When business takes you on a new adventure to a great destination, you’ll probably want to spend a little time relaxing and exploring the location. If you organize your schedule right, you may be able to combine your business with a little bit of pleasure.
If you want to do this, you have to make sure you spend enough days doing business so you can deduct the expense of travelling, whether airfare or similar. You have to spend over half of your days conducting business domestically, and over 75% of your two week trip overseas in order to deduct expenses.
Four hours of work is all it takes to classify as a work day, regardless of what you do for the rest of the day. As long as you’ve worked for at least four hours, you can figure out the percentage of your trip used for business in order to determine eligibility for deduction. For each business day, you can deduct hotels, meals, and other work related expenses, even though you only spent four hours working.
You can take advantage of your business trips by making sure you work as little as necessary to meet the deduction eligibility. To do this, you may want to try to arrange your schedule to work no more than four hours each business day when possible. You can also spread your business out over the course of the trip so each day has business activity. Another option is to use slower transportation, because travel days count as business days. Drive whenever possible, as opposed to flying, to maximize your travel and therefore your deductions, as doing so doesn’t violate any tax codes
IRS rules say that days between work days in which you take off can be counted as business days if it’s cheaper to spend the time off than to go back home for work. If you have to work on Friday, and then again on Monday, you can count the weekend as two business days even if you haven’t done any work.
Personal expenses that you incur when you stop at destinations not related to business are not deductible. For example, if you top in a tourist city on your way to a meeting in the next town, you may not be able to deduct those expenses since they weren’t necessary to conducting business.
