Truck driver meal claims: the simplified method, the 80% rate and the logbook

Meals are the single largest deduction most drivers claim, and the single most common one to be reduced on review. The rules are not complicated, but they are specific: there is a defined weight class, a defined distance, a defined time away, a defined flat rate and a defined deduction percentage — and a claim that fails any one of them falls back to a much less generous treatment. This guide walks through what a Canadian long-haul driver can actually claim, and what has to be in the logbook to hold it.

Two ways to claim: detailed or simplified

Every meal claim uses one of two methods. The detailed method means keeping every receipt and claiming what you actually spent. The simplified method means claiming a flat rate per meal without keeping the receipts.

For the 2025 tax year the CRA’s flat rate is $23 per meal, sales tax included, to a maximum of $69 per day per person — three meals a day. That rate is set by the CRA and has been revised before, so confirm the figure for the year you are filing rather than carrying last year’s number forward.

The simplified method removes the receipts, not the records. The CRA is explicit that although you do not need detailed receipts for actual expenses under this method, it may still ask you to provide documentation to support the claim. What that documentation is, in practice, is the trip log.

The 80% rate, and who gets it

Meals are ordinarily deductible at 50%. Long-haul truck drivers are the exception: meal and beverage expenses incurred during an eligible travel period are deductible at 80%. On a $23 meal that is the difference between deducting $11.50 and deducting $18.40 — over a year of road meals, a material number.

The higher rate is not for everyone in a truck. You are a long-haul truck driver if your main duty of employment is transporting goods by driving a long-haul truck, whether or not your employer’s main business is transporting goods, passengers or both. A long-haul truck is a truck or tractor designed for hauling freight with a gross vehicle weight rating of more than 11,788 kg. A driver in a lighter vehicle, or a transport employee whose main duty is something else, is on the ordinary 50% rate — the same rule described in the guide to the 50% meals and entertainment limit.

What an eligible travel period is

This is where claims most often fail, because the definition has both a time test and a distance test and both must be met.

For an employed driver, an eligible travel period is a period during which you are away from the municipality or metropolitan area where you report to work for at least 24 hours, for the purpose of driving a long-haul truck that transports goods at least 160 kilometres from the employer’s establishment you regularly report to.

For a self-employed driver, the CRA frames it slightly differently: at least 24 continuous hours away from the municipality and metropolitan area in which you reside, driving a long-haul truck that transports goods to or from a location beyond a radius of at least 160 kilometres from that residential location.

Two consequences follow. A long day trip — out and back inside 24 hours — is not an eligible travel period no matter how far you drove. And a multi-day trip that never gets 160 km from base is not one either. Both still allow a meal claim; they just do not get the 80% rate.

The forms an employed driver needs

Employed drivers claim on Form TL2, Claim for Meals and Lodging Expenses. You complete Parts 1 and 2; your employer completes Part 3. Trips that qualify as eligible trips for long-haul drivers are reported in Part 2B, and all other trips in Part 2A — that split is how the 80% and 50% rates get applied correctly.

Your employer also has to complete and sign Form T2200, Declaration of Conditions of Employment. The meal and lodging claim itself goes on line 22900 of your return. You do not send the TL2 in with the return, but you keep it in case the CRA asks to see it later — and that request is common enough that filing the form away carelessly is a real risk.

Owner-operators and incorporated drivers

If you are self-employed or drive through your own corporation, you are not filing a TL2 — the meals are a business expense, and the 80% rate for eligible travel periods applies on the same terms. The bigger questions for incorporated drivers usually sit elsewhere: whether the arrangement with the carrier looks like employment or genuine contracting, how the truck itself is depreciated, and how GST/HST is handled on interlined freight. Those are worth settling deliberately with an accountant who works with truckers rather than discovering them on review.

The logbook is the claim

Under either method, what actually supports a meal deduction is a contemporaneous trip record. At minimum it should show, for every trip: the date and time you left, the date and time you returned, the destination and the distance from your base, the number of meals eaten on the trip, and whether the trip met both the 24-hour and 160-kilometre tests.

That last column is the one people skip, and it is the one that decides whether the trip sits in Part 2B at 80% or Part 2A at 50%. Written at the time, it takes seconds per trip. Reconstructed in March from dispatch records and fuel receipts, it takes days — and a reconstruction is much harder to defend than a log kept as you went.

Keep the log with the rest of your records. It is the same discipline that makes vehicle costs defensible, and the two often need to be maintained side by side; the guide to business vehicle and mileage deductions covers that side.

Lodging, and what else goes on the TL2

Meals get the attention, but the TL2 is a claim for meals and lodging, and the lodging side is often left on the table by drivers who sleep in the cab and assume there is nothing to claim. Where you do pay for accommodation on the road, those costs are claimed on the same form and are not subject to the 50% or 80% limit that applies to food and beverages — that limit is specific to meals. Keep the invoices; there is no flat-rate shortcut for lodging equivalent to the $23 meal rate.

Showers, parking and similar road costs are handled under the ordinary rules for employment expenses rather than as part of the meal claim, and what an employee can deduct is bounded by what the T2200 says the conditions of employment actually required. That is another reason the T2200 is worth reading rather than filing unread: it defines the outer edge of everything claimed on the return.

Common mistakes

Claiming three meals a day for every day of a trip regardless of departure and return times. Applying the 80% rate to trips that never met the distance test. Mixing the detailed and simplified methods within a year. Claiming the flat rate for days at home. And filing without the T2200 in hand, which is the fastest way to have an otherwise correct claim disallowed.

Getting it right

Trucking is one of the few industries where a single deduction, correctly documented, moves the return materially — and where the documentation is genuinely easy to build if it is set up before the year starts rather than after. If you are based in the Fraser Valley, working with a trucking accountant in Abbotsford who knows what an eligible travel period is means the log you keep is the log the claim needs.

This article is general information for Canadian drivers and trucking businesses and is current as of July 2026. The flat meal rate is set by the CRA and can change — confirm the rate for the tax year you are filing. It is not tax advice; please speak with a CPA before acting on anything here.