Lithuanian per diems from 1 October 2026: what changed

Since 1 October 2026, amendments to Lithuanian Government Resolution No. 526 on per diems and other business trip expenses have applied. The per diem amounts for each country and city did not change. What changed is how they apply: to a short first or last day, to a one-day trip within Lithuania, and to when a company may pay less than the maximum. If you own or manage a Lithuanian company from abroad, these are the three changes your finance team will be applying, and the internal rules they may ask you to sign.

A short first or last day: 20% of the per diem

If the first and/or last day of a business trip lasts less than four hours, the per diem for that day is 20% of the set amount. Travel time from the employer's designated workplace and back counts as trip time.

The practical consequence is that dates alone are no longer enough. To calculate the first and last day correctly, accounting needs to know when the employee left and when they came back. If your trip order or expense report template only has dates, departure and return times are the first thing to add.

A one-day trip within Lithuania: no per diem

For trips within Lithuania, a per diem is paid only when the trip lasts longer than one trip day. Driving to a client in another city and returning the same evening no longer earns one. Trips abroad are not affected by this limit.

The other costs of such a trip — travel, fuel, parking — are reimbursed as before, against documents. On a one-day trip, the job that matters is collecting the receipts, not calculating a per diem.

Reducing per diems: the 50% and 65% floors

• •A collective agreement may not set per diems below 50% of the maximum.
• •A company's internal rules (without a collective agreement) may not set them below 65%, and only for trips lasting at least seven days.
• •For trips shorter than seven days, per diems can no longer be reduced through internal rules.

If your company's travel policy says, for example, that "all trips are paid at 50% of the per diem" and there is no collective agreement, that clause no longer works from October. It needs to be rewritten — and since it is usually the director who signs it, this is a decision that reaches management, not only payroll.

What to review in your company

• •Your travel policy or internal act: does any reduction respect the 65% floor and the seven-day condition?
• •Your collective agreement, if you have one: are the amounts at least 50%?
• •Your trip order template: does it record departure and return times, not only dates?
• •One-day domestic trips: make sure they no longer slip into the per diem calculation out of habit.

The per diem amounts for each country and city are published in the annex to Resolution No. 526 in Lithuania's official register of legal acts. Use those rather than tables in articles, which go out of date.

Where Ezura helps, and where it doesn't

Ezura does not calculate per diems — that stays in your payroll process. Ezura handles everything around them: the trip request and its approval, the trip order generated from your company's own template, receipts photographed on a phone during the trip, and the expense report — one PDF with every receipt attached, with company-card and own-money spending totalled separately and expenses in other currencies summed per currency.

For a manager, that means one place to see who travelled where, what was approved and by whom, and what the trip actually cost — without waiting for an envelope of receipts at month end.