Build an expense policy template in minutes.

Answer a few questions, tune benchmarked limits, and watch a ready-to-share draft come together as you go.

Read about our learnings from the analysis powering this tool.

Expense policy

Preview

Acme Robotics

Meals
$75 / day
Travel
$650 / night
Software
Approval required

Expense Policy

This document is used to determine whether an expense is in or out of policy. When required, receipts must correspond to the expense. Duplicate receipt usage is forbidden.

Restrictions & Exceptions

Prohibited Spend

  • Personal expenses
  • Cash advances
  • Charitable donations
  • Political donations
  • Gambling spend
  • Cigarettes
  • Adult entertainment
  • Luxury car rentals
  • Private jets or charter services
  • Gift cards for employees
  • Child-care, babysitting, house-sitting, or pet-sitting services
  • Spa and personal grooming services
  • Travel for spouses, partners, family members, or non-employees (excluding prospects)

Get my benchmarked, AI-ready expense policy.

Built from best practices from over 10,000 real policies. Ready to share with your team or load into Ramp.

FAQ

An expense policy should cover common expense categories (travel, meals, software, entertainment), specific dollar thresholds for each, receipt requirements, submission deadlines, approval workflows, and a list of prohibited expenses. Most companies cover the categorical rules but miss the operational specifics. Despite meals being the most common expense category, a daily meal cap is only specified in 66% of policies; only 48% specify a submission deadline for expenses and/or expense requirements.

Policies with 3-5 expense categories have the lowest rate of policy uncertainty and/or violations. Policies with fewer than 3 categories treat distinct types of spending the same, while policies with 6 or more tend to create distinctions that do not matter in practice. Within each category, sub-types that involve meaningfully different spending (like solo meals vs. client dinners) should have their own limits.

It depends on your company's spend patterns, but it should be revisited especially when team size, key travel markets, or IRS mileage and per diem rates change. Companies using Ramp's Policy Agent to automate expense reviews update their policies at 7x the rate of those without it, typically refining limits after seeing where employees consistently push boundaries or where approvers make exceptions.

Based on Ramp’s analysis of 10,000 company expense policies, the median limits are: $650 for a domestic one-way flight, $250 per night for hotels, $75 per day for meals, and $0.725 per mile for mileage (the 2026 IRS standard rate, which most companies adopt rather than setting their own). These vary by company size and industry.

Across 50,000+ businesses on Ramp, out-of-policy spend declines by 62% over two years. Policy flags and manager change requests follow the same pattern, declining 60% and 52% respectively as employees adjust to automated enforcement and policies get refined over time.

Ramp's Policy Agent reviews every expense in real time against your written policy, approving in-policy spend, flagging violations, requesting missing receipts, and suggesting policy updates. Three out of four in-policy expenses are approved without a human ever seeing them, with exceptions escalated to a manager. Customers are saving 4-5 hours of manual review per week and catching 7x more out-of-policy spend.