Travel Expenses: Flat Rate or Actual Cost, and Where the Threshold Sits

Two routes, and they are not open in the same places

France states the choice in two numbered paragraphs. Article 2 of the arrêté of 4 September 2025 says that professional expenses are made good either by reimbursing the sums actually incurred, with the employer holding the supporting documents, or on the basis of flat allowances, which the employer may deduct within the limits the arrêté sets. The second route comes with a presumption attached: an allowance at or below the limit is deemed to have been used for its purpose. Nobody collects a receipt, nobody reclaims a surplus, and the paperwork stops.

Germany writes the opposite instruction. Paragraph 9 subsection 4a of the income tax act opens by saying that an employee's additional meal costs are deductible only as the following sentences provide, and the next sentence orders a flat allowance to be applied in settlement of the costs actually incurred. The wording is not decorative. The flat rate is not an option offered alongside the receipt; it takes the receipt's place. Whatever you spent on food is legally irrelevant to what you may deduct.

Spain does something different again, and the difference is easy to miss because the numbers look like the other two. The figures in article 9 of the income tax regulation are addressed to the payer: they describe how much of a travel allowance escapes tax in the employee's hands. Nothing in them lets an employee deduct a cost they bore themselves. Article 19 of the income tax act lists what a salaried person may subtract from gross pay — social security, professional bodies, union dues, up to 300 euros of legal defence — and closes with 2,000 euros of other expenses. Travel is not on that list, and the 2,000 euros is the same for someone who spent the year in hotels as for someone who never left the office.

France: the crossover is the scale figure, and nothing else

The French scale has three meal figures and two lodging figures. The amounts below are the 2026 values, each tagged on the social security bulletin with the words valeur au 1er janvier 2026. A meal on a business trip where the employee cannot get home or back to the usual workplace: 21.40 euros. A meal taken away from the employer's premises but not in a restaurant — a site, a van, a lunch eaten standing up: 10.40 euros. A meal taken at the workplace where working hours make it necessary, a night shift or a split shift: 7.50 euros. For a long posting away from home, lodging with breakfast is 76.60 euros a day in Paris and the departments of Hauts-de-Seine, Seine-Saint-Denis and Val-de-Marne, and 56.80 euros a day elsewhere in metropolitan France.

Because the receipts route is exempt in full and the flat route only up to those numbers, the crossover is the number itself. Below it the allowance is worth more than the bill; above it, the bill is worth more than the allowance. Take a five-day mission in the provinces. Frugal version: five lunches at 14 euros and four nights at 52 euros, which is 278 euros of real spending against 5 × 21.40 + 4 × 56.80 = 334.20 euros of allowance — the traveller is 56.20 euros ahead and nobody keeps a receipt. Expensive version: five meals at 29 euros and four nights at 118 euros, which is 617 euros of real spending against the same 334.20 euros — the traveller is 282.80 euros short, and the only way to be made whole is the receipts route.

There is a second reason the receipts route wins on long assignments: the flat figures are cut, and the receipts are not. Article 5 of the same arrêté reduces the exempt allowance to 85 % of its value once the posting at the same site passes three months, and to 70 % once it passes twenty-four, up to seventy-two — six years in all. On the provincial lodging figure of 56.80 euros that is 48.30 and then 39.80 a day; on the Paris figure of 76.60 it is 65.10 and then 53.60; on the 21.40-euro meal it is 18.20 and then 15.00. The logic is that a two-year posting stops being a hotel-and-restaurant life and starts to look like living somewhere. The practical effect is that a long posting drifts steadily towards the receipts.

Germany: one number, taken away in fractions

The German scale has two values and they are in the statute, not in a table. Paragraph 9 subsection 4a of the income tax act gives 28 euros for each calendar day on which the employee is away from home and from the first place of work for 24 hours, and 14 euros each for the day of arrival and the day of departure where the employee stays overnight away from home, or for a day of more than eight hours' absence with no overnight stay. Below eight hours there is nothing. A day trip that runs seven hours and fifty minutes is worth zero, and one that runs eight hours and ten minutes is worth 14 euros — which is the sharpest cliff edge in any of the three systems.

The part people forget is the subtraction. Where a meal is provided by the employer or, at its instigation, by a third party — a hotel breakfast, a conference lunch — the allowance is cut by 20 % for breakfast and by 40 % each for lunch and dinner, and the percentages apply to the full-day rate whatever the actual day is worth. Twenty per cent of 28 euros is 5.60; forty per cent is 11.20. A three-day trip is 14 + 28 + 14 = 56 euros, and two hotel breakfasts take it to 44.80. A full day on which the employer provides all three meals is 28 − 5.60 − 11.20 − 11.20, which is exactly zero. And a 14-euro travel day on which dinner is provided is 14 − 11.20 = 2.80 euros, because the 40 % is calculated on the 28 and not on the 14.

Lodging follows the opposite rule, which is why German travel expenses feel inconsistent until you see the design. For the employee's own deduction there is no flat overnight figure at all: what counts is the invoice. So the two halves of the same trip are governed by opposite instincts — the meal half ignores what you spent, the hotel half is entirely what you spent. There is one statutory exception, and it is narrow: a driver who sleeps in the vehicle may take a flat 9 euros a calendar day under paragraph 9 subsection 1 sentence 3 number 5b, precisely because there is no invoice to produce.

Spain: a ceiling on the employer, not a choice for the employee

Article 9 of the income tax regulation sets four meal figures and no lodging figure. Meals on a trip that involves an overnight stay in a municipality other than the usual workplace and the taxpayer's residence: 53.34 euros a day in Spain, 91.35 abroad. Meals with no overnight stay: 26.67 euros a day in Spain, 48.08 abroad. Accommodation is exempt at the amount of the expenses justified — the invoice, uncapped. Drivers of goods vehicles get a documented-free allowance of 15 euros a day in Spain and 25 abroad, which exists for the same reason as the German 9 euros: there is nothing to produce.

Because the figure is a ceiling and not an entitlement, what matters is what happens above it. Anything paid over 53.34 euros a day is ordinary salary: subject to income tax withholding, to the employee's social contributions and to the employer's. An employer that pays a round 60 euros a day is not being generous by 6.66 euros — it is paying 6.66 euros of taxable pay. Over 200 travel days that is 1,332 euros added to the employee's gross for the year, and roughly 400 euros of employer contributions on top at a 30 % rate. Rounding a per-diem up to a friendly number is one of the more expensive administrative habits there is.

And there is no counterweight on the employee's side. The list in article 19 of the income tax act is closed: social security and compulsory schemes, professional bodies within a limit, union dues, up to 300 euros of legal defence against the employer, and 2,000 euros of other expenses, doubled in the year an unemployed person moves municipality to take a job and increased for disabled workers. That is the whole of it. A Spanish employee who paid for a business trip out of their own pocket and was never reimbursed has, in the ordinary case, nowhere on the return to put it.

Annual? Only one of the three

It is repeated everywhere that these scales are set annually. That is true of France and of nothing else in this article. Article 10 of the arrêté of 4 September 2025 revalues the amounts in its articles 3 to 8 every 1 January, in line with the forecast rate of change in average annual consumer prices excluding tobacco given in the economic report attached to the finance bill, rounded to the nearest ten cents; the resulting table is published by the social security collection agency. That is why the French figures in this article carry 2026 and not a text reference alone: the 2026 revalorisation moved the trip meal from 21.10 to 21.40 euros, the lodging figure outside Paris to 56.80 and the Paris figure to 76.60, a shift of about 1.4 %. Next January they will move again, so read the year on any French figure before you use it.

Germany does not work that way. The 28 euros and the 14 euros sit in the statute and only a law moves them; the current pair has stood since 2020. What did change for 2026 is a neighbouring number that people confuse with this one: the commuting allowance. The Steueränderungsgesetz 2025, published in the federal gazette on 23 December 2025, replaced the old two-tier commuting rate — 30 cents for the first 20 kilometres and 38 above — with a flat 38 cents for every full kilometre from the first, capped at 4,500 euros a year, with effect from the 2026 assessment year. That is the commute, not the trip, and it has nothing to do with the meal allowance.

Spain is the extreme case: the four meal figures have stood since the 2007 regulation. The only travel number that moved in nearly two decades is the mileage rate, raised from 0.19 to 0.26 euros a kilometre by an order of 12 July 2023 with effect from 17 July that year. Italy is more static still — the 46.48 euros a day for domestic travel and 77.47 abroad in article 51 paragraph 5 of the consolidated income tax act are euro conversions of lira amounts, and the same article names three reimbursement systems, flat, mixed and analytical, which is the clearest statement anywhere that the choice this article is about is a real one. The practical rule that follows: in France, look up this year's table; in Germany, Spain and Italy, the number you learned is probably still the number.

The employee's own election, and the number that decides it

Everything above concerns what the employer pays. There is a second, separate election, and only France really offers it: on the income tax return a salaried person may take a standard deduction of 10 % of pay or claim actual professional expenses instead. Article 83, 3° of the tax code in its version in force on 1 July 2026, as amended by décret n° 2026-562 of 29 June 2026, sets the standard deduction at 10 % with a floor of 509 euros and a ceiling of 14,555 euros on 2025 income. The ceiling means the 10 % stops growing above a net taxable salary of 145,550 euros. The election is annual and personal to each member of the household, and it obliges you to justify every expense claimed.

The arithmetic of the election is simple and the answer surprises people: real expenses win as soon as they exceed 10 % of net taxable salary, and for a commuter that happens sooner than expected. Take a salary of 30,000 euros and 220 worked days. The flat deduction is 3,000 euros. The meal supplement alone — the difference between eating out and eating at home, valued by the tax administration at 5.45 euros a day on 2025 income where no receipts are kept — is 5.45 × 220 = 1,199 euros. That leaves 1,801 euros to be found in mileage, which on the five-horsepower scale means 2,832 kilometres a year: with 220 return trips, 6.4 kilometres each way. Drop the meal supplement and the crossing moves to 10.7 kilometres each way. On a 45,000-euro salary the same calculation gives 12.1 kilometres.

Germany and Spain both have a counterpart to the 10 %, and neither is really a choice. The German employee allowance of paragraph 9a of the income tax act is 1,230 euros: you get it automatically and you only ever see it disappear, replaced by proven costs once those exceed it. Spain's 2,000 euros of other expenses under article 19 is not even a floor you can beat, because there is nothing to beat it with. So of the three countries, the flat-versus-actual question is a live decision for a French employee, a threshold question for a German one, and no question at all for a Spanish one — which is the same conclusion the employer-side rules reached, arrived at from the other end.

Frequently asked questions

If I spend less than the allowance, do I keep the difference?

Where the flat route is open and the amount is within the scale, yes — and that is the whole point of it. In France the presumption in article 2 of the arrêté is that an allowance at or below the limit was used for its purpose, so nobody asks for the receipt and nobody reclaims the surplus. The surplus is not a loophole; it is the price the system pays for not processing receipts. Two limits on that. It stops being true the moment the allowance exceeds the scale, when the excess becomes ordinary pay unless the employer can justify it. And the scale is a tax ceiling, not an entitlement: an employer is free to pay less, or to require receipts instead. What entitles you to anything is your contract, your collective agreement or your employer's policy.

Can I claim what I actually spent on meals in Germany if the trip was expensive?

No, and this is the most common misunderstanding in German travel expenses. Paragraph 9 subsection 4a of the income tax act opens by saying that an employee's additional meal costs are deductible only as the following sentences provide, and those sentences set a flat 28 euros and 14 euros. A 90-euro dinner and a 9-euro sandwich produce exactly the same deduction. Your employer may of course reimburse the 90 euros as a matter of policy, but the part above the flat figure is taxable pay rather than a tax-free reimbursement. Lodging is the other way round: there the invoice is the only thing that counts, and a flat figure would be refused.

Does the allowance cover the journey between home and my usual workplace?

No, in none of the four countries. That journey is commuting, not business travel, and it is treated as the employee's own cost — covered, where it is covered, by a separate and much smaller instrument. In Germany that is the commuting allowance, 38 cents for every full kilometre from the first from the 2026 assessment year, capped at 4,500 euros. In France it is the mileage scale, but only inside the actual-expenses election on the tax return, and normally only up to 40 kilometres each way. The per-diem scales in this article begin at the point where you leave your normal place of work, and end when you get back to it.

I have been posted to the same site for eight months. Does anything change?

In France, yes, and by a fixed fraction. Article 5 of the arrêté cuts the exempt allowance to 85 % of its value once the posting at one site passes three months, and to 70 % once it passes twenty-four, up to seventy-two — six years in all. On the provincial lodging figure of 56.80 euros a day that is 48.30 and then 39.80; on the Paris figure of 76.60 it is 65.10 and then 53.60; on the 21.40-euro meal it is 18.20 and then 15.00. The reasoning is that a long posting stops being a hotel-and-restaurant life and starts to look like living somewhere. The practical consequence is worth acting on: the receipts route is not cut, so it becomes relatively better the longer the posting lasts.

How do I know whether the figures in this article are still the ones that apply?

By knowing which of them can move, and how. The French amounts are revalued automatically every 1 January under article 10 of the arrêté of 4 September 2025, at the forecast inflation rate rounded to the nearest ten cents, and the resulting table is published by the collection agency — the French figures here are that table's 2026 values, and the 2027 ones will be roughly a percent and a half higher. The German 28 and 14 only move when a law moves them, and none has since 2020. The Spanish 53.34 and 26.67 have not moved since the 2007 regulation, and the Italian 46.48 and 77.47 are converted lira amounts. That asymmetry is more useful than any single number: in France, look it up; elsewhere, the figure you learned is probably still the figure.