Business miles, for tax purposes, are the miles you drive for work other than your regular commute between home and your usual workplace. For 2026, the IRS lets self-employed drivers deduct 72.5 cents for every business mile.1Internal Revenue Service. IRS Sets 2026 Business Standard Mileage Rate at 72.5 Cents Per Mile, Up 2.5 Cents The category is narrower than most people assume, and who gets to claim it is narrower still.
Trips That Count
The IRS treats these types of driving as deductible business mileage:
- Driving between two workplaces on the same day. The miles have to be the direct route; if you detour for personal errands, only the direct distance counts.2Internal Revenue Service. Publication 463 – Travel, Gift, and Car Expenses
- Visits to clients, customers, vendors, or business contacts.
- Business errands: the office supply store, the bank for a business deposit, the post office to mail invoices.
- Travel to a temporary work location where the assignment is expected to last one year or less, even when you drive there straight from home.3Internal Revenue Service. Topic No. 511, Business Travel Expenses
- Driving to conferences, seminars, trade shows, and continuing education courses in your field.
The governing principle is purpose. A trip has to be primarily for business. If the drive mixes personal and business reasons, the deduction turns on which one was the main reason for going.
Trips That Don’t Count
Commuting is never deductible. Driving between your home and your regular workplace is a personal expense no matter how long the drive, whether you take business calls on the way, or whether your car is wrapped with your company logo.2Internal Revenue Service. Publication 463 – Travel, Gift, and Car Expenses
Personal errands are out too: grocery runs, school pickups, social visits. And watch the one-year rule work in reverse. If a temporary assignment stretches past a year or becomes indefinite, that site is now your regular workplace, and driving there from home becomes nondeductible commuting.
When a Home Office Changes the Answer
If your home office qualifies as your principal place of business under IRS rules, every work-related trip out the door counts as business mileage rather than commuting.4Internal Revenue Service. Publication 587 – Business Use of Your Home That matters a lot for self-employed people who work from home most days and drive to clients. Without a qualifying home office, the first trip from home and the last trip back are commuting. With one, every business trip is deductible from door to door.
To qualify, the space has to be your primary business location and used regularly and exclusively for business. A kitchen table where you occasionally sort invoices doesn’t meet the test.
Who Can Actually Deduct Business Miles
This is where a lot of readers get tripped up. The business mileage deduction is primarily for self-employed people: sole proprietors, independent contractors, freelancers, and gig workers such as rideshare drivers. If you report business income on Schedule C, you can deduct your business miles.
Most W-2 employees cannot. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act eliminated the deduction for unreimbursed employee business expenses starting in 2018, and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act made that elimination permanent.5Internal Revenue Service. Topic No. 510, Business Use of Car Three narrow categories of employees can still claim vehicle expenses on Form 2106: Armed Forces reservists, qualified performing artists, and fee-basis state or local government officials.
If you’re a regular W-2 employee who drives for work without reimbursement, your practical option is asking your employer to set up a mileage reimbursement program. You can’t take the deduction yourself.
Records You Need to Keep
A mileage deduction without records is a mileage deduction that disappears in an audit. For every business trip the IRS wants four things: the date, the destination, the business purpose, and the miles driven.2Internal Revenue Service. Publication 463 – Travel, Gift, and Car Expenses Estimates and after-the-fact approximations are not acceptable.
Records carry the most weight when they’re written at or near the time of the trip. A log reconstructed from memory months later is far less convincing than one kept as you go. You don’t have to write every trip down the same day; a weekly log that accounts for that week’s driving is considered timely.2Internal Revenue Service. Publication 463 – Travel, Gift, and Car Expenses Apps with GPS tracking automate this, but a notebook or spreadsheet is fine if you capture the four elements consistently.
Part IV of Schedule C asks for your total business miles, commuting miles, and other personal miles for the year, along with the date the vehicle was placed in service. If you can’t split your annual miles into those three buckets, you can’t complete the form honestly. Keep the log and supporting documentation for at least three years from the date you filed, which matches the standard IRS audit window.6Internal Revenue Service. How Long Should I Keep Records
How the Deduction Is Calculated
Once you know which miles count, you pick one of two methods.
The standard mileage rate is the simpler one. Multiply your business miles by the IRS rate for the year. For 2026, that’s 72.5 cents per mile.1Internal Revenue Service. IRS Sets 2026 Business Standard Mileage Rate at 72.5 Cents Per Mile, Up 2.5 Cents That single rate covers fuel, insurance, depreciation, maintenance, and general wear. Tolls and parking fees are still deductible on top. Fifteen thousand business miles in 2026 produces a $10,875 deduction.
Don’t mix the business rate up with the others. For 2026, medical and military moving miles are deductible at 20.5 cents per mile, and charitable driving is fixed at 14 cents per mile by statute. Using the wrong rate is an easy audit trigger.
The actual expenses method means totaling every cost of running the vehicle for the year (gas, oil, repairs, tires, insurance, registration, lease payments, and depreciation) and multiplying by your business-use percentage.5Internal Revenue Service. Topic No. 510, Business Use of Car Business-use percentage is business miles divided by total miles. Drove 20,000 miles and 12,000 were for business? Your percentage is 60%, and $10,000 in vehicle costs produces a $6,000 deduction. Every expense needs a receipt tying it to that specific vehicle.
One choice locks in the other. You have to elect the standard mileage rate in the first year the vehicle is available for business use. If you start with actual expenses, you generally cannot switch to the standard rate later for that vehicle. Starting with the standard rate is more flexible: you can switch to actual expenses in a later year. The standard rate is also unavailable if you operate five or more vehicles at once, if you’ve already claimed accelerated depreciation or a Section 179 deduction on the vehicle, or if you’re mid-lease and picked actual expenses at the start; for a leased vehicle, the method you choose at the start applies for the entire lease including renewals.5Internal Revenue Service. Topic No. 510, Business Use of Car
For most self-employed drivers with an ordinary passenger vehicle, the standard mileage rate is easier to track and produces a comparable result. The actual expenses method tends to pull ahead for expensive vehicles or ones with unusually high operating costs, but it comes with heavier bookkeeping and, if you own the vehicle, depreciation rules that eventually catch up with you when you sell.