17.9 Travel Costs May Be Medical Deductions
Travel costs to a doctor’s office, hospital, or clinic where you, your spouse, or your dependents receive medical care are deductible medical expenses, subject to the AGI floor (7.5% of AGI for 2012; see 17.1). Commuting to work is not a medical expense, even if your condition requires you to make special travel arrangements.
Deductible travel includes fares for buses, taxis or trains, and the costs of hiring a car service or ambulance to obtain medical care. Plane fares to another city are allowed by the IRS so long as obtaining medical care is the primary purpose of the trip; see below for lodging expense rule.
If you used your automobile in 2012 to obtain medical care, you may deduct a flat IRS rate of 23 cents a mile. In addition, you may deduct parking fees and tolls. If, however, auto expenses exceed this standard mileage rate, you may deduct your actual out-of-pocket costs for gas, oil, repairs, tolls, and parking fees. Do not include depreciation, general maintenance, or car insurance. The cost, as well as the operating and repair costs, of a wheelchair, autoette, or special auto device for a handicapped person is deductible if not used mainly for commuting.
Medical conferences.
Travel costs and admission fees to a medical conference are deductible medical expenses if an illness suffered by you, your spouse, or your dependents is the subject of the conference. For example, the IRS allowed a parent to deduct the registration fees and cost of traveling to a medical conference dealing with treatment options for a disease suffered by her dependent child. The child’s doctor had recommended the conference. During the conference, most of the parent’s time was spent attending sessions on her child’s condition. Any recreational activities were secondary. If the parent had attended the conference because of her own condition the same deductions would have been allowed.
Lodging and meals while attending the conference are not deductible; these are allowed only if treatment is received at a licensed hospital or similar facility, as discussed below.
Caution
Lodging expenses.
If you are receiving inpatient care at a hospital or similar facility, your expenses, including lodging and meals, are deductible. If you are not an inpatient, lodging expenses while away from home are deductible as medical expenses if the trip is primarily to receive treatment from a doctor in a licensed hospital, hospital-related outpatient facility, or a facility equivalent to a hospital. Meal expenses are not deductible unless they are paid as part of inpatient care.
The deduction for lodging while receiving treatment as an outpatient at a licensed hospital, clinic, or hospital-equivalent facility is limited to $50 per night per person. For example, the limit is $100 if a parent travels with a sick child. The IRS ruled that the $50 allowance could be claimed by a parent for a six-week hotel stay while her eight-year-old daughter was treated in a nearby hospital for serious injuries received in an automobile accident. The mother’s presence was necessary so that she could sign release forms.
Deductible Transportation Costs
Examples of travel costs that have been treated as medical expenses by IRS rulings or court decisions are:
- Nurse’s fare if nurse is required on trip
- Parent’s fare if parent is needed to accompany child who requires medical care
- Parent’s fare to visit his child at an institution where the visits are prescribed by a doctor
- Trip to visit specialist in another city
- Airplane fare to a distant city in which a patient used to live to have a checkup by a family doctor living there. That he could have received the same examination in the city in which he presently lived did not bar his deduction.
- Trip to escape a climate that is bad for a specific condition. For example, the cost of a trip from a northern state to Florida during the winter on the advice of a doctor to relieve a chronic heart condition is deductible. The cost of a trip made solely to improve a post-operative condition by a person recovering from a throat operation was ruled deductible.
- Travel to an Alcoholics Anonymous club meeting if membership in the group has been advised by a doctor
- Disabled veteran’s commuting expenses where a doctor prescribed work and driving as therapy
- Wife’s trip to provide nursing care for an ailing husband in a distant city. The trip was ordered by her husband’s doctor as a necessity.
- Driving prescribed as therapy
- Travel costs of kidney transplant donor or prospective donor
Nondeductible Transportation Costs
- Commuting to work
- Trip for the general improvement of your health
- Traveling to areas of favorable climates during the year for general health reasons, rather than living permanently in a locality suitable for your health
- Meals while on a trip for outpatient medical treatment—even if cost of transportation is a valid medical cost. However, a court has allowed the deduction of the extra cost of specially prepared food.
- Trip to get “spiritual” rather than medical aid. For example, the cost of a trip to the Shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes is not deductible.
- Moving a family to a climate more suitable to an ill mother’s condition. Only the mother’s travel costs are deductible.
- Moving household furnishings to area advised by physician
- Operating an auto or special vehicle to go to work because of a disability
- Convalescence cruise advised by a doctor for a patient recovering from pneumonia
- Loss on sale of car bought for medical travel
- Medical seminar cruise taken by patient whose condition was reviewed by physicians taking the cruise