(2023) Can I claim expenses for "collective transport"?

Collective transport is provided when your employer provides a vehicle for travel between your home and workplace or when, for example, you travel by bus. Whether you can claim travel expenses depends on whether you actually incurred any costs or if the journeys were free of charge for you. If you did not make any contributions, you are not entitled to a travel allowance.

If you had to bear a share of the costs for the collective transport, you can claim this amount with proof. The travel allowance is not applicable here.

In 2021, the Federal Fiscal Court made a groundbreaking decision on the subject of "travel to the meeting point". According to this, if the meeting point is not typically visited on a daily basis, the journeys there can be deducted at business travel rates and not just with the commuter allowance (BFH ruling of 19.4.2021, VI R 6/19). In the underlying case, a construction machine operator was often deployed on multi-day remote construction sites. According to the BFH, this does not constitute a typical daily visit to the employer's meeting point. Consequently, the costs to the meeting point are to be considered at 30 cents per kilometre driven.

Recently, the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Finance Court ruled that there are no journeys to the meeting point if a furniture fitter parks the company lorry at the roadside or in a - changing - public car park after work, drives home with his own car, and takes over the lorry again the next morning (ruling of 1.9.2022, 2 K 104/19).