Reevesis, you should consider a career in spying. See thread below:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=507588

$35 per diem + $5 for misc travel expenses. I get free breakfast in the morning at the Hilton, and make PB&J for lunch (I carry it on :)). Then I can eat whatever for dinner, but have lately just been ending up at Subway.

One company I do some work with (and I'm actually doing my last run for them in a couple of weeks) only allows $40/day. I do the free breakfast strategy when I can and then carry power bars and drinks so that I can have a quick lunch. I try to do a sit-down, nice dinner in the evenings. 40 bucks certainly is not very generous and depending on where I'm at, it's tough to stay within.

My current project has a per diem of $65 AUD (roughly $48 USD) for food and dry cleaning. Most of my colleagues have apartments with kitchens here, so it isn't too hard to keep to $65. Given my love for good food, coupled with a dislike for cooking, I tend to exceed it.

My previous firm had us expense actual meals costs and didn't set any specific limits, but expenses had to be somewhat resonable, though the occasional splurge was OK.

While I liked the freedom to spend more, the convenience of not having to track receipts leads me to prefer the per diem.

-m

My company is "reasonable expenses"; reciepts for things over $25 but they don't seem to care too much under $75 for dinner. Billed as costs, though, so no $$ recovery. Do those of you with specific per diems get to pocket the difference?

Some clients prorate how much they will pay for meals depending on the travel time of the trip, to prevent people from starting a trip at 8pm and bagging the full day's worth of meal perdiem.

We have to put the start/end time of our trips on our expense reports, and generally I cannot charge for dinner if I get back to my car at the airport by 6, since I wouldn't be leaving the office by 6 anyway.

No real limit, but meals over $25 require receipts if not on the corporate credit card. If applied to the corporate card, the expense shows up automatically on our expense-processing software along with all other charges and no further documentation is then required.

Although I'm pretty much unlimited in what I can spend and how I can spend it, I still tend to carry a bottle or two of good wine with me when traveling ... I would prefer to have a decent room service meal with a very good bottle from my wine cellar than to suffer through being a single diner in a restaurant, drinking bad & overpriced wine.

I've even shared my wine in restaurants that allow BYO, even going so far as to plan meals around the wine with like-minded wine collecting customers. Those meals, by the way, are usually the most fun ;)

Whatever the IRS says is the allowable M&IE per diem for the city I'm in.

Of course, I just learned this week that the rates went up....last October 1. CLT's only a $6 difference, but PHL is $13. And to think I spent more than a month there....might not have had to pay so much out of pocket for going over!

Depends on location, so far i know Chicago is $38/day. I usualy dont eat breakfast, cheap lunch, decent dinner with couple drinks. and end up taking home $10-$30 by the end of the week..... or there are the weeks im in the hole 30-40!

at the end of the month it seems to avg out. I like not having to send in all reciepts.

$50 a day for meals.

Mine is $40 per day, no matter what city I'm in.

My per diem
 

Mine is $60.00 per day. They are pretty liberal though. If I don't eat breakfast or have a small lunch I can go over the $35.00 for dinner. If I eat less expensive one day, I can go more expensive the next. I cannot put any alcholic drinks on my expense report unless I am entertaining. I once had to get a Coors Lite (for $2.00) approved by my boss as acctng. would not pay it. I told them the soda would have been more money....

$50 a day including any travel day. So if I take a red-eye I get $50 for the day of departure. I average $25 a day spending so I pocket quite a lot.

I'm not 100% sure what it is this year - I'm on leave doing my Masters at the moment. Last year it was C$40 in Canada or US$40 international. Those travelling to more expensive cities like Tokyo tend to put through 'reasonable' expenses though.

State of Florida employees have the option of receiving $21/day for meals ($3 bkfst, $6 lunch, $12 dinner) plus actual hotel cost. Partial reimbursement determined by hours on travel status. As an alternative, the state offers a flat $50/day to cover everything.

God bless the Jebster

Ahh... beat me to it! I worked for a Florida community college for 5 years and got screwed on this for each and every trip. This per diem has not been raised since the 70s!!!! There is talk of the legislature finally raising it. I think it's awful that gov't balances its budgets on the back of their underpaid employees.

Has anyone here ever tried to eat a decent breakfast for $3? Ridiculous.

Oh, and the college I worked for used to tell us that if our conference started at 8 am in a city 2 hours away (assuming no traffic snarls) that we should leave at 6 am (instead of a reasonable 5 or 5:30 am to ensure enough time for parking, etc.) just to save the $3 on breakfast. Sheesh!

No receipts for meals were necessary, though, so if you could figure out how to eat cheaper, you could pocket the difference.

Thank goodness my new company has one of those "reasonable" type guidelines. I've never been told to skimp on anything, and in fact have been part of group outings to expensive restaurants with many rounds of drinks, many shared appetizers, individual salads, an entree, dessert, AND espresso or an after-dinner drink. Gotta love corporate America!

The last three trips, I got these guidelines.

"Whatever it costs but be reasonable and save the receipts."

Upon further questioning....

San Francisco $60-70
Dallas $50-60
DC $50-60

$50 / day meals

In Sweden the tax authority provide a table mandating per diem per location (Socialism at its best).

It ranges from 30 USD / day if you find yourself in afganistan?!?! to 120 USD for the sudan....

Places you might actually visit work out somewhere in between there;
India and China are around 50 to 60 USD, Japan is 100 USD.

Other places I have worked have simply refunded reasonable expenses.

For the per diem, technically you are meant to account for the fact you paid for three meals a day yourself, but in practice I have never heard of a check actually happening.

Here's a fun story. My old firm was strict about travel limits- and exception cities also had hard and fast price caps.

My boss decided rules didn't apply to him and let underlings like me stay at a $200 a nite hotel in Chicago (limit was $150 in those days). That was about the one nice thing that mean, temper ridden guy did for me.

"Reasonable expenses" though once in a while we need to remind people what "reasonable" means. A lot of people don't realise how good some of this expenses software is these days..

Got the word this week at work that $40 per day is now "reasonable" in most areas. yay.

$60/day for food, but $225 max for hotels, which is difficult in NY.

Back in my heavy business travel days I got the best of both worlds as far as my PD went. I got the usual $35/day, but on work days (5/wk) all meals were provided by a local caterer. I only had to buy for myself twice a week, so my workmates and I ate well those days!

We have a $400AU per day allowance, which includes hotel accommodation. I don't mind because I can normally get into my favourite travel hotel (the JW Mumbai) for around $200AU per night, and spend $50 max per day on food.

The company I work for are pretty good. We do very little domestic travel, and when we do travel it's for 6 weeks at a time to India (from Australia) in groups of 15, so they're fairly flexible with what we spend and how.

10 for Breakfast
15 for Lunch
25 for Dinner

need receipts for everything over $5

So do you have a set per diem, AND you have to justify it?

$50 a day for meals, no receipts required. Rather generous for a non-profit, in my opinion.

Its not uncommon to pocket $200.00 a week.

I get GSA perdiem and usually travel to DC, NY, Chicago, etc.

Anyway,

Stay at a fullservice Marriott or Rennaisance and you get Bfast and Dinner
if you have status.

This comes out to 6k - 8k a year tax free.

I spent over twenty years working for a company that I felt had a very enlightened and correct approach. You got an annual T&E budget. Size depended on how much travel you were expected to do.

In my case I was expected to be on the road about 40% of the time (domestically in the U.S.) and the budget was around $45k....to be used as I saw fit. While I had a lot of lattitude, it was closely monitored. I had to keep track each week of where I was versus budget. Travellers who were over got asked some tough questions. If you could justify it, you were ok. If not, you got your ears pinned back.

Guys (and gals) who thought they could outsmart the system to either pamper themselves or try to help themselves to some tax free income, sooner or later got a rude awakening. I'd look at my T&E as a resource. I approached it from the standpoint of "How much time can I get in front of my customers with this resource" "How many trips can I get out of this".

I'd plan my travel pretty carefully, but by being a wise steward of my travel funds, I never had to worry about needing to be somewhere on short notice, etc.

What did the $45K get me? About 16 mostly short-hop plane trips a year, and nearly as many road trips in my company car (which also came out of the t&e). The majority of my trips were 2-4 nights duration....staying in Marriott Courtyards, Fairfield Inns or similar. Breakfast usually at the hotel (freebie if offered), lunch would be with a customer, dinner would be soup/sandwich or small entree/beer usually at a casual sit-down chain or similar.

It worked out fine. Now I work for a different company, don't travel quite as much, and don't have a formal annual budget. But I still travel in the same fashion as always and my new company is 100% cool with it. As for the per diem question, my current bosses start asking questions when non-entertainment meals start running over $50 or so per day....$100-150 on hotels depending on the city.