A tax home is generally the regular place of business or post of duty, and it takes in the entire city or general area in which the taxpayer’s business or work is located, regardless of where the family home is maintained (IRS, Publication 463 (2025)). It is the reference point for the travel deduction, which allows ordinary and necessary traveling expenses, including amounts spent on meals and lodging that are not lavish or extravagant under the circumstances, while away from home in the pursuit of a trade or business (26 U.S.C. 162(a)(2)).
Where a taxpayer has more than one regular place of business, the tax home is the main one. Where the nature of the work leaves no regular or main place of business, the tax home may be the place where the taxpayer regularly lives. Where there is neither, the taxpayer is an itinerant, the tax home is wherever the work is, and no travel expense deduction is available, because that person is never treated as being away from home (IRS, Publication 463 (2025)).
What Away From Home Requires
Both conditions have to hold, not either one on its own. The duties must require the taxpayer to be away from the general area of the tax home substantially longer than an ordinary day’s work, and the taxpayer must need to sleep or rest to meet the demands of the work while away. That rest condition is not satisfied by merely napping in a car, and a whole day or a dusk-to-dawn absence is not required, so long as the relief from duty is long enough to get necessary sleep or rest (IRS, Publication 463 (2025)).
The One-Year Rule Moves the Tax Home
The statute sets the outer limit in a single sentence. For purposes of paragraph (2), the taxpayer shall not be treated as being temporarily away from home during any period of employment if such period exceeds 1 year, and the only carve-out is a federal employee certified by the Attorney General, or a designee, as traveling on behalf of the United States in temporary duty status to investigate or prosecute a federal crime or to provide support services for that work (26 U.S.C. 162(a)).
Publication 463 turns that limit into an expectation test. An assignment in a single location realistically expected to last 1 year or less, and that does last that long, is temporary, so the tax home does not move. An assignment realistically expected to last more than 1 year is indefinite whether or not it actually runs that long, the assignment location becomes the new tax home, and travel expenses there stop being deductible (IRS, Publication 463 (2025)).
The expectation is fixed when the work starts, then revisited when the facts change. An assignment that begins temporary can become indefinite through changed circumstances, and a series of assignments to the same location, each short but together covering a long period, may be treated as one indefinite assignment (IRS, Publication 463 (2025)).
Say the expectation at the start is 9 months, and after 8 months the taxpayer is asked to remain for 7 more, for a total actual stay of 15 months. Travel expenses for the first 8 months are deductible, because the original expectation was realistic when it was formed. Expenses after that point are not, because the location became the tax home once the job turned indefinite (IRS, Publication 463 (2025)).
Which Return Lines It Drives
For a self-employed client the deduction sits on Schedule C at line 24a, which takes lodging and transportation connected with overnight travel for business while away from the tax home, and the instructions restate the ceiling in the same breath: no deduction for expenses paid or incurred in connection with employment away from home if that period of employment exceeds 1 year. Meals are kept off that line and entered on line 24b instead, as deductible business meal expenses including meals while traveling away from home for business, in most cases at 50% (IRS, Instructions for Schedule C (2025)).
For employees the route is nearly closed. Form 2106 may be used only by an Armed Forces reservist, a qualified performing artist, a fee-basis state or local government official, or an employee with impairment-related work expenses, and everyone else lost the form when section 67(h) eliminated miscellaneous itemized deductions for tax years beginning after 2017, the deductions subject to the 2% floor under section 67(a) (IRS, Instructions for Form 2106 (2025)).
On an expatriate return the phrase is a gate rather than a deduction, and it is asked before either qualification route is worked. Form 2555 line 9, in Part I, tells the filer to list their tax homes during the tax year and the dates established, and only then to complete either the bona fide residence part or the physical presence part (IRS, Form 2555 (2025)). Which of those two routes a filer qualifies under is worked through in bona fide residence test.
Nothing on any of those lines records the reasoning behind them. The determination is made on what was realistically expected when the work started (IRS, Publication 463 (2025)). That puts the contract term or engagement letter that fixed the original expectation, and the dated event that changed it, in the file rather than a year-end reconstruction built from where the client actually ended up.
Same Two Words, Three Statutory Scopes
The phrase does not carry one meaning across the Code. Section 911(d)(3) defines tax home as the individual’s home for purposes of section 162(a)(2), then adds a second sentence: nobody is treated as having a tax home in a foreign country for any period for which their abode is within the United States, unless they are serving in an area the President has designated by Executive order as a combat zone in support of the Armed Forces (26 U.S.C. 911(d)(3)).
Abode is left undefined in that sentence, and the regulation works on it negatively, by naming two facts that do not by themselves put the abode in the United States. Temporary presence of the individual in the United States does not necessarily mean that the individual’s abode is in the United States during that time, and maintenance of a dwelling in the United States, whether or not that dwelling is used by the individual’s spouse and dependents, does not necessarily mean that the individual’s abode is in the United States (26 CFR 1.911-2(b)).
The closer connection exception to the substantial presence test borrows that same definition and then drops the second sentence, so the abode bar does not travel with it (26 U.S.C. 7701(b)(3)(B)). How that exception works, and the form it is claimed on, sit in substantial presence test.
Three scopes, then. The section 162(a)(2) reading decides a deduction (26 U.S.C. 162(a)(2)), the section 911(d)(3) reading decides eligibility for the foreign earned income exclusion (26 U.S.C. 911(d)(3)), and the section 7701(b)(3)(B) reading decides whether a foreign national is treated as a US resident (26 U.S.C. 7701(b)(3)(B)).
Carrying the travel answer into a foreign earned income question skips the abode sentence. Carrying the foreign earned income answer into a closer connection question imports a sentence the Code told the preparer to leave out.
What It Is Commonly Confused With
The family home. The tax home sits where the work is regardless of where the family home is kept, so a taxpayer who does not live at the tax home cannot deduct the cost of traveling between the tax home and the family home, or meals and lodging while at the tax home. Working temporarily in the same city where the taxpayer and the family live is the separate case, and the taxpayer may then be considered as traveling away from home (IRS, Publication 463 (2025)).
Domicile and state residency. Domicile is a state law question. It is a separate determination on separate authority, so a taxpayer can hold a tax home in one place and a domicile in another without either answer being wrong.
Common Questions
Start at the regular place of business or post of duty. With more than one place of work, weigh the total time ordinarily spent in each place, the level of business activity in each, and whether the income from each place is significant or insignificant (IRS, Publication 463 (2025)).
With no regular or main place of business, three factors decide it (IRS, Publication 463 (2025)).
- Business done in the area of the main home. The taxpayer performs part of the business in the area of the main home and uses that home for lodging while doing business in the area.
- Duplicated living expenses. The taxpayer has living expenses at the main home that are duplicated because the business requires being away from that home.
- An area not abandoned. The taxpayer has not abandoned the area holding both the historical place of lodging and the claimed main home, has a family member or members living at the main home, or often uses that home for lodging.
Satisfying all three puts the tax home at the place where the taxpayer regularly lives. Satisfying only two leaves the answer to all the facts and circumstances. Satisfying only one makes the taxpayer an itinerant, whose tax home is wherever the work is and who cannot deduct travel expenses (IRS, Publication 463 (2025)).
The same rule, with no separate regime for the job title. A clinician moving between postings usually has no regular or main place of business, so the three-factor test decides whether the home they keep returning to is the tax home, and each posting is then run through the same expectation test as any other assignment (IRS, Publication 463 (2025)).
Firms carrying away-from-home determinations through a busy season can put a block of that preparation through a trial task before any of it reaches a client file.
