Tax-free deemed daily subsistence for local business travel.
Tax-free amount
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Daily deemed rate
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Taxable excess
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Travel money that escapes tax
When your employer sends you away from home overnight for work, the money they hand you for meals and out-of-pocket costs can come to you tax-free, up to a daily limit that SARS sets. The point of the rule is that you should not be taxed on money that simply reimburses you for being away. This calculator applies that daily deemed amount, multiplies it by the nights you are away, and tells you how much of your allowance is sheltered and how much, if any, spills over into taxable pay.
The beauty of the deemed amount is that you do not need a single receipt to claim it. As long as you were genuinely away overnight on business, the daily figure is yours without proof. That is a meaningful simplification for anyone who travels often and does not want to hoard till slips from petrol stations and food courts.
Two deemed rates, one choice
For local travel inside South Africa there are two daily figures, and which applies depends on what the allowance is meant to cover. Where it covers meals and incidental costs together, this calculator uses R570 a day. Where it covers incidental costs only, because your meals are already paid for or provided, the figure drops to R176 a day. You pick the right one based on your trip, not on which gives a bigger number. These amounts are the calculator's assumptions for the current year, and you should check the latest figures with SARS, since the daily rates are updated annually by notice.
Five nights away on a R3,500 allowance
Say you spend five nights away and your allowance covers meals and incidentals, so the R570 rate applies. The tax-free amount is five times R570, or R2,850. If your employer paid you R3,500 for the trip, the first R2,850 is tax-free and the remaining R650 is taxable, unless you can produce receipts proving you actually spent more than the deemed amount.
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When receipts beat the deemed rate
The deemed amount is a floor of convenience, not a ceiling. If your actual costs on a trip genuinely exceeded the daily figure, you are entitled to claim what you actually spent instead, provided you keep the receipts. Someone travelling to an expensive city, where a single dinner outruns a chunk of the R570, may be better served by the receipt method. The deemed amount wins on ease; the actual-cost method wins when costs are high and you are organised enough to document them.
A practical tip on how the allowance is structured: ask your employer to treat the trip as covering meals and incidentals where you genuinely pay for your own food, so the higher R570 rate applies rather than the R176 incidentals-only figure. Two edge cases catch people out. First, the deemed amounts here are for local travel; trips outside South Africa use a separate, country-by-country schedule of US-dollar amounts that this calculator does not model. Second, the relief is for being away overnight, so a long day trip where you return home the same night does not qualify for the deemed daily amount at all.
Is a subsistence allowance the same as a travel allowance?
No, they cover different things. A subsistence allowance covers meals and incidental costs while you are away overnight, and is what this calculator handles. A travel allowance covers the cost of using your car for business and is taxed on a per-kilometre basis instead. You can receive both, but they are calculated separately.
Do I count the day I travel home as a night away?
The deemed amount is based on nights spent away from your usual place of residence on business. A trip of five nights gives five days of the deemed amount. The day you finally return home, having slept away the night before, is covered by that last night; a day with no overnight stay attached does not add another deemed amount.