If you drive for a living — deliveries, rideshare, errands, field service calls between clients — mileage is very likely your single biggest tax deduction. It's also the one gig workers most often shortchange themselves on, not because the rule is complicated, but because the record-keeping habit is easy to skip until tax season, when it's too late to reconstruct.
The IRS standard mileage rate lets you deduct a fixed amount per business mile driven, instead of tracking actual vehicle expenses (gas, maintenance, depreciation) separately. The rate changes year to year, so check the current figure rather than reusing last year's number. Multiply your total deductible business miles by the rate, and that's the deduction — no receipts for gas required, just a mileage log.
What actually counts as a deductible mile
This is where most gig workers leave money on the table or, worse, overclaim and create audit risk:
- Deductible: driving between gigs, from a drop-off to your next pickup, to a client site, to pick up supplies for a job, or between two work locations in the same day.
- Not deductible: your regular commute from home to a single fixed workplace (if you have one), and — this trips people up — the drive from home to your first pickup or appointment of the day, and from your last one back home, under the general commuting rule. Some platforms and interpretations vary here, so when in doubt, log the miles and let your tax preparer make the call rather than deciding not to log them at all.
If you run multiple gigs or platforms in a single day — say a delivery block in the morning and a freelance client visit in the afternoon — every mile driven between those jobs is fair game. This is exactly the kind of multi-source day where a single tracked log matters most, because it's the easiest kind of day to lose track of by memory alone.
The habit that protects the deduction
The IRS wants a contemporaneous log: date, starting point, destination, purpose, and miles for each trip. "Contemporaneous" means logged at or near the time of the trip — not reconstructed from memory in March. An estimate written down after the fact is the single most common reason a mileage deduction gets disallowed on audit, even when the driving genuinely happened.
The fix isn't complicated, it's just a habit: log the trip when it happens, or right after. Whether that's a dedicated app, a note on your phone, or an odometer photo at the start and end of a work day, the format matters less than the timing.
Where this fits with everything else
Mileage rarely lives in isolation — it's one line in a bigger picture of income and expenses across every platform or client you work with. If you're tracking gigs, expenses, and mileage in the same place you're tracking income, the quarterly "what do I owe" question gets a lot less scary, because the deduction is already accounted for instead of something you're hoping you remember at filing time.
Keep the log current, keep the purpose specific, and treat every business mile as real money — because, at the standard rate, it is.