What Is the Federal Travel Regulation (FTR)? The Complete Guide

Ask ten federal employees what governs their travel claim and you will get ten shrugs. The rulebook exists all the same. It sets the lodging cap, the meal allowance, the mileage rate, and the paperwork trail behind almost every official government trip taken in the United States.

What the FTR actually is

The FTR sits in 41 CFR, Chapters 300 through 304. GSA describes it as the regulation that "summarizes the travel and relocation policy for all federal civilian employees and others authorized to travel at the government's expense" (see the official GSA policy page). It implements statutory requirements and Executive Branch policy, turning laws passed by Congress into the day-to-day rules an agency travel office actually applies.

The chapters break down by subject. Chapter 300 covers general provisions and definitions. Chapter 301 is the one most travellers care about: temporary duty (TDY) travel, covering transportation, lodging, meals and incidental expenses (M&IE), and special situations like conferences or emergency travel. Chapters 302 and 303 deal with relocation, for employees who permanently move for a job. Chapter 304 covers travel paid for by a non-federal source, such as a conference host picking up part of the bill. You can read the current text on eCFR.gov, which GSA keeps updated as the authoritative version.

In December 2025, GSA finalised a rule reorganising and streamlining large parts of the FTR, cutting duplicated text and tidying the structure. The substance did not change much. The point of the rewrite was efficiency, not a new set of rules. If you are reading an older PDF copy of the FTR, check eCFR first, because section numbers can shift after a reorganisation like this.

Who has to follow it

The FTR applies to federal civilian employees and to anyone else authorised to travel at government expense, including some contractors, grantees, and invitational travellers depending on how their travel order is written. It does not apply to everyone in federal service, though. Uniformed military personnel and Department of Defense civilians follow a different rulebook, and diplomats and other foreign affairs staff posted overseas follow yet another one. That split trips people up constantly, so it is worth spelling out properly.

Why the FTR exists

Before a single, unified travel regulation existed, agencies set their own reimbursement rules. That meant one department might pay a generous lodging rate in Chicago while another capped it much lower for the same trip, with no shared logic behind the numbers. Congress and GSA moved to a common framework so that travel reimbursement would be fair, defensible, and auditable across the whole executive branch. A single rulebook means an inspector general, a congressional committee, or a taxpayer can check any travel voucher against the same standard, no matter which agency issued it.

That auditability is the whole point. Every dollar of per diem paid out under the FTR traces back to a published rate, a specific regulation section, and a documented business purpose. It is not a bureaucratic nicety; it is what stops travel spending turning into a black box.

The chain of authority: statute, FTR, and GSA rate tables

It helps to think of federal travel reimbursement as three layers stacked on top of each other.

1. Congress passes the underlying statutes that authorise government travel reimbursement in the first place.
2. GSA writes the FTR (41 CFR Chapters 300-304) to implement those statutes as detailed, enforceable rules.
3. GSA then publishes the actual numbers, the CONUS per diem rate tables, under the authority the FTR grants it.

Agencies and contractors sit underneath all three layers. They do not get to invent their own per diem figures. For fiscal year 2026, the GSA standard CONUS rate is $110 a night for lodging and $68 a day for meals and incidental expenses, and that number is what most agency travel systems default to unless a traveller's destination has its own published rate. You can check any city's current figure with our own per diem calculator, which pulls from the same GSA tables. For background on how the standard rate is set and applied, see our guide to the standard CONUS per diem rate, and for a broader primer start with what is per diem.

FTR vs JTR vs DSSR: three rulebooks, three audiences

This is the confusion that catches almost everyone out at some point. Three different regulations govern government travel, and which one applies depends entirely on who you are and where you are going.

The Defense Travel Management Office maintains the JTR, which "implements policy and law to establish travel and transportation allowances for Uniformed Service members, DoD civilian employees, and others traveling at the DoD's expense." It is a genuinely separate document from the FTR, not a DoD-branded copy of it, though the two share plenty of common structure because they trace back to related statutes.

The DSSR works the same way for foreign affairs staff. If you are a civilian employee posted to a US embassy in, say, Nairobi or Manila, your lodging and meal allowances come from the DSSR, not the FTR, even though you are still a federal civilian employee. Outside the continental US but still on domestic soil, or in the small set of non-foreign overseas locations, rates typically follow a Per Diem Committee process rather than the ordinary CONUS table.

None of this changes how mileage reimbursement works, incidentally. The IRS sets a single national standard mileage rate that most agencies and employers reference regardless of which travel regulation otherwise applies; for 2026 it opened at 72.5 cents a mile for business travel, 20.5 cents for medical or moving travel, and 14 cents for charitable driving, effective from 1 January 2026, then rose to 76 cents (23.5 cents medical/moving) from 1 July 2026 after a mid-year adjustment. Our mileage reimbursement calculator applies the current figure automatically.

“The FTR is a regulation contained in 41 CFR, Chapters 300 through 304, which implements statutory requirements and Executive Branch policies for travel by Federal civilian employees and others authorized to travel at Government expense.”

— U.S. General Services Administration, gsa.gov

How the FAR ties contractor travel back to the FTR

None of this stays confined to government employees. If you run a business that bills the federal government for a contract, and that contract lets you charge travel costs, the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) decides what you can actually claim. The relevant clause is FAR 31.205-46, and it is blunt about the ceiling: lodging, meals, and incidental expenses are only reasonable and allowable if they do not exceed, on a daily basis, the maximum per diem rates in effect at the time of travel. For travel inside the continental US, that means the FTR-derived GSA rates. For Alaska, Hawaii, and outlying US areas, it points to JTR figures, and for travel abroad it points to the DSSR. Higher actual costs can sometimes be allowed in special or unusual circumstances, but only with written justification and, for repeated use of an area, advance contracting officer approval.

In practice, this is why a government contractor's expense policy usually mirrors GSA per diem tables almost exactly. It is not corporate thriftiness. It is the FAR making anything above the ceiling an unallowable cost unless the contractor can prove the exception applies. Our guide to per diem for government contractors walks through how firms build compliant travel policies around this rule.

What happens when a claim goes above the FTR ceiling

For a federal employee, going over the published per diem rate does not automatically get rejected outright, but it does trigger extra scrutiny. Most agencies require advance approval for actual expense reimbursement above the standard or locality rate, usually capped at up to 300% of the applicable per diem under FTR provisions for high-cost or unusual situations, such as a conference held in a venue with no cheaper lodging nearby. Without that pre-approval on file, the excess is typically treated as unallowable and either rejected by the approving official or clawed back through payroll.

For a contractor billing the government, the stakes are sharper. Costs claimed above the FAR-referenced ceiling without the required written justification and, where needed, contracting officer sign-off, are simply unallowable. That is not a grey area open to negotiation after the fact; auditors check travel vouchers precisely because the rule is written to be checked. Keep the paper trail: dates, destination, business purpose, and the traveller's name, matched against the rate table for that location and date.

Using the FTR day to day

You rarely need to read the raw regulation text to stay compliant. What you need is the current rate for your destination and the discipline to keep receipts and travel orders that match it. Look up the applicable figure with our per diem calculator before booking, and check our methodology page if you want to see exactly how we source and update GSA's published numbers. For a deeper dive into how GSA sets and revises those specific rates each fiscal year, read GSA per diem rates explained.

The FTR will probably never be exciting reading. It does not need to be. Its job is to make sure a lodging claim in Denver and a lodging claim in Des Moines get judged against the same yardstick, and that anyone checking the books later can see exactly why a reimbursement was approved. Know which of the three rulebooks applies to you, check the current rate before you travel, and keep your paperwork tidy. That covers most of what the regulation actually asks of you.