Per diems, meals and overnight stays
How the meal allowance is worked out, what a provided meal costs you, and the three-month rule nobody remembers until it bites.
Steerd computes the German per diem (Verpflegungsmehraufwand) from your itinerary. You do not look up a table.
Which day gets what
Each day of a trip falls into one basis:
| Basis | When |
|---|---|
| Full day | A full 24 hours away. |
| Arrival or departure day | The first and last day of a multi-day trip. |
| More than 8 hours | A single-day trip over the 8 hour threshold. |
| No per diem | Under the threshold. |
Two more appear in specific situations: Excluded, where a day is deliberately taken out, and Residual only, where the allowance is reduced to what is left after reductions.
Provided meals reduce the allowance
If a meal was provided, the per diem for that day is reduced. Tick the meals you were given: breakfast, lunch or dinner. Each has its own statutory reduction.
This is the part people forget. A hotel rate that includes breakfast means breakfast was provided, even though you did not think of it as a meal anyone gave you. Not recording it overstates your claim.
Provenance records who provided it: your employer, or a third party at a business occasion.
A meal over EUR 60 is treated differently. Steerd warns that no reduction applies and that the amount may count as taxable wages. That is a payroll question, not an expenses question, and it is worth raising rather than quietly claiming.
Overnight stays
An overnight is recorded as one of:
- With receipt, the actual cost,
- Flat rate, the statutory lump sum,
- Employer provided, so it costs you nothing,
- Private, staying with friends or family,
- None.
Every overnight stay claimed with a receipt must actually have one attached. The checklist enforces it.
The three-month rule
If you travel repeatedly to the same place, the per diem stops after three months. This catches long client engagements at a customer site, and it is the rule people discover after claiming a year of allowances they were not entitled to.
Steerd tracks it and asks you to resolve it per day. You attest one of:
- Interrupted at least 4 weeks, which restarts the clock,
- Different site, so it is not the same place,
- At most 2 days a week, which is below the threshold that starts the clock.
Until every affected day is resolved, the checklist item "The three-month rule is resolved for every day" blocks approval.