Temporary duty is an assignment away from a pilot
or flight attendant's main place of work that is in a single location, is
realistically expected to last for less than one year, and does in fact last for
one year or less. Typically, if a flight crewmember falls under the definition of a
temporary assignment, the pilot or flight
attendant's tax home remains at his or her previous
tax home while the flight
crewmember is on TDY.
This means the flight crewmember can deduct
travel expenses
and M&IE expenses while
away from the original location. Below is an example:
Ruth is a flight attendant for Delta Airlines.
Her domicile has always been ATL (Atlanta), but she was transferred to JFK (New
York) in the middle of the year. The assignment was an involuntary TDY and
she hopes to be back in ATL with a few months. A few months later she is
awarded ATL as her domicile again.
In this scenario, Ruth could consider ATL to be
her tax home for the entire time she is based in JFK. That means her
expenses associated with traveling from ATL to JFK would be deductible. If
Ruth paid for hotel rooms or had a
crash pad during the
temporary assignment, then those could be written off on
IRS Form 2106.
The difficult thing for a flight crewmember to
determine is how long the new assignment will last. Typically the new
domicile is the
airline pilot or flight attendant's tax home,
but if the crewmember is certain they are eligible to call the new assignment a
temporary duty assignment, then several
additional travel deductions are available for
the flight crewmember to deduct.
In this example, if Ruth used EZPerDiem.com to
compute her meal expense deduction, she would
would simply not include JFK as a domicile if JFK were a temporary assignment.
In addition, in the EZPerDiem.com Expense Processor, Ruth would also enter the
travel expenses associated with getting back and forth between ATL and JFK.
Typically she could not do this because
commuting expenses
are NOT deductible.
If Ruth were going to remain in IAH longer than one
year, it would be an
indefinite assignment and JFK would become Ruth's new tax home
