What Miles Count as Business Miles?

Deductible: Driving to a client's office, picking up supplies, traveling between job sites, going to a business meeting.

NOT deductible: Your regular commute from home to a permanent work location. However, if your home is your principal place of business (home office), trips from home to client sites ARE deductible.

Tracking tip: Use an app like Everlance, Stride, or MileIQ to automatically track business miles. The IRS requires contemporaneous records — a log of dates, miles, and business purpose.

Why 2026 Needs Two Figures, Not One

The IRS raised the business rate mid-year, so a single annual number will give the wrong answer. Miles driven from 1 January to 30 June 2026 are worth 72.5¢ each; miles from 1 July to 31 December are worth 76¢. For comparison, 2025 ran at a flat 70¢ all year.

The practical consequence is that your log needs dates, not just totals. Ten thousand undated business miles cannot be split correctly between the two halves of the year, and the difference across that many miles is $350.

Standard Rate or Actual Expenses — and the Trap in Year One

The standard rate is meant to cover everything the car costs you: fuel, insurance, repairs, maintenance and depreciation. The alternative is to total those real costs and deduct the business-use percentage.

The order you choose them in matters permanently. If you want the option of using the standard rate for a car, you must choose it in the first year that car is used for business. Claim actual expenses with depreciation in year one instead, and that vehicle is locked out of the standard rate for as long as you own it. The reverse is not true — start with the standard rate and you may switch to actual expenses later, subject to using straight-line depreciation from then on.

As a rough guide: an older, cheap, high-mileage car usually does better on the standard rate. A new or expensive vehicle driven fewer miles often does better on actual expenses. Leased vehicles have their own rules, and whichever method you pick for a leased car must be used for the whole lease.

You Can Still Deduct These On Top

The standard rate does not absorb everything. Business-related parking fees and tolls remain separately deductible under either method, as does the business-use share of car loan interest and of personal property tax on the vehicle. Parking at your own regular workplace is a commuting cost and is not deductible.

What the IRS Expects Your Log to Contain

Records must be contemporaneous — written at or near the time of the trip, not reconstructed the week before an audit. Each entry needs the date, the destination, the business purpose, and the miles. You also need your total annual mileage, because the deduction is a percentage of use and the IRS will ask what share of the car's year was business.

An app that logs automatically is the easiest way to satisfy this, but a notebook in the glovebox satisfies it equally well. What does not satisfy it is an estimate produced from memory, and that is the single most common reason mileage deductions are reduced or disallowed on examination.

What This Calculator Cannot See

It multiplies the miles you enter by the correct rate for the period. It does not verify that the miles were business miles, does not apportion a vehicle used partly for personal trips, does not handle leases, depreciation recapture, or vehicles placed in service part-way through the year. It is a sizing tool, not a substitute for a return.

Primary sources: IRS standard mileage rates · IRS Publication 463, Travel, Gift, and Car Expenses. The 72.5¢ and 76¢ figures were checked against the IRS rates page on 11 September 2026.