Away From Home

You may only deduct travel expenses incurred when you are "away from home." For this purpose, you are traveling away from home if you meet the following two conditions:

• Your trip is long enough or far away enough that you can't reasonably be expected to complete the round trip without obtaining sleep or rest. This doesn't mean that you need to stay overnight at the destination; for example, it may be that you had an all-day meeting and needed to catch a few hours sleep in a hotel before driving home.
• The travel is away from the general area or vicinity of your tax home.

Generally, your tax home is the entire general area or vicinity (e.g., a city and surrounding suburbs) of your principal place of business, regardless of the location of your family home.

If you conduct your business in more than one place, you should consider the total time you ordinarily spend working in each place, the degree of your business activity in each place, and the relative amount of your income from each place to determine your "principal" place of business.

If you don't have a regular place of abode and no main place of business, you may be considered an itinerant — your tax home is wherever you work and, therefore, you can never satisfy the away-from-home requirement. When you are temporarily (a year or less), as opposed to indefinitely, working away from your main place of business, your tax home doesn't change.