You booked the flight to Lisbon in March. You filmed a few clips on the tram, posted a reel from a rooftop bar, and shot a morning-routine video in the rental. In April, your tax software asks whether the trip was for business, and you pause. You did make content. But you also ate a lot of pastries and stayed two extra days because the light was nice.\n\nMost creators answer that moment in one of two ways. They write off the whole trip because the camera was out, or they write off nothing because it feels too risky. Both are wrong, and the tax code gives you a middle path that most people never learn.\n\n## The camera is not the test\n\nThe rule is not about whether you created content. It's about why you went.\n\nFor travel inside the United States, the IRS asks whether the trip was primarily for business. If it was, your transportation costs, meaning flights, trains and rental cars, are deductible in full. If the trip was primarily personal, the transportation isn't deductible at all, even if you spent a few days on real work at the destination.\n\nThat all-or-nothing quality is what surprises people. A vacation with some filming is still a vacation. A work trip with some sightseeing is still a work trip.\n\nThe IRS looks at the facts: how many days were business versus personal, how much of each day went to work, and whether the trip would have happened without the business reason. It also considers who decided the destination. If a brand partnership, a conference or a client shoot determined where you went, that points toward business. If you picked the place because you've always wanted to see it, that points the other way.\n\n## What counts as a business day\n\nThis is where creators can legitimately claim more than they expect.\n\nA business day is not only a day you were filming. Under the IRS's travel rules, these generally count:\n\n- Days you travel to and from the destination for business.\n- Days your presence is required, such as an event, a scheduled shoot or meetings.\n- Weekend or holiday days that fall between business days, when it would have made no sense to fly home.\n- Days you intended to work but couldn't because of circumstances outside your control, like weather.\n\nPersonal days include the sightseeing days, the extra days tacked on at the end, and any day with no real business activity.\n\nSay you fly to Austin for a three-day brand activation on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, then stay until Tuesday because you like the city. Your trip is primarily business: three business days plus travel days against three or four personal ones. Your flight is deductible. Your hotel and meals for the business days are deductible. The Sunday-to-Tuesday extension is yours to pay for.\n\n## The costs that follow the days\n\nOnce a trip qualifies, the costs split into two kinds.\n\nTransportation is deductible in full if the trip is primarily business. That means your airfare, whether or not you stayed a few extra days.\n\nLodging and meals are deductible only for the business days. Hotel nights tied to personal days are not. Meals are generally limited to 50% of the cost, the same limit that applies to business meals elsewhere. Lavish or extravagant spending is not allowed, but the standard is "not lavish," not "cheapest possible."\n\nThere is also a distinction worth knowing: you must be traveling away from your tax home, overnight or long enough to need rest. A day trip to a shoot in the next town is a mileage question, not a travel-expense question. And a companion who isn't an employee or doing real business work, such as a partner who comes along, generally has costs that aren't deductible.\n\n## International trips have their own rule\n\nFor travel outside North America, the IRS adds a more generous allowance. You can deduct the full transportation cost if any one of these is true:\n\n- The trip lasted a week or less, not counting the day you left.\n- Less than 25% of your time abroad was personal.\n- You didn't have substantial control over arranging the trip.\n- A major personal vacation wasn't a significant reason for going.\n\nIf none of those fits, you must allocate. You deduct only the business share of the transportation, based on the ratio of business days to total days. A ten-day trip with six business days means roughly 60% of the airfare.\n\nThis is the part where the Lisbon trip gets interesting. A five-day trip with filming scheduled each day looks very different from a three-week trip with four shooting days.\n\n## Proof is the whole game\n\nTravel is one of the categories where the IRS demands the most specific records. Under the substantiation rules, you need to show the amount, the dates and place, and the business purpose of each expense. Receipts show the first two. Almost nobody keeps the third.\n\nThe business purpose is what separates a deductible trip from a vacation with a story attached. Contemporaneous evidence is far more persuasive than a memory in April. Good evidence includes:\n\n- A brand contract, an invitation, or an email thread that explains why you went.\n- A shot list or content plan made before the trip.\n- A day-by-day note of what you did and which content it fed.\n- The published posts themselves, which connect the spending to income.\n\nIf you got a gifted hotel stay or a paid partnership, remember the income side too. The value of free goods and services can be taxable, so the trip and the income should tell one coherent story.\n\n## Your next moves\n\nYou can do all of this today, even for trips you've already taken.\n\n- List every trip from this year and write the reason you went in one sentence next to each. If the sentence starts with "I wanted to," mark that trip as probably personal.\n- Count business days versus personal days for each trip, using the rules above. Include travel days and weekends sandwiched between business days. Write the totals down.\n- Pull the proof: the brand email, the event confirmation, the shot list, the published links. Save them in a folder named for the trip.\n- Split the receipts: flights, hotel nights tied to business days, and 50% of business-day meals. Leave personal-day lodging and meals out.\n- Before your next trip, write a one-paragraph plan: why you're going, what you'll film, which days are work. Put it in your notes app the day you book. That timestamp is worth more than a perfect memory.\n\n## Where Aside fits\n\nThe hard part of travel deductions isn't the rule. It's remembering, months later, which day was work and what you were thinking when you booked. We built Aside, a tax companion for creators, around that gap: capture the purpose and the expense when they happen, and the evidence is there when the form asks. If you'd like a calmer way to keep those records, you can see how it works at aside.lumenlabs.works.