Ask any preparer which three expenses come up most often in a first meeting with a newly self employed client, and the answer is remarkably consistent: the drive to work, food during the working day, and the clothes worn to do the job. All three feel like costs of earning a living, because they are, and all three are generally not deductible. The reasoning behind that is the same in each case, and understanding it once is far more useful than memorizing three separate rules, because the same logic decides most of the questions that follow.
The Drive to Work, and Why It Counts as Personal
Travel between home and a regular place of work is a personal expense, no matter how far it is or how inconvenient. Somebody who drives an hour each way has chosen where to live relative to where they work, and that choice is treated as personal rather than as a cost of the business. This surprises people who moved specifically to take a job, and the rule does not bend for the reason behind the choice or for how unreasonable the distance has become since.
What is deductible is travel between work locations during the working day. A tradesperson driving from the first job to the second is traveling for business, and only the first trip from home and the last trip back are the commute. The distinction that changes everything is whether the home is a principal place of business, since a qualifying home office turns the house into a work location and makes the trip to the first site a business trip rather than a commute. That single point is worth more to most mobile trades than any other item in this article.
Lunch, and the Two Situations That Genuinely Differ
Food eaten during an ordinary working day is personal, because everybody has to eat and being at work does not change that requirement in any way the tax code recognizes. Buying a sandwich rather than bringing one is a convenience rather than a business necessity, and a receipt does not alter the character of the expense it records. Somebody working through lunch at a desk is in exactly the same position as somebody eating the same sandwich at home on a Sunday. The receipt records a real payment and says nothing at all about why it was made.
Two situations are genuinely different. A meal with a customer, supplier, or business associate where business is actually discussed is a business meal, generally deductible in part rather than in full, and the record has to name who was present and what the business purpose was. The second is a meal while traveling away from home overnight for work, which falls under travel rules rather than meal rules and is treated more generously. Neither exception covers a person eating alone near their usual workplace, which is the situation almost everybody is actually asking about.
Work Clothes and the Test That Actually Decides Them
The test here is the sharpest of the three and it is not about cost or about whether the employer requires it. Clothing is deductible only if it is required for the work and unsuitable for ordinary wear. A welding jacket, flame resistant coveralls, steel toed boots, and a hard hat pass easily. A suit required by a firm does not, and neither does a set of clean work trousers, however clearly they are only ever worn on site. The reasoning is that ordinary clothing has an ordinary use whether or not anybody puts it to one.
The awkward middle is a branded uniform. A shirt with a company logo embroidered on it generally qualifies, since nobody would wear another business's advertising socially, while the same shirt without the logo does not. Protective equipment, laundering of qualifying uniforms, and required safety gear all follow the clothing rather than being treated separately. The unsuitable for ordinary wear test is a good deal narrower than most people in the trades believe, and reading how the Internal Revenue Service frames it once beats whatever gets repeated at a supply counter.
The Pattern Underneath All Three
The common thread is that an expense is deductible when it exists because of the business and not otherwise. Everybody eats, everybody wears clothes, and everybody gets to work, so those costs are attributed to being a person rather than to running a business. The exceptions all appear at the point where the expense stops being something a person would have incurred anyway: the meal exists because a customer was being met, the clothing is unwearable outside the job, the trip is between two work sites.
Applying that test resolves most novel questions without needing a rule for each one. A haircut before a client meeting fails it. A tool that has no household use passes. A phone used for both purposes is apportioned. The test also explains why the exceptions are narrow rather than generous, and it stops people from constructing arguments that will not survive a question from anybody who asks how the expense would have differed if the business did not exist. That single question is the whole test, and it can be applied by anybody in about five seconds without consulting anything.
What People Miss in the Other Direction
The same conversation nearly always turns up expenses that were deductible and never claimed, and they tend to be the unglamorous ones. Bank and payment processing fees on business accounts. The business portion of a phone bill and home internet. Professional insurance premiums. Trade association dues and licensing renewals. Continuing education that maintains a skill already in use. Software subscriptions. Mileage, when a log exists, which is where most of it is lost. None of these is exotic and all of them are ordinary costs of operating, which is exactly why they get overlooked by somebody focused on the three that do not qualify.
Genuinely mixed items deserve apportionment rather than avoidance, and this is where people either overreach or give up entirely. A vehicle used for both purposes, a room used partly for work, a phone that does both are all handled by a percentage supported by something real: a mileage log, a floor plan, a month of usage records. What makes the number defensible is not its precision but the existence of a basis for it. The three costs everybody asks about are usually not the ones deciding a return, and the ones that are get missed because nobody thought to ask.