Business travel is a large and closely budgeted part of US tourism, but the official measure of what companies spend, the public rates that price a mile and a day on the road, and the share of travel that is business are published in separate places. We assemble them. Using Table 3 of the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) Tourism Satellite Accounts, private-sector business travel by US residents inside the United States reached USD 374.5 billion in 2023, 26.3% above 2019 in current dollars and 27.1% of US residents' travel spending in the country; including travel abroad and international airfares it was USD 409.4 billion. Hotels were the largest category (USD 92.5 billion, 24.7%), and while hotel spending was 25.7% above 2019, business spending on domestic airfares was 42.6% below it. Across the 1999–2016 release the business share of travel spending fell from 34.8% to 30.1%. An industry forecast in constant 2025 dollars puts 2026 business travel in the US at USD 319.1 billion, 86.7% of 2019, with real spending per domestic business trip down from USD 698 to USD 644. The IRS business mileage rate rose from 27.5 cents in 1991 to 76 cents from July 2026; the standard federal per diem rises from USD 178 to USD 181 a day in fiscal 2027, with locality lodging caps up to USD 499 a night. Work-related business trips were 3.5% of household trips in 2022. We keep BEA releases and the two industry forecasts apart and report only arithmetic on published figures.
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Oyelaran et al. (2026) studied this question.
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