As a delivery driver working as an independent contractor, you can claim the mileage deduction by multiplying your business miles by the IRS standard rate — 72.5 cents per mile for 2026 — and reporting the total on Line 9 of Schedule C.1Internal Revenue Service. IRS Sets 2026 Business Standard Mileage Rate at 72.5 Cents Per Mile, Up 2.5 Cents A driver who logs 20,000 business miles writes off $14,500 before any other deduction is considered. The catch is that the IRS won’t take your word for the miles. You need a contemporaneous log, and you need to know which miles actually count.
Who Can Claim It
The deduction is built for self-employed drivers. If you receive a 1099 from DoorDash, Uber Eats, Instacart, Amazon Flex, or a similar platform, you report your earnings on Schedule C and deduct ordinary and necessary business expenses, vehicle costs among them.2Internal Revenue Service. About Schedule C (Form 1040), Profit or Loss From Business3Internal Revenue Service. Heres the 411 on Who Can Deduct Car Expenses on Their Tax Returns
If you drive as a W-2 employee, this article isn’t really for you. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act suspended unreimbursed employee business expense deductions from 2018 through 2025, and even once that suspension lifts, employees can only claim vehicle costs as a miscellaneous itemized deduction subject to a 2% AGI floor, and only if they itemize.4Congress.gov. Expiring Provisions in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act If your employer already reimburses your mileage through an accountable plan, you claim nothing because the expense is covered.5Internal Revenue Service. Publication 463 (2025) Travel, Gift, and Car Expenses
Which Miles Count
Only miles driven for a business purpose are deductible, and the line between business and personal is where most drivers get in trouble.
Commuting from home to a fixed workplace is never deductible. Delivery drivers usually don’t have a fixed workplace, though, and that opens a door. If you use a dedicated space in your home exclusively and regularly for the administrative side of your work — tracking earnings, managing app settings, planning routes — your home qualifies as your principal place of business.6Internal Revenue Service. Business Use of Home With that designation in place, the first trip from home to a pickup and the last trip home at the end of your shift both count as business miles. Without it, those trips look like commuting.
Between deliveries, driving to pick up an order, or repositioning to a busier zone — all business. Personal errands slipped into a shift are not. Grab lunch, run to the bank, pick up your kids, and the detour miles come out of the business total even if the miles before and after stay in it. Sloppy separation here is what loses the deduction in an audit.
Standard Rate or Actual Expenses
You have two ways to calculate the deduction.
The standard mileage rate is the simpler one. Multiply business miles by 72.5 cents for 2026 and you’re done.7Internal Revenue Service. IRS Notice 2026-10 – 2026 Standard Mileage Rates The rate is designed to cover gas, insurance, maintenance, repairs, and depreciation, so you don’t need fuel receipts or oil change records. Business-related parking fees and tolls come on top of the per-mile figure, not baked into it, so keep those receipts separately.8Internal Revenue Service. Topic No. 510, Business Use of Car
The actual expense method means tracking every dollar you spend on the car — fuel, oil changes, tires, repairs, insurance, registration, depreciation or lease payments — then multiplying the total by your business-use percentage.8Internal Revenue Service. Topic No. 510, Business Use of Car If you drove 30,000 miles total and 22,500 were for deliveries, your business percentage is 75%. Actual costs of $8,000 would give you a $6,000 deduction. The same 22,500 miles at the standard rate would be $16,312.50. The gap can be dramatic and it doesn’t always favor the same method. A paid-off fuel-efficient car almost always does better on the standard rate. A newer vehicle with a loan and high insurance sometimes wins on actual expenses.
The choice you make in the first year matters. Start with the standard rate and you can switch to actual expenses in any later year. Start with actual expenses and claim MACRS depreciation, Section 179, or bonus depreciation — which is what most people using actual expenses do — and you can never switch to the standard rate for that vehicle.5Internal Revenue Service. Publication 463 (2025) Travel, Gift, and Car Expenses For a leased vehicle, choosing the standard rate locks you into it for the entire lease. A few situations also disqualify the standard rate outright: operating five or more vehicles at once, claiming MACRS or Section 179 on the car, or claiming actual expenses on a leased vehicle after 1997.8Internal Revenue Service. Topic No. 510, Business Use of Car For a typical driver with one personal car, none of those apply.
For most delivery drivers, the standard rate is the better place to start. It’s simpler, it preserves your options, and 72.5 cents is generous enough that actual expenses only pull ahead when the vehicle is expensive to own.
The Records You Need
This is where deductions live or die. The IRS wants records created at or near the time of each trip, not reconstructed from memory in April. Each log entry needs four things:9eCFR. 26 CFR 1.274-5A – Substantiation Requirements
- The date of the trip.
- The destination — restaurant, customer address, or delivery zone.
- The business purpose, such as “Uber Eats deliveries, downtown area.”
- The miles driven.
Paper notebook, spreadsheet, or a mileage app like Everlance, Stride, or MileIQ all work. The apps automate GPS capture, but you’re still responsible for classifying each trip and noting the purpose. The IRS applies the same standards no matter how the data was collected.10Internal Revenue Service. Revenue Procedure 98-25
If you use the actual expense method, the paperwork grows. Save every fuel receipt, repair invoice, insurance premium notice, registration renewal, and loan or lease statement. You’ll also need the vehicle’s purchase price and the date you first put it into business use for depreciation.
Reporting It on Schedule C
Delivery income goes in Part I of Schedule C. The mileage deduction, whether calculated by the standard rate or actual expenses, lands on Line 9, “Car and truck expenses.”11Internal Revenue Service. 2025 Schedule C (Form 1040) Schedule C then produces your net profit, which flows to your Form 1040.
If you’re claiming vehicle expenses on Line 9 and don’t have to file Form 4562, you also complete Part IV of Schedule C, “Information on Your Vehicle.” It asks for total mileage, business miles, commuting miles, and the date the vehicle was placed in service. Two questions ask whether you have written evidence and whether that evidence is contemporaneous. You want to answer yes to both.
Drivers using actual expenses with depreciation will generally file Form 4562 instead, and vehicle information moves there.
The Bonus Nobody Talks About
Your mileage deduction lowers more than income tax. Because it reduces net profit on Schedule C, it also shrinks the amount subject to self-employment tax — the 15.3% that funds Social Security (12.4%) and Medicare (2.9%).12Internal Revenue Service. Self-Employment Tax (Social Security and Medicare Taxes) A $14,500 mileage deduction saves income tax at your marginal rate and roughly $2,219 in self-employment tax on top of that (15.3% × 92.35% × $14,500). Easy money to leave on the table if you skip the log.
Don’t Forget Quarterly Estimates
Independent contractors have no withholding. If you expect to owe $1,000 or more in federal tax for the year, and most full-time delivery drivers will, you’re required to make quarterly estimated payments covering income tax and self-employment tax both.13Internal Revenue Service. Estimated Taxes Deadlines fall in April, June, September, and the following January. Underpay and you owe a penalty even if you end up with a refund at filing. The safe harbor is paying at least 90% of the current year’s tax or 100% of last year’s, whichever is smaller. Because the mileage deduction directly changes what you owe each quarter, tracking miles all year long — not just before you file — gives you a much better estimate to work from.
If You Get Audited
Mileage deductions draw IRS scrutiny because they’re easy to inflate and hard to verify without good records. If you’re audited and can’t produce a contemporaneous log with dates, destinations, purposes, and distances, the IRS will disallow part or all of the deduction. The burden of proof is entirely yours.
A disallowed deduction raises your taxable income, so you’ll owe additional income tax and self-employment tax on the difference. If the IRS finds negligence or a substantial understatement of tax, a 20% accuracy-related penalty applies on top of the back taxes. For individuals, a substantial understatement means the understatement exceeds the greater of 10% of the tax that should have been shown or $5,000.14Internal Revenue Service. Accuracy-Related Penalty Interest runs from the original due date on all of it.
Use a mileage app from day one and review it weekly to keep trips classified correctly. The drivers who lose these audits are the ones trying to reconstruct a year of driving from memory. Your records don’t need to be perfect. They do need to be real.