Posted on March 24th, 2014

Dear Friend:

As a teacher or professor, you’ve probably seen advertisements for job-related courses in exotic locales. You may have wondered whether such courses are tax-deductible. The answer depends on the specifics of the course and of your job situation.

If the education comes from the travel itself, the expenses aren’t deductible. For example, a French teacher can’t deduct the cost of a trip to France to maintain familiarity with the French language and culture.

Education in the form of a course that is related to your job as a teacher or professor may be deductible, but only if the course either maintains or improves skills that you need for your job, or meets your employer’s requirements or the requirements of applicable law or regulations to maintain your job or salary.

But a course won’t be deductible if it is needed to meet the minimum requirements to be a teacher. “Minimum requirements” refers to the college degree or minimum number of college hours required of a person hired as a teacher. For example, if state law requires beginning high school teachers to have a bachelor’s degree and to complete a fifth year of training within 10 years of hire, the costs of the getting the bachelor’s degree won’t be deductible, but the costs of the fifth year will.

Once you have met the minimum requirements in your own state, you are considered to have met them in all states. Any additional courses you need to be certified in another state will qualify for deduction.

Education that qualifies you for a new trade or business is not deductible. But a change from elementary school teacher to secondary school teacher, from teacher of one subject to teacher of another, or from classroom teacher to guidance counselor or school administrator isn’t considered a change to a new business.

If a course you’ve taken qualifies under the above rules, you can deduct your course expenses, such as tuition, fees, books, and supplies. Whether you can also deduct your travel, meal, and lodging expenses while away from home to take the course depends on the main purpose of the trip.

If the trip was mainly job-related, you can deduct the costs of travel, meals, and lodging, except for the part that is allocable to personal activities, such as sightseeing, recreation, or social visiting. If the trip was mainly personal, travel expenses aren’t deductible, and meals and lodging are deductible only for the time that you attend the qualifying courses. Determining the purpose of the trip is largely a matter of comparing the time spent on job-related activities with time spent on personal activities.

To illustrate how these rules work, let’s examine two cases that produced opposite results. In the first case, a teacher named Gloria went to Hawaii to attend a course on Hawaiian culture. In the second case, another teacher named Ann travelled to Thailand, Cambodia, and Indonesia to take a course on Southeast Asian religious traditions.

At first glance, the two courses appear similar. Yet only Ann got to deduct her travel expenses. What caused the difference?

Gloria, who was a science teacher, couldn’t show a connection between her teaching and the course on Hawaiian culture. The most she could say was that the course gave her “better understanding of people.” That wasn’t enough to justify the deduction.

Ann, who was an English teacher and chaired her high school’s English department, was able to show how she applied what she learned to work more effectively with her Asian students and introduce new literary works into the curriculum.

In addition, the court was impressed by the fact that the course featured lectures by university professors and a substantial reading list. While the course did include visits to tourist sites, each visit served an educational purpose.

Ann was also able to prove that she spent most of her travel time on course activity. Because her trip was mainly job-related, Ann could deduct all of her expenses, including tuition, airfare, meals, and lodging.

Ann’s successful experience suggests guidelines that you can follow to help you nail down the deduction for job-related education:

• Choose either a course that you must take in order to keep your job or salary or one that enhances your job skills in specific ways. Be sure that you can identify the ways in which your job skills were enhanced.
• Make sure that the course you choose has a structured academic component and isn’t just a glorified vacation. For example, there should be regular lectures, a syllabus, and reading assignments.
• If the course work occupied the majority of your time on the trip, keep records to prove that fact. If the trip was primarily personal, you should still keep a record of your meals and lodging expenses for the time that you attended the course, since those expenses are deductible.

I hope this overview of the deductibility of teachers’ travel expenses for job-related education is helpful. Feel free to call me if you have specific questions or need additional information.