a W-2 company driver, this deduction isn't yours. The 2017 tax law took unreimbursed employee expenses off the table and hasn't given them back. Some carriers run a per diem pay program instead, which converts part of your wage into an untaxed reimbursement. That's a different animal, and it lowers the wage figure your Social Security and your next truck loan get calculated from. Read it closely before you opt in.
If you're home every night, it isn't yours either. Away means away overnight, far enough out that you need actual rest. Sleeping in your own berth in your own driveway isn't away. A fourteen-hour day that ends in your own bed isn't away.
The gap is the part you control
Every fall this number comes out and gets written up, and then eleven months later people file a return that under-claims it because the day count was a guess. There are tax guides sitting online right now still quoting truckers a $69 rate that expired two years ago.
The rate isn't the problem. It's published, it's locked for a year, and it's the same eighty dollars for you as it is for the biggest fleet in the country. The distance between $17,280 and whatever ends up on your return is a record-keeping gap, and that one belongs to you.
So start the list tonight. A note on your phone with a date in it beats every good intention that ever died in a glovebox. There's a rundown of the other write-offs that quietly slip away here, and this one dwarfs all of them put together.
If you want the fuller picture of what a day of running costs you before any deduction comes off, the cost calculator does that math. I'd rather you claim what you already earned than hear about it from your CPA in March.