What Are Commuting Miles? IRS Rules, Exceptions, and Deductions

Commuting miles are the trips you drive between your home and your regular workplace, and the IRS treats them as a personal expense you cannot deduct.¹ It doesn’t matter whether you drive five miles or fifty, take a bus, or ride a bike. Where you live is a personal choice, and the cost of getting from that home to your job is a personal cost.² The distinction matters because miles that fall on the business side of the line can be deducted at 72.5 cents per mile for 2026 if you qualify.³

What the IRS Actually Counts as Commuting

Your daily drive from home to your regular place of work and back is commuting. Full stop. A few things people commonly assume will change that answer do not.

Making business calls on the drive doesn’t convert the trip into a business expense. Carpooling with a colleague and talking shop the whole way doesn’t either. What you do inside the car doesn’t change what the drive is. Hauling heavy tools or equipment in your vehicle also doesn’t make the commute deductible, though you can deduct any extra cost the hauling creates, such as renting a trailer to tow behind your car.¹

The upshot: if the trip is between your home and a regular work location, and nothing structural about your work setup takes it out of that category, it’s commuting and it’s personal.

When Driving Stops Being Commuting

Certain trips look like commuting on the surface but qualify as business travel under IRS rules. Three situations account for most of them.

Travel Between Two or More Work Locations in One Day

When you work at multiple locations in a single day, the bookend trips are commuting and everything in the middle is business. The drive from home to your first stop is personal. The drive from your last stop back home is personal. The miles between work locations during the day are deductible.¹

Picture a self-employed contractor who drives from home to her office, then to a supply yard, then to a job site, then to the county building department, and finally home. Only the first leg and the last leg are commuting. Every trip in between is a business expense.⁴ Those mid-day trips exist because the work demands them, not because of where she lives.

Travel to a Temporary Work Site

The IRS uses a one-year rule to separate temporary work locations from regular ones. If you realistically expect an assignment to last a year or less, and it actually does, that site is temporary.⁵ Travel to a temporary site is treated differently depending on whether you already have a regular workplace:

If you have at least one regular work location, travel to any temporary site in the same trade or business is deductible, regardless of how close or far that site is from your home.⁵
If you have no regular work location, travel to a temporary site is deductible only if that site sits outside the metropolitan area where you live. Trips to temporary sites inside your metro area are treated as commuting.

The moment your expectation shifts and you believe you’ll be at the location for more than a year, the site becomes a regular place of business. From the date your expectation changes, not from the one-year anniversary, the drive becomes nondeductible commuting.⁶ A short project that keeps getting extended in small increments doesn’t stay temporary just because each extension is short. Once you know you’ll be there past the one-year mark, the deduction stops.

A Qualifying Home Office as Your Principal Place of Business

A home office that qualifies as your principal place of business essentially eliminates commuting for that trade or business. Every trip from your home to a client site, a secondary office, or any other work location in the same business counts as business travel from the moment you pull out of the driveway.⁷

To qualify, you must use a dedicated space in your home exclusively and regularly for administrative or management activities of your business, and you cannot have another fixed location where you do substantial administrative work.⁷ A spare bedroom where you also store holiday decorations doesn’t count. Neither does a kitchen table you use for both personal meals and invoicing. If the home office is just a convenience space and not your principal place of business, ordinary commuting rules apply and your first and last trips of the day remain personal.

Who Can Deduct Business Miles in the First Place

Even after you’ve correctly identified miles as business travel rather than commuting, whether you can deduct them depends on how you earn your income.

If you’re self-employed, a sole proprietor, or an independent contractor, you deduct qualifying business miles on Schedule C. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act didn’t touch this. The 2026 standard mileage rate is 72.5 cents per mile for business use.³

If you’re a W-2 employee, the answer is usually no. The TCJA eliminated the deduction for unreimbursed employee business expenses starting in 2018, and that change has been made permanent. Employees generally cannot claim a miscellaneous itemized deduction for unreimbursed travel.⁸ A narrow set of employees still can: certain members of reserve components of the Armed Forces, qualifying state and local government officials paid on a fee basis, qualifying performing artists, and eligible educators. Everyone else has to rely on the employer’s reimbursement policy to recover business mileage costs.

Logging Miles So the Distinction Holds Up

The IRS requires you to substantiate four elements for every business trip: the amount (or number of miles), the date, the destination or place, and the business purpose.⁹ If you’re using the standard mileage rate, your log needs the date, destination, business purpose, and total miles for each trip.

Record each trip at or near the time it happens. You don’t need to log every trip the moment you park, but a weekly log that accounts for the week’s driving qualifies as timely.¹ Reconstructing a year’s driving from memory in April is exactly the kind of record that falls apart under scrutiny. Mileage-tracking apps handle this cleanly, and many separate business trips from commuting automatically based on saved work locations.

Keep your log and any supporting documents, like gas receipts or toll records, for at least three years after filing the return that claims the deduction. The burden of proving the deduction is legitimate falls on you, not the IRS.¹⁰

What Happens if You Deduct Commuting Miles as Business

Mileage deductions are one of the most closely scrutinized items on self-employed returns. If you claim commuting miles as business travel and get caught, you owe the underlying tax on the disallowed deduction plus an accuracy-related penalty of 20% of the underpayment.¹¹

That 20% penalty applies when the IRS determines you were negligent or disregarded the rules, or when the understatement is substantial, meaning you understated your tax by more than 10% of what you actually owed or $5,000, whichever is greater.¹¹ Without a contemporaneous log, the IRS can disallow your entire mileage deduction rather than just the questionable trips, because you haven’t met the substantiation requirements.

The most common mistake isn’t fraud. It’s honest confusion about which trips qualify. Freelancers who work from home but haven’t formally established a qualifying home office sometimes deduct every trip to a client’s location, not realizing that without the home office designation, the first and last trips of the day are commuting. Getting the classification right on the front end is far cheaper than sorting it out with the IRS later.

1
Internal Revenue Service. Publication 463 (2025), Travel, Gift, and Car Expenses
2
eCFR. 26 CFR 1.262-1 – Personal, Living, and Family Expenses
3
Internal Revenue Service. 2026 Standard Mileage Rates
4
Internal Revenue Service. Travel and Entertainment Expenses – Frequently Asked Questions
5
Internal Revenue Service. Rev. Rul. 99-7
6
Internal Revenue Service. Topic No. 511, Business Travel Expenses
7
Internal Revenue Service. Publication 587 (2025), Business Use of Your Home
8
Internal Revenue Service. IRS Sets 2026 Business Standard Mileage Rate at 72.5 Cents Per Mile
9
eCFR. 26 CFR 1.274-5A – Substantiation Requirements
10
Internal Revenue Service. Burden of Proof
11
Internal Revenue Service. Accuracy-Related Penalty