No Van Life Tax Home? Here’s What You Can Still Deduct
For a self-employed vanlifer with no tax home, the business costs of traveling away from home stop being deductible, which means lodging, meals, and the travel to and from. The good news is that having no tax home does not affect deductions for business phone use, professional development, business mileage that has a real business purpose, software, equipment, or the self-employed health insurance deduction. I’m Catina Borgmann, a Federally Credentialed Enrolled Agent (EA), a federally licensed tax professional, and most full-time vanlifers have no tax home.
Two bad answers float around this topic. One says van life is one giant write-off because you travel for work. The other says no tax home means no deductions at all. Both are wrong, and the second one is the quieter mistake, because it talks people out of money they are allowed to keep.
I have prepared returns for nearly 20 years, and I live in a van. So I read both versions of this misinformation as someone who has to defend the right answer.
I’m not going to sugarcoat the first half. If you have no tax home, the travel deductions that get passed around in van life groups do not apply to you. The IRS word for having no tax home is itinerant. I prefer purposefully mobile, but the IRS has not taken my edit.
The second half is better news, and it is where most of the useful detail lives.
What is a tax home, and why don’t most vanlifers have one?
Your tax home is a location on a map. It is the city or general area where your main place of business is located. The word home is what causes the confusion, because your tax home starts with where your business is located, not with where you sleep or where your mail goes.
People try to solve this with an address. A mail forwarding service, a relative’s spare room, or a storage unit can look like a home base on paper. The IRS looks at facts instead of labels, and the first fact it wants is where your regular place of business is located. Working from a van doesn’t give you a place on the map. The van moves, so the location moves with it. A business that never stays in one area has no main place of business to point to, and that is why most full-time vanlifers have no tax home. An address you use for mail and a driver’s license matters for domicile. It does very little for a tax home.
Domicile answers which state taxes you. Tax home answers whether you can deduct business travel away from your tax home. If the state tax question is what brought you here, I wrote about which state taxes a full-time vanlifer, and the rest of this post stays on the deduction side.
The rule exists for a reason that makes sense once you see it. The travel deduction was built for someone with a regular place of business who goes somewhere else temporarily for work. They can deduct lodging and meals while they are away from that regular place of business. If your business has no regular place, you are never away from it, and there is nothing for the deduction to cover.
If you have no regular place of business, the IRS falls back on a second test that decides whether you can deduct travel expenses. It asks whether the place where you regularly live, your main home in the ordinary sense, can serve as your tax home. Three questions drive the answer.
Do you do some of your business in that area and stay in that home when you are there?
Do you pay to keep that home while also paying for lodging somewhere else because your work takes you away?
Have you kept your ties to the area, such as family living there or regular stays?
How those answers add up for your own facts is where people get tripped up, and I walk through it in the Van Life Foundations Manual.
In the tax world, we use a nickname for an itinerant, a tax turtle, because your home travels with you. I am one too, and I think it’s an affectionate name!
A Tax Court case involving a long-haul trucker who named a friend’s house as his tax home did not go his way, and the reason applies to a full-time vanlifer too. Naming an address is not the same as having a tax home.
Most full-time vanlifers who work while they travel have no main place of business and no home they are paying to keep up. It is an ordinary situation and not a penalty, just a fact to plan around.
What does having no tax home cost you, and what can you still deduct?
What goes away without a tax home?
The travel deduction is built on one idea. You are traveling away from your tax home for business, overnight, and the costs of that trip are lodging, meals, and the transportation to and from. If you have no tax home, there is no away. No away, no deduction.
For a vanlifer, that lands on specific things. The nightly campground or RV park fee that someone told you to write off because you were traveling for work is lodging. The meals you buy while you are on the road working are meals. Neither is deductible as business travel when you have no tax home, and I would rather you hear that from me now than from an IRS notice later.
Another place a missing tax home shows up catches remote employees. If you kept a corporate remote job after you moved into a van and your employer reimburses your travel tax-free, that arrangement assumes you have a tax home to be away from. Without one, those reimbursements can become taxable wages.
What stays?
The rule that removes the deduction for travel away from your tax home does not remove the deductions that come from running a business. Those never depended on having a tax home.
Before the list, one boundary. If you are a W-2 employee, federal rules right now do not let you deduct unreimbursed work expenses at all, so the list below is not for you. It also is not a full inventory of what a self-employed vanlifer can write off. It is the list of what survives the loss of a tax home.
Business mileage survives, with a condition I will repeat because it matters. The drive has to have a business purpose. Meeting a client, picking up supplies for the business, dropping off a package a customer ordered, and making a business bank deposit all qualify. A drive to a lake because the forecast looked good does not, even if you answered email when you got there. Neither does a visit to family. For someone living on the road, a large share of the driving is personal, so expect your business mileage to be a smaller number than your odometer suggests. You will need a record of those drives, and a good one.
The ordinary costs of the business survive too. Software you use for your work, equipment, the business use of your phone, and professional development like a course or a conference are business expenses whether or not you have a tax home. Where an item serves both business and personal life, only the business share counts.
The self-employed health insurance deduction also survives. It has its own rules, including that it depends on your business having a profit, and none of them involve a tax home.
Van Lifestylist Tip
The IRS says itinerant. I say purposefully mobile. Either way, the deduction that disappears is the one that depends on being away from your tax home, and the ones that depend on running a business are still there.
Why does so much advice on this topic get it wrong?
Because the word travel is doing double duty. A travel deduction for lodging and meals away from your tax home is one thing. Mileage on a vehicle you use for the business is another. They have different rules and different requirements, and a lot of van life advice blends them into one idea, so you get either everything or nothing.
A van adds to the confusion because it is both transportation and a home, and the tax rules treat those two roles differently. Then the advice travels through social media, where a confident one-liner moves faster than a correct paragraph. The IRS put misleading tax advice on social media on its 2026 Dirty Dozen list, and van life groups are not exempt from that.
I would rather give you the narrow answer that is true than the broad one that sounds good.
What does this look like for two vanlifers?
Take two people on the same road in the same kind of van.
The first is self-employed, a bookkeeper with clients in several states. She has no tax home. She cannot deduct her campsite nights or her dinners as business travel. She can still deduct the bookkeeping software, the business share of her phone plan, and the mileage on the day she drove to meet a client in person. If she logged that drive with a date, a destination, and a reason, it counts. If she also drove two hours to see a waterfall and keeps no record, it does not.
The second is a W-2 employee working remotely for a company that reimburses his travel. He has no tax home. The reimbursements he has been treating as tax-free deserve a second look with a preparer, and he cannot make up the difference with deductions, because unreimbursed employee expenses are not deductible on a federal return right now.
Same van. Different returns. This is why one-line advice about van life and taxes keeps costing people money.
Is there a separate deduction worth checking if I financed a new van?
This one has nothing to do with a tax home, but it comes up with the same readers, so I am answering it here. A new federal deduction covers interest on certain vehicle loans, and a vanlifer who financed a new van may qualify. The IRS published final regulations in September 2026, so the rules are no longer proposed. Three questions cover what a reader needs to know.
Does the car loan interest deduction apply to a van loan?
It can. The van has to be new, bought mainly for personal use, and financed with a loan secured by a first lien on the vehicle, taken out after December 31, 2024. It also has to have had its final assembly in the United States and weigh under 14,000 pounds GVWR. The deduction is up to $10,000 of interest per return for tax years 2025 through 2028, and it phases out at higher incomes. You can claim it whether or not you itemize.
How do I find out where my van was assembled?
Read the window sticker. It states the final assembly point outright, and it stays accurate when other sources change. Do not go by the brand or the model name, because final assembly can differ from one vehicle to the next of the same make and model.
Does a used van qualify?
No. The vehicle has to be new, which means your use of it is its first, and the loan paperwork has to treat it as new. A van bought used, even a low-mileage one, does not qualify.
Reviewed October 2026. This deduction ends with tax year 2028.
What should I check on my own return if I have no tax home?
Start with the facts you can check today.
Sort yourself into the right bucket. Self-employed, W-2, or both. The answers differ, and the W-2 bucket has the fewest deductions.
Look back at what you have been calling business travel. If lodging or meals are in there and you have no tax home, take the question to your preparer before you file, not after.
Separate business drives from personal drives from here on, and keep a record of each business drive.
If you financed a new van, find the window sticker and read the final assembly line.
Bring your actual facts to a tax professional. This post is general education, not advice for your situation.
When you sit down with that preparer, four questions get you most of the way. Do I have a tax home? Which of my expenses were personal travel and which were business? How should I record business drives? Does my financed van qualify for the loan interest deduction?
If you are self-employed and want the bigger picture of how business structure and taxes fit together, the Self-Employed Tax and Business Structure Workshop covers it. The tax answers on my FAQ page and my April guide to van life taxes from an Enrolled Agent are good companions to this one. For the primary sources, IRS Publication 463 covers travel and car expenses, Tax Topic 511 covers business travel expenses, and the final car loan interest regulations are on the Federal Register.
If you are not sure which side of the tax home line you are on, a free Curiosity Call is a low-pressure first step. It is 15 minutes, and we can talk through where you are and whether working together makes sense.
