Generally, your tax home is your regular place of business or post of duty, regardless of where you maintain your family home. It includes the entire city or general area in which your business or work is located.
If you have more than one regular place of business, your tax home is your main place of business. See Main place of business or work, later.
This is important because, if you have a tax home and you travel out of town on business, you can deduct your travel expenses as a work expense as long as you are self-employed and file a schedule C. Your deductible travel expenses are your actual expense for transportation, your actual expense for lodging, and 50% of your actual expense for meals, or 50% of the federal meal per diem rate for the area where you are traveling.
You can never deduct your living expenses at your Tax Home as work expenses, although you might qualify for the home office deduction if you meet all the usual rules for that.
If you have no tax home because you don't have a main place of work, then you can't deduct any travel back and forth.
Once you decide where your tax home is, you have two additional considerations for deducting travel to the other location.
1. You can only deduct actual lodging costs. This is easy to do if you use hotels or other short term rentals. I don't know what rules the IRS would apply if you got a permanent apartment. It might be that they would allow a deduction for rent since the annual rent is probably less than the combined costs of short term rentals. Or it might be they would require you to allocate your rent to the # of days lived in the apartment and only deduct a percentage of your rent, utilities and so on.
2. The bigger problem is that travel is only deductible if the need to work away from your tax home is temporary, meaning that it is planned to last, and actually does last, one year or less. If the job is longer than a year, or is indeterminate, the travel expenses are never deductible.
How does this apply if you are bouncing back and forth? The publication does not give a firm indication. The examples focus on steady assignments--for example, you go to work a 9 month assignment at your company's second location out of state. The guidance doesn't really cover a long term arrangement made up of multiple short term trips back and forth.
My thinking is that if this is a long-term (>1 year) or indefinite arrangement, then the IRS view would either be that the expenses are not deductible because the travel is not temporary, or they are not deductible because you have no tax home. And if the expenses aren't deductible, then you should make whatever arrangements are most convenient for you.
You may want professional advice on this.
