M&IE breakdown
Meals and incidental expenses (M&IE) are the daily GSA allowance for food and incidentals when a traveler is away from the official duty station. For FY2026 CONUS, GSA publishes a small set of total-dollar tiers. Each tier splits into breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a small incidental amount. Lodging is a separate ceiling on the destination page; this table only covers meals.
The first and last calendar days of a trip are reimbursed at 75 percent of the daily total, not at a made-up meal-by-meal cutoff. A trip that begins and ends on the same calendar day is paid at 75 percent once. Intervening full days use 100 percent of the destination tier. Those are GSA allocation rules, not tax advice, and they apply to the CONUS meals table rather than to lodging.
Use the calculator below to see how those percentages add up for a date range. Pick the daily total that matches the destination you are traveling to — the destination pages on this site already show that total next to each city. The table lists every CONUS tier GSA published for this fiscal year so you can check the breakfast/lunch/dinner split without opening a second bulletin.
| Total | Breakfast | Lunch | Dinner | Incidentals | First/last day |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $68 | $16 | $19 | $28 | $5 | $51.00 |
| $74 | $18 | $20 | $31 | $5 | $55.50 |
| $80 | $20 | $22 | $33 | $5 | $60.00 |
| $86 | $22 | $23 | $36 | $5 | $64.50 |
| $92 | $23 | $26 | $38 | $5 | $69.00 |
Source: gsa.gov M&IE breakdowns.
First/last-day calculator
Enter trip start and end dates and a daily M&IE total from the table. The tool counts calendar days in the range, tags the ends as first/last at 75 percent, and tags every day in between as a full day at 100 percent. It does not prorate hours within a day, and it does not apply lodging.