The Travel Nurse 50-Mile Rule: What the IRS Actually Says

By CircleRN Team | Published 2026-10-26 | 9 min read

The IRS has no 50-mile rule for travel nurses. Where the number comes from, what the IRS tests instead, and why stipends are taxable without a tax home.

No. The IRS has no 50-mile rule for travel nurses, and no federal mileage figure decides whether a housing or meal stipend can be paid tax-free. The 50 miles you hear about is usually an agency or hospital policy for deciding who gets a travel package, and the best-known 50-mile test in the tax rules belongs to the moving expense deduction, which most people have not been able to use since 2018.

What the IRS actually asks is where your tax home is, whether your work keeps you away from it long enough that you need to sleep or rest, and whether the assignment is temporary. This guide covers the distance question and what happens when you have no tax home at all. The tax home rules themselves are in our tax home guide. It is general information, not tax advice for your situation.

Does the IRS have a 50-mile rule for travel nurses?

No. The statute behind tax-free travel pay, section 162(a)(2) of the Internal Revenue Code, covers traveling expenses while away from home in the pursuit of a trade or business. It contains no distance. IRS Publication 463 defines traveling away from home with two conditions, and neither is a number of miles:

The publication says your tax home includes the entire city or general area in which your business or work is located, and it does not put a mileage figure on that general area. The one mileage threshold in that part of the publication is 100 miles, and it applies only to Armed Forces reservists deciding where on the return to deduct reserve travel. It has nothing to do with nurses.

The same test governs your stipend. Under Treasury Regulation 1.62-2, an employer's per diem is kept out of your wages only when it pays for business expenses that would be deductible, which for lodging and meals means travel away from your tax home. No distance appears there either.

Where does the 50-mile number come from?

Mostly from staffing policy. Agencies, and the hospitals and staffing programs they contract with, decide who is offered a travel package and who is paid a local rate. Many of them draw that line with a radius around the hospital, and 50 miles is a common one. Those policies are private and vary, so the only way to know the rule for a given job is to ask the recruiter what radius applies and whether it is measured from your permanent address.

That policy answers a business question: will this agency pay you as a traveler? It does not answer the tax question. Living 80 miles away does not make a stipend tax-free, and an agency radius is not an IRS safe harbor. Our housing stipend guide covers how agencies set the stipend amount once you qualify.

The second source of the number is the tax code itself, but a different section of it, covered next.

Is the 50-mile moving expense test still in effect?

Not for travel nurses. Section 217 of the Code allowed a deduction for the cost of moving to a new job, and one condition was distance. No deduction is allowed unless the taxpayer's new principal place of work is at least 50 miles farther from his former residence than was his former principal place of work, or, with no former place of work, at least 50 miles from the former residence. That test was about a permanent move to a new job. It never governed travel stipends.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act suspended the deduction for tax years beginning after December 31, 2017, except for active-duty members of the Armed Forces moving under military orders. The suspension was written to end after 2025. The 2025 reconciliation law, Public Law 119-21, removed that end date, so the suspension no longer expires. It also extended the exception to certain intelligence community employees. IRS Publication 15-B for 2026 says the same law permanently eliminates the exclusion for qualified moving expense reimbursements from an employee's income, with the same exceptions.

For a nurse, that means relocation money for a permanent move is taxable pay, and the 50-mile test in section 217 is not something you can rely on for anything.

What do the IRS rules for travel nurses actually test?

Three things, in this order.

  1. Where your tax home is. Under Publication 463 it is generally your regular place of business. A traveler with no regular place of business may have a tax home at the home where they regularly live, judged by three factors: you work part of the time in that area and stay at the home while doing it; you have living expenses at the home that you duplicate because work takes you away; and you have not abandoned the area, have family living at the home, or often use it for lodging. IRS Chief Counsel advice identifies these as the objective factors from Revenue Ruling 73-529, 1973-2 C.B. 37. All three and the home is your tax home; two and it depends on the facts and circumstances; one and you are an itinerant.
  2. Whether you are away from it overnight. The sleep or rest condition is literal. Publication 463 says it isn't satisfied by merely napping in your car, though you do not have to be gone from dusk to dawn.
  3. Whether the assignment is temporary. That is the one-year rule, covered below.

Duplication runs through all three. The reason the stipend exists is that you are paying for a home you keep and for a second place to sleep near the job. What counts as a duplicated expense, and what does not, is in our housing stipend rules. The living-with-family version of the question is in tax home with parents.

Can you take a contract 30 miles from home and get stipends?

Two separate questions are hiding in this one, and they have different owners.

Will the agency pay you a stipend? That is the agency's policy, and often the hospital's. If 30 miles is inside their radius, many will only offer a local rate, and no tax argument changes that.

Could a stipend be tax-free? Only if the work takes you outside the general area of your tax home and you need to sleep there. No published rule says 30 miles is too close or 60 miles is far enough. But the closer the hospital, the more likely it sits in the general area that Publication 463 treats as part of your tax home, and the harder it is to show that your work, rather than your preference, required a second place to sleep. If you drive home after each shift and sleep there, you are not traveling away from home in the IRS sense, whatever the agency's radius says.

The regulation spells out what happens to money paid for travel that is not away from home. Treasury Regulation 1.62-2 treats an allowance for travel that is not away from home as paid under a nonaccountable plan, and its own example has an airline paying a travel allowance to crews whether or not they are away from home: the away-from-home part stays tax-free and the rest is wages. A stipend paid for a commute is taxable pay.

If the honest answer is a local contract, compare it on take-home pay. Our pay calculator shows a fully taxable local rate beside a travel package, and the stipend calculator shows the GSA ceiling for an assignment location.

Where is the one-year rule written?

In the statute. The flush language at the end of section 162(a) says that the taxpayer shall not be treated as being temporarily away from home during any period of employment if such period exceeds 1 year. In a letter dated December 21, 2018 and released in 2019, answering a member of Congress who had passed on a constituent's request for a waiver on the taxation of per diem reimbursements, IRS Chief Counsel wrote, We don't have the authority to waive this rule; Congress would need to take legislative action to change it.

Publication 463 turns it into an expectation test. An assignment in a single location is temporary if it is realistically expected to last (and does in fact last) for 1 year or less, and indefinite if it is realistically expected to last more than a year, whether or not it actually lasts for more than 1 year. Revenue Ruling 93-86, as IRS Chief Counsel quotes it, adds that work first expected to last a year or less is treated as temporary until the date that the taxpayer's realistic expectation changes. Publication 463 also warns that a series of assignments to the same location, all for short periods but that together cover a long period, may be considered an indefinite assignment.

Once an assignment is indefinite, Publication 463 says you must include in your income any amounts you receive from your employer for living expenses, even if they are called “travel allowances”. How this plays out when you are asked to extend is in extending, ending, or moving on.

Can you be a travel nurse without a tax home?

Yes. Nothing stops you from taking travel contracts without a tax home. What changes is the pay. Publication 463 says that if you have no regular or main place of business and there is no place where you regularly live, you are considered an itinerant (a transient) and your tax home is wherever you work. An itinerant can't claim a travel expense deduction because you are never considered to be traveling away from home.

The publication's own example is close to a common travel nurse setup: a salesperson who works temporary assignments in several states, keeps a room in a sister's house, stays there one or two weekends a year, does no work there and pays no rent. The IRS conclusion is that this person meets none of the three factors and is an itinerant and has no tax home. Giving up your apartment and living in travel housing year round puts you in the same place.

For an itinerant, the stipend part of a package is wages. Treasury Regulation 1.62-2 says amounts treated as paid under a nonaccountable plan are included in the employee's gross income, must be reported as wages or other compensation on the employee's Form W-2, and are subject to withholding and payment of employment taxes. That means federal income tax plus Social Security and Medicare on what was quoted to you as tax-free. An offer built around a large stipend and a low base rate loses the most, so run any offer you are considering through the pay calculator with the stipend taxed before you sign.

If you are between homes, the fix is to establish one that meets the factors, not to describe a place you do not maintain. Our tax home guide walks through the common arrangements.

Who decides whether your stipend is tax-free?

The agency decides how it pays you. Publication 463 says the employer makes the decision whether to reimburse employees under an accountable plan or a nonaccountable plan. Under IRS Publication 15, an accountable plan requires that employees paid or incurred allowable expenses, that the payment must not be an amount that would have otherwise been paid to the employee as wages, that employees substantiate the expenses within a reasonable period, and that they return any excess. When those rules are met, amounts paid under an accountable plan aren't wages. For a per diem paid under an accountable plan, Publication 463 says an allowance at or below the federal rate won't be included in box 1 of your Form W-2. The federal rate is usually the GSA per diem rate for the location, and you can look it up with our stipend calculator.

The tax rules decide whether that treatment was right, and the facts they turn on are yours: where you live, whether you keep paying for it, where you sleep during the contract, and how long you expect to stay. If those facts do not support a tax home, the radius you cleared and the way the agency coded the payment do not make the stipend tax-free. What an audit can cost is covered in the tax home guide.

Bottom Line

There is no IRS 50-mile rule. The 50 miles is usually an agency or hospital policy for who gets travel pay, and the best-known 50-mile test in the tax rules is for moving expenses, suspended for almost everyone since 2018 and now with no end date. What the IRS tests is whether you have a tax home, whether your work takes you outside its general area long enough to need sleep, and whether the assignment is expected to last a year or less. A nearby contract you commute to is local work, and a stipend for it is wages. A traveler with no tax home is an itinerant, and every stipend dollar is taxable pay.

Next: the general tax home rules, how stipends are taxed, and what an extension does to the one-year clock.

Sources

This guide is general educational content, not tax advice. Whether you have a tax home and whether a stipend is tax-free depend on your own facts. If you are unsure, work with a tax professional who understands travel healthcare work before you accept tax-free stipends.

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