German per diem rates 2026: what you can claim for meals on a business trip

If you work in Germany and travel for your job, the tax rules don't ask for restaurant receipts. They give you a flat amount per day for food instead. In English it usually goes by per diem. On German forms it's the Verpflegungspauschale, the flat meal allowance, and the cost it covers is called Verpflegungsmehraufwand, the extra you spend on food because you're away from home. For trips inside Germany in 2026 there are two rates, €14 and €28 a day.

The rules sit in § 9 (4a) of the Income Tax Act (EStG). Everything below comes from that section, the two sections that refer to it, and the finance ministry's 2026 letter on foreign rates. This is general information, not tax advice. If your situation is unusual, ask a Steuerberater, a German tax adviser.

German per diem rates for 2026

For business trips within Germany the law sets three cases:

• €28 for each calendar day on which you're away from home and your regular workplace for the full 24 hours.
• €14 each for the day you leave and the day you come back, on a trip with at least one night away from home. The number of hours doesn't matter on those two days.
• €14 for a one-day trip without an overnight stay, if you're away for more than 8 hours. At 8 hours or less, the day gets nothing.

A trip that starts in the evening and ends after midnight, with no night in a hotel, counts as one trip. If it ran longer than 8 hours in total, you get €14 once, for the calendar day on which you spent most of those hours away.

There is no new domestic rate for 2026. The version of § 9 (4a) in force when we checked it on 30 October 2026 sets €14 and €28. The foreign rates are a different matter, because the finance ministry sets them again each year. More on those below.

Who can claim the per diem in Germany

The allowance applies when you work away from both your home and your erste Tätigkeitsstätte, the "first place of work" that the tax office treats as your regular workplace. If you have no such fixed workplace, the same rates apply to your trips.

As an employee, you can get the money in two ways:

• From your employer, tax-free. Under § 3 No. 16 EStG, travel cost reimbursements to employees outside the public sector stay tax-free up to the amounts § 9 allows as a deduction.
• In your tax return. Whatever your employer didn't reimburse tax-free, you can deduct as Werbungskosten, work-related expenses. The law rules out a deduction for the part you were already reimbursed tax-free. If your employer paid you €10 tax-free for a €28 day, you can still deduct €18.

If you're self-employed or freelance, § 4 (5) sentence 1 No. 5 EStG lets you deduct meal costs as Betriebsausgaben, business expenses. The condition is that you work temporarily away from home and from the centre of your permanent business activity, and the amounts follow § 9 (4a). In other words, the same €14 and €28.

The three-month rule for German per diems

The per diem covers only the first three months of a longer assignment at the same place of work. The law calls this the Dreimonatsfrist, the three-month limit. After three months at one site, the allowance for that site stops.

A break resets the clock if it lasts at least four weeks. Then the three months start again from the first day back. This matters on long client placements. An engineer sent to the same customer site from January onwards can claim per diems for January to March, and nothing for April unless there was a four-week gap.

Per diem deductions when meals are provided

If your employer gives you a meal during the trip, or a third party does so at your employer's request, the allowance for that day goes down:

• breakfast takes off 20% of the full-day rate, which is €5.60 in Germany
• lunch or dinner takes off 40% each, €11.20 in Germany

The cut is always worked out from the full-day rate of €28, including on the days you arrive and leave, when you only get €14. It's an easy step to get wrong in a spreadsheet. A hotel breakfast on your departure day takes €5.60 off the €14 and leaves €8.40. Taking 20% of €14 instead would leave €11.20, which is €2.80 too much.

A few more details. The cut can't be larger than the day's allowance, so a day can drop to zero but not below. If you paid something towards the meal yourself, that amount reduces the cut. And the finance ministry's own example treats a hotel breakfast that the employer booked and paid for in advance as a provided meal.

Per diem rates for business trips abroad

Abroad, every country has its own pair of rates. The Federal Ministry of Finance (BMF) sets them each year, and the letter for 2026, dated 5 December 2025, applies from 1 January 2026. Its table gives Austria €50 for a full day and €33 for arrival, departure and one-day trips over 8 hours. For the Netherlands it's €58 and €39. A country that isn't on the list takes Luxembourg's rates, €63 and €42.

Which country counts for a given day? Under § 9 (4a), it's the place you reach last before midnight local time. If that place is in Germany, the rate of your last place of work abroad applies. The BMF letter adds rules for days on which you cross a border, and for days when one trip ends and the next begins.

Meal cuts abroad work the same way as at home. They use the full-day rate of the country that counts for that day, no matter in which country the meal was served.

The same letter also lists overnight rates for each country. Those apply only when your employer reimburses you. In your own tax return, only what you actually paid for the hotel counts.

Worked example: a four-day trip to Hamburg

This is an example to show the arithmetic, not a ruling on anyone's case. An employee based in Munich travels to Hamburg on Monday morning and comes back on Thursday evening. The employer books and pays for the hotel, breakfast included. On Wednesday the employer also provides lunch at a team workshop.

• Monday, arrival day: €14.00
• Tuesday, full day, hotel breakfast: €28.00 minus €5.60 = €22.40
• Wednesday, full day, breakfast and lunch: €28.00 minus €5.60 minus €11.20 = €11.20
• Thursday, departure day, hotel breakfast: €14.00 minus €5.60 = €8.40

The total is €56.00. Without the provided meals it would have been €84.00. If the employer reimburses the €56.00 tax-free, there is nothing left to deduct. If the employer pays nothing, the employee can claim the €56.00 as Werbungskosten in their tax return.

Keeping a trip log on a Mac

Each day is a small sum. A year of trips is a lot of rows, though, and one wrong rate in a spreadsheet cell quietly carries through every total below it.

Spesenwerk, our Mac app for German travel expense claims, does the day-by-day calculation. You enter the trip, and it works out your absence time, which you can override when a day went differently. It applies the €14 and €28 rates and the 20% and 40% meal cuts, and it includes all 214 foreign rates from the 5 December 2025 letter. Rate tables are kept per year and you can edit them. The finished report goes out as a PDF, a CSV file or a DATEV booking batch for your bookkeeper.

Before you download it, know that the app's interface is in German, because the rules it implements are German. The German terms glossed in this article are the ones German tax forms use.

Download Spesenwerk from its product page. Without a licence it runs as a demo that can't save or export. That's enough to enter your last business trip and compare the allowance with what you claimed.