Mileage reimbursement sounds simple. An employee drives for business. The company reimburses them per mile or kilometer. End of story. But once your workforce operates across multiple countries, that simplicity disappears

What is a fair and defensible rate to reimburse an employee for using their personal vehicle for business?

Answering that globally is where complexity begins.

Why It Gets Complicated

Every country approaches mileage reimbursement differently:

• Some tax authorities publish official per-mile or per-kilometer rates.

• Some provide partial guidance.

• Some provide no formal guidance at all.

• Rates may vary by vehicle type, engine size, fuel source, or region.

• Electric vehicle reimbursement may be treated differently than traditional vehicles.

There is no universal global standard.

For finance teams, this creates a practical challenge: how do you apply a policy consistently when the underlying data varies — or doesn’t exist?

Without reliable benchmarks, companies risk:

• Over-reimbursing and increasing unnecessary cost

• Under-reimbursing and impacting employee experience

• Applying inconsistent logic across countries

• Struggling to explain or defend their methodology

Why We Built the Global Driving Reimbursement Report

At AIRINC, we believe good policy starts with good data.

And we really love data!

We saw teams repeatedly rebuilding the same country-by-country mileage research — validating rates, checking effective dates, filling gaps where no official guidance existed. It was time-consuming and often inconsistent.

So we asked a basic question:

What if there were a single, structured data foundation for global mileage reimbursement?

That question led to the Global Driving Reimbursement Report.

Back to Basics: What Good Looks Like

A strong global mileage reimbursement approach should be:

• Grounded in credible data

• Consistent in methodology

• Clear in its rationale

• Scalable across countries

Where governments publish official rates, those can serve as a benchmark. Where they do not, organizations need a standardized alternative based on real cost inputs.

The goal isn’t perfection. It’s consistency and defensibility.

A More Structured Foundation

The Global Driving Reimbursement Report supports this back-to-basics approach by consolidating:

• Government mileage reimbursement rates from 80+ countries (updated annually)

• Cost-of-living-based auto reimbursement rates for 100+ countries (updated semi-annually)

• Coverage across vehicle types, including electric vehicles

• Rates available in both miles and kilometers

By bringing this data into one centralized framework, organizations can apply a clear, repeatable methodology instead of researching and validating rates country by country.

The Bottom Line

Global mileage reimbursement doesn’t need to be a patchwork of local decisions.

When built on consistent data and clear logic, it becomes what it was meant to be: a fair, practical mechanism for reimbursing employees — applied confidently across borders.

For organizations managing business travel across borders, it offers a clearer path to fair and consistent driving reimbursement worldwide.

Back to basics. Powered by data.

Benchmark Surveys

Policy & Practice Benchmark Highlights: Long-Term Assignments

While alternative mobility types continually emerge, the traditional long-term assignment endures. For many organizations, LTAs continue to serve as the primary vehicle for leadership development, skills transfer, operational continuity, and strategic capability-building in key locations around the world. Download the survey highlights to see the policy structures and compensation approaches that companies are using for LTAs; policy practices regarding assignment allowances, family support, taxation, and more…