How Gig Workers Track Mileage for Tax Savings

If you drive for a rideshare or delivery platform, tracking mileage for taxes means recording every business trip as it happens with four pieces of information (date, destination, purpose, and miles), then multiplying your yearly business miles by the IRS standard rate. For 2026 that rate is 72.5 cents per mile, so 15,000 business miles cuts $10,875 off the profit you owe tax on.¹ Because gig income is taxed on net profit rather than gross earnings, this one habit is often the largest deduction on a driver’s return.

Which Miles You Can Actually Deduct

Federal law lets you deduct ordinary and necessary expenses of running a business, and vehicle costs qualify.² The catch is which miles count.

Commuting never counts. If you have no regular office, the drive from home to your first pickup or first delivery of the day is commuting, and so is the drive home from your last stop.³ Those miles stay off your log no matter how far you drive.

Once you’re on the clock, the miles between jobs are business miles. For a delivery courier that’s the drive from the restaurant to the customer and from the drop-off to the next pickup. For a rideshare driver it’s the miles between a drop-off and the next passenger. You’re already at work, so the trips between stops are work trips.

One boundary worth knowing: if your home qualifies as your principal place of business, trips out from home can shift from commuting to business travel. The rules for when a home office changes that analysis are in IRS Publication 463, and they turn on how you actually use the space.

What Each Trip Entry Needs

The IRS won’t accept round estimates or an end-of-year guess. The statute requires you to substantiate vehicle expenses with records showing the amount, the time and place, and the business purpose of each trip.⁴ Publication 463 turns that into a working checklist. Every entry needs four things:⁵

The date of the trip.
The destination (city, town, or area).
A brief business purpose, like “delivered food order” or “drove passenger to airport.”
The mileage, either as start and stop odometer readings or as a total.

Log any tolls or parking connected to the trip in the same entry. Records made at or near the time of the trip carry far more weight than anything reconstructed later. A spreadsheet you assemble the week before filing is exactly what auditors reject. When deductions get disallowed for lack of contemporaneous records, you owe the extra tax plus interest.

Practical Ways to Log Your Miles

The IRS cares about the data, not the format. Consistency and completeness are what matter.

A paper logbook in the car is the simplest option. You write the odometer reading when you start driving for work and again when you stop. It forces real-time recording. It also disappears with one lost notebook, so photograph each completed page as a backup.

A spreadsheet works if you prefer entering data at the end of each shift. You can run monthly totals and see the year building. The failure mode is falling behind. A week of unlogged trips becomes a month, and by April you’re guessing.

GPS-based mileage apps are the most popular option among full-time drivers. They detect trips automatically, capture timestamps and routes, and let you swipe each trip as business or personal. Most produce an IRS-ready report at year-end. The tradeoff is that you still have to classify trips regularly. An app that logs every drive without categorization isn’t much better than no log at all.

Turning the Log Into a Deduction

Once you have the miles, you pick one of two methods to convert them into dollars.

Standard Mileage Rate

For 2026, multiply business miles by 72.5 cents.¹ A driver with 20,000 business miles deducts $14,500. The rate is meant to cover gas, oil, repairs, tires, insurance, registration, and depreciation, so you don’t track those separately.

Timing matters. You must choose the standard rate in the first year you use the car for business. After that, you can switch to actual expenses if it works out better. Start with actual expenses instead, and you generally can’t move that vehicle to the standard rate later. For a leased car, if you pick the standard rate you have to stay with it for the entire lease, renewals included.⁶

Actual Expense Method

Here you track every operating cost during the year: gas, oil changes, repairs, tires, insurance, registration, and depreciation. Then you calculate what share of your total driving was business. Drive 30,000 miles with 20,000 for work, and your business-use percentage is about 67%, which you apply to the total costs.⁶ This method tends to favor drivers with newer or more expensive vehicles where depreciation is heavy. It also demands receipts for every category on top of the mileage log. For most gig workers in a mid-range car, the standard rate wins on both simplicity and dollars.

Parking and Tolls

Whichever method you use, business parking fees and tolls are deductible on top of the mileage or actual-expense figure.⁶ Parking at a regular workplace is a commuting cost and doesn’t count. A bridge toll on the way to a delivery or parking at a customer’s building does. Record these next to the trip they belong to.

What the Deduction Is Actually Worth

Mileage doesn’t just reduce income tax. It also reduces self-employment tax, the 15.3% levy that funds Social Security and Medicare.⁷ That’s where the real money hides.

Take a rideshare driver who earns $50,000 and logs 18,000 business miles. At 72.5 cents, the deduction is $13,050, and taxable profit drops to $36,950. The savings hit both income tax and the 15.3% self-employment tax on that profit. Depending on the bracket, the combined savings from those tracked miles can top $4,500. Skip the tracking and you pay tax on money that went to gas and tires.

Accurate tracking mid-year also feeds your quarterly estimated tax payments. If you expect to owe $1,000 or more at filing, the IRS requires four estimated payments across the year.⁸ The mileage number lowers the profit those payments are based on, which keeps you from overpaying or underpaying as you go.

Where the Number Goes on Your Return

Gig workers report business income and expenses on Schedule C of Form 1040.⁹ The mileage deduction appears in the vehicle expense section. Part IV of Schedule C asks specific questions: when you placed the car in service for business, total miles for the year, business miles, whether another vehicle was available for personal use, and whether you have written evidence to back the deduction.

Claiming depreciation or using the actual expense method may also require Form 4562, which covers depreciation and listed property.¹⁰ Standard-rate drivers with no other depreciation claims can usually skip it.

How Long to Keep the Log

Your mileage log doesn’t go in with the return, but the IRS can ask for it during an audit. Keep the records at least three years after you file the return they support.¹¹ Your 2026 log should sit somewhere safe until at least 2030.

When the IRS challenges a deduction, the question is always whether your records hold up. A detailed log built throughout the year is strong evidence. A log rebuilt from memory after an IRS letter arrives is treated as almost worthless. Drivers who can’t produce adequate records typically lose the entire deduction, not just the questioned portion. The resulting bill includes the extra tax, interest running back to the original due date, and often an accuracy penalty on top. For a full-time driver claiming $10,000 or more in mileage, that’s a heavy cost for a problem five minutes of daily logging would have solved.

1
Internal Revenue Service. IRS Sets 2026 Business Standard Mileage Rate at 72.5 Cents Per Mile
2
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 US Code 162 – Trade or Business Expenses
3
Internal Revenue Service. Travel and Entertainment Expenses Frequently Asked Questions
4
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 USC 274 – Disallowance of Certain Entertainment, Etc., Expenses
5
Internal Revenue Service. Publication 463, Travel, Gift, and Car Expenses
6
Internal Revenue Service. Topic No. 510, Business Use of Car
7
Internal Revenue Service. Self-Employment Tax (Social Security and Medicare Taxes)
8
Internal Revenue Service. Estimated Taxes
9
Internal Revenue Service. About Schedule C (Form 1040), Profit or Loss From Business (Sole Proprietorship)
10
Internal Revenue Service. About Form 4562, Depreciation and Amortization (Including Information on Listed Property)
11
Internal Revenue Service. Taking Care of Business: Recordkeeping for Small Businesses