The short answer first: for business trips within Germany, the Verpflegungsmehraufwand (per diem meal allowance) in 2026 is €14 for absences of more than 8 hours and for arrival/departure days, and €28 for each full 24-hour day. Both rates are unchanged since 2020. Foreign trips use the country table from the BMF letter of 5 December 2025, effective 1 January 2026 — and several country rates did change this year.
Everything else — who qualifies, how meal deductions work, what truck drivers can claim on top, and the full table for the countries German fleets actually drive to — is below, with worked examples your payroll team can copy.
What Is the Verpflegungsmehraufwand?
When an employee works away from both their home and their first place of work (erste Tätigkeitsstätte), meals cost more than they would at the office kitchen. German tax law compensates this with flat daily allowances — no food receipts required. The legal basis is § 9 Abs. 4a EStG.
Three conditions must be met:
- A qualifying business trip (Auswärtstätigkeit). The employee works away from home and away from their first place of work. It can be in the same city.
- More than 8 hours of absence. Several trips in one calendar day can be added together — three customer visits totalling 9 hours away qualify.
- The traveller pays for their own meals. Provided meals reduce the allowance (details below).
One ceiling applies: after three months of continuous work at the same external location, the entitlement ends (Dreimonatsfrist). The clock restarts after an interruption of at least four weeks.
Verpflegungsmehraufwand 2026: Domestic Rates
The rates for trips within Germany have not moved since 2020 — the increase to €16/€32 once planned in the Wachstumschancengesetz was dropped before enactment and has not returned in 2026:
| Absence | Allowance 2026 |
|---|
| More than 8 hours (single-day trip) | €14 |
| Arrival and departure day of a multi-day trip (no minimum hours) | €14 |
| Full calendar day (24 hours away) | €28 |
Two special cases worth knowing:
- Midnight rule: a single trip that runs overnight without an overnight stay (say, 18:00 to 09:00 the next morning) counts as one trip. The €14 applies once, to the calendar day with the larger share of the absence.
- With an overnight stay, both calendar days are arrival/departure days: €14 each, with no minimum hours on either day.
Meal Reductions (Kürzung)
If the employer — or a hotel, customer, or event organiser at the employer's instigation — provides a meal, the allowance is reduced. The reduction is always calculated from the full-day rate of the destination, even when only the €14 rate applies that day:
| Provided meal | Reduction | Domestic amount |
|---|
| Breakfast | 20% of the full-day rate | €5.60 |
| Lunch | 40% of the full-day rate | €11.20 |
| Dinner | 40% of the full-day rate | €11.20 |
A day where breakfast and lunch are provided on a single-day trip is quickly worth nothing: €14 − €5.60 − €11.20 = €0 (the allowance never goes negative).
Worked Example: Three-Day Service Trip Within Germany
A technician leaves Monday at 07:00 for a customer site, stays two nights in a hotel with breakfast included, and returns Wednesday at 15:30:
| Day | Basis | Reduction | Payout |
|---|
| Monday (arrival day) | €14 | — | €14.00 |
| Tuesday (full day) | €28 | breakfast −€5.60 | €22.40 |
| Wednesday (departure day) | €14 | breakfast −€5.60 | €8.40 |
| Total | | | €44.80 |
The employer reimburses €44.80 tax-free. No food receipts are needed — only the trip record: destination, purpose, departure and return times.
Foreign Per Diem Rates 2026: The Countries German Fleets Drive To
For cross-border trips, the BMF publishes country-specific rates each year. The letter of 5 December 2025 (GZ IV C 5 - S 2353/00094/007/012) applies from 1 January 2026 and updated several countries against 2025. Here are the destinations that matter for German road fleets:
| Destination | Full day (24h) | Arrival/departure day | Overnight flat rate* |
|---|
| Austria | €50 | €33 | €117 |
| Belgium | €59 | €40 | €141 |
| Czech Republic | €32 | €21 | €77 |
| Denmark | €75 | €50 | €183 |
| France (Paris + depts. 77/78/91–95) | €58 | €39 | €159 |
| France (rest) | €53 | €36 | €105 |
| Italy (Rome) | €48 | €32 | €150 |
| Italy (rest, incl. Milan full day €42) | €42 | €28 | €150 |
| Luxembourg | €63 | €42 | €139 |
| Netherlands | €58 | €39 | €167 |
| Poland (Warsaw) | €40 | €27 | €143 |
| Poland (rest) | €34 | €23 | €124 |
| Portugal | €32 | €21 | €111 |
| Spain (Madrid) | €42 | €28 | €131 |
| Spain (rest) | €34 | €23 | €103 |
| Sweden | €66 | €44 | €140 |
| Switzerland (Bern €82 full day) | €70 | €47 | €195 |
| United Kingdom (London) | €66 | €44 | €163 |
| United Kingdom (rest) | €52 | €35 | €99 |
* The overnight flat rate may only be used for tax-free employer reimbursement; employees deducting costs themselves may only claim actual, documented lodging costs. For countries not in the BMF table, the Luxembourg rates apply.
Three routing rules decide which country's rate applies:
- Arrival day: the rate of the place reached before midnight local time.
- Departure day: the rate of the last place of work — returning from Amsterdam to Cologne pays the Dutch €39, not the German €14.
- Intermediate days: the rate of the place reached before midnight that day.
Meal reductions abroad use the same 20/40/40 split, calculated from the destination's full-day rate — a provided breakfast in Denmark costs the traveller €15 of allowance (20% of €75), not €5.60.
The €9 Overnight Flat Rate for Truck Drivers
Professional drivers who sleep in the cab get an extra allowance most general per diem guides skip: the Übernachtungspauschale für Berufskraftfahrer of €9 per calendar day (§ 9 Abs. 1 Satz 3 Nr. 5b EStG, raised from €8 in 2024). It compensates the costs of life on the road that hotel guests never see — paid showers and toilets at service areas, parking fees at Autohöfe — and it stacks on top of the normal per diem.
For a long-haul driver away Monday to Friday with four nights in the cab, that is 4 × €9 = €36 per week on top of roughly €112 of per diems (€14 + 3 × €28 + €14) — about €590 per month, tax-free, before any meal reductions.
Two practical points:
- Flat rate or actual costs — one choice per year. Drivers may claim higher documented actual costs instead of the €9, but the method must be applied consistently for the whole calendar year.
- Arrival/departure days are before the courts. Whether the €9 also applies on days without an actual overnight stay in the vehicle is pending at the Bundesfinanzhof (VI R 6/25), after the Thüringen fiscal court said no (2 K 534/22). Until the ruling, affected drivers should file an objection (Einspruch) to keep assessments open.
Employer or Tax Return: Who Pays, and What's Tax-Free
Employers are not legally required to reimburse per diems — but the tax framework makes it cheap to do so, and nearly every fleet's travel policy does:
- Reimbursement up to the statutory rate is tax-free for the employee and a deductible business expense for the employer. No receipts, no social-security contributions.
- Up to double the rate can be paid if the excess is taxed at a flat 25% (pauschal versteuert) by the employer — €56 instead of €28 for a full domestic day, for example.
- Beyond double, every additional euro is taxed as normal wages.
- If the employer pays nothing (or less than the statutory rate), the employee deducts the flat rates — or the difference — as Werbungskosten in Anlage N of their tax return. The refund is worth only their marginal tax rate on the allowance, so direct employer reimbursement is always worth more to the driver.
For domestic overnight stays, employers can additionally reimburse a €20 flat rate per night tax-free without a hotel invoice — though most reimburse actual hotel costs against the invoice instead.
Getting the Admin Right (Without Drowning In It)
The per diem itself is the easy part of travel-cost compliance: no receipts, just clean trip records with destination, business purpose, and departure/return times. The mistakes auditors actually find are elsewhere — forgotten meal reductions when a hotel breakfast was included, the wrong country rate on the border-crossing day, or per diems paid past the three-month limit. A payroll tax audit (Lohnsteuer-Außenprüfung) can look back four years, and reclassified allowances come back as wage tax plus interest.
The bigger daily time sink for fleets is everything around the trip. Meals are covered by flat rates — but fuel, charging and tolls are not, and they generate the paper: a driver crossing three countries brings back a stack of station receipts in as many languages and VAT regimes. That reconciliation burden is a workflow choice, not a law of nature. Routing all fuel and charging spend through a single fleet fuel card collapses it into one consolidated invoice with per-transaction VAT — and if drivers are still paying pump prices set by the station, a fuel card without deposit that settles at real market prices fixes the cost side at the same time. For a broader comparison of what German fleets use today, see our guide to the best fuel cards for companies in Germany.
That leaves a clean division of labour: per diems as an automated payroll line calculated from trip times, and road spend on one invoice that finance never has to chase.
Sources
This article is general information, not tax advice. Rates are set by the German Federal Ministry of Finance and reviewed annually; verify specifics for your situation with your Steuerberater.
