For tax purposes, the per-diem deduction is one of the largest tax savings available to over-the-road truck drivers. It allows you to deduct a flat daily amount for meals and incidental expenses without keeping detailed receipts for every meal and every snack on the road.
The 2024 IRS rate
For travel within the continental United States, the IRS standard daily per-diem for transportation industry workers is $80 per full day in 2024 ($86 outside CONUS). Drivers may deduct 80% of that amount under the special transportation-industry rule (vs. 50% for most other professions), so the effective deduction is $64 per full day in CONUS for owner-operators and self-employed drivers.
Who can claim per diem
Per-diem is available to any driver whose work requires substantial sleep or rest periods away from their tax home. As of the 2018 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, company drivers can no longer claim per-diem as an unreimbursed employee expense on their personal tax return. However, many carriers offer a "per-diem program" where they pay drivers a portion of wages as a tax-free per-diem allowance and the rest as W-2 wages — this preserves much of the original tax benefit.
Counting partial days
For partial-day travel (the day you leave home and the day you return), you may claim 75% of the daily per-diem rate. So a 5-day, 4-night OTR run typically counts as 3 full days plus 2 partial days = 4.5 daily rates.
Recordkeeping
You must document your time away from home. ELD logs are sufficient; many drivers also keep a simple spreadsheet or smartphone-app log of departure and return times. You don't need meal receipts when claiming the standard per-diem (only when claiming actual meal expenses, which is almost never advantageous for OTR drivers).
Owner-operator advantage
Owner-operators filing Schedule C deduct per-diem directly on their tax return. A solo OTR owner-operator out 240 nights per year claims roughly $15,360 in deductions ($64 × 240) — translating to $3,800+ in actual tax savings at typical marginal rates. Read our trucker tax-deduction guide for the full picture.