How to Keep a Mileage Log the IRS Will Accept (2026)

The 2026 rate and what it covers

The IRS set the 2026 standard mileage rate for business use at 72.5 cents per mile in Notice 2026-10. That single per-mile figure is designed to stand in for the full cost of operating your car: gas, maintenance, repairs, insurance, and depreciation are all baked in. That cuts both ways. You do not need a single gas receipt to claim it, and you also cannot deduct those costs again on top of it.

Two costs sit outside the bundle: parking fees and tolls for business trips. Those are deductible in addition to the mileage rate, so keep the receipts with your log.

To feel the scale: a delivery driver who logs 8,000 business miles in 2026 deducts 8,000 × $0.725 = $5,800. That comes off the top of self-employment income, which means it reduces both income tax and self-employment tax. Run your own numbers through the SE tax calculator and the deduction’s real value becomes obvious fast.

What the IRS actually requires in a log

The substantiation rules live in IRS Publication 463. Vehicle expenses fall into a category the tax code holds to stricter proof standards than ordinary business expenses, which is why “roughly 10,000 miles, probably” does not survive an audit. For each business trip, your records must show:

• Miles driven for the trip
• Date of the trip
• Destination (where you went)
• Business purpose (why the trip was business)

And the record needs to be contemporaneous: kept at or near the time of the trip. A log written as you go carries far more weight than one assembled from memory in April. The format is up to you. The IRS does not require an app, a particular form, or GPS data. It requires those four elements, captured close to when the driving happened.

For gig drivers there is a useful shortcut hiding in plain sight: the platform already records your trips. Those records help enormously, but they typically cover only miles with a passenger or delivery attached. Your own log fills the gaps (the miles between drop-off and the next pickup) and ties the whole day together.

Commuting vs business miles (where most people get it wrong)

Not every mile you drive for work-related reasons is a business mile. The big exclusion is commuting: driving from home to a regular workplace is personal, not deductible, no matter how far it is or how much work you think about on the way.

For gig drivers the line is blurrier but follows a workable rule of thumb drawn from how the IRS treats availability for work:

• Generally commuting: the drive from home before you go online in the platform app. You are positioning yourself to work, not yet working.
• Generally business: miles driven between pickups while you are available for work in the app: heading to a pickup, driving between drop-off and the next request, repositioning between busy zones while online.

Walk through an example day. You leave home, drive to the busy part of town, and go online when you arrive: that first stretch is commuting, not logged. You accept a pickup, drive to the restaurant, deliver, then drift toward the next busy zone while waiting for a request: all of that is business, logged. You go offline and drive home: commuting again. The same physical mile can be deductible or not depending entirely on whether you were available for work when you drove it, which is why the log needs to capture the day’s structure and not just a single total.

The practical upshot: go online, then note the odometer or let the tracking start, and treat the online-to-offline window as your business-mile window. If you drive for DoorDash or Uber, our driver’s tax guide covers how this fits into the rest of your return.

Standard mileage rate vs actual expenses

The standard rate is one of two ways to deduct vehicle costs. The other is the actual expense method: total your real vehicle costs for the year and multiply by your business-use percentage (business miles divided by total miles).

How to think about the choice:

• Standard rate: simple, predictable, and no expense receipts required. One log, one multiplication. For most gig drivers in ordinary cars this is the practical winner.
• Actual expenses: can produce a larger deduction for expensive vehicles with high operating costs and heavy business use, but you must keep receipts for every vehicle cost, and you still need the mileage log to establish the business-use percentage.

One rule with teeth: to use the standard mileage rate on a car at all, you must choose it in the first year the car is used for business. Pick actual expenses in year one and the standard rate is off the table for that car in later years. If you are unsure, starting with the standard rate preserves the choice.

Either way, notice the common denominator: the mileage log. The method changes the arithmetic, never the record-keeping.

Setting up a log you will actually keep

The best logging method is whichever one you will still be using in November. The realistic options:

• A mileage-tracking app.Phone apps can detect drives automatically and prompt you to classify each one as business or personal. Lowest ongoing effort, and the classification step is where the “business purpose” element gets captured, so do not skip it.
• A spreadsheet. One row per trip with columns for date, miles, destination, and purpose. Works well if your driving happens in predictable blocks (for example, gig sessions you can enter at the end of each shift, which still counts as near the time of the trip).
• A paper notebook in the glovebox. Unfashionable and completely acceptable. Write the entry before you get out of the car.

Whichever you choose, add the two bookends: odometer photos on January 1 and December 31. Total annual miles are reported in the vehicle section of Schedule C, and they make your business-use percentage verifiable instead of asserted. A dated phone photo of the dashboard is all it takes.

One habit worth building in week one: log the trip the same day, not on the weekend. The contemporaneous requirement is the part of the rule people fail, and the gap between “same day” and “reconstructed in April” is exactly the gap between a deduction that holds and one that does not.

Where the numbers land on your return

The mileage deduction flows into Schedule C, the form where self-employed income and expenses meet. Car and truck expenses have their own line in Part II (line 9), and Part IV of the same form asks directly for the information your log produces: when you placed the vehicle in service, your total miles for the year, your business miles, and whether you have written evidence supporting the deduction. That last question is worth pausing on. The IRS is not discovering your log in an audit; you are attesting to it on the face of the return every year.

This is also why the odometer bookends matter beyond good hygiene. Part IV wants total annual miles, and the difference between your January and December readings is the defensible way to produce that number. Business miles divided by total miles is your business-use percentage, and a percentage backed by two dated photos and a trip log reads very differently from one that appears out of nowhere.

From Schedule C, your net profit (after the mileage deduction and everything else) flows through to your 1040 and to Schedule SE, where self-employment tax is calculated. That chain is the reason mileage is so valuable: a dollar of mileage deduction reduces the base for both taxes at once.

If your log has gaps

Real logs have holes: a week where the app was not running, a month before you knew you needed one. The wrong response is to fill the gap with a smooth invented number, and the equally wrong response is to abandon the whole deduction. The defensible middle path is honest reconstruction from records that already exist: platform trip histories, calendar entries, navigation history, and odometer readings on either side of the gap. Reconstruct conservatively, document how you did it, and resume contemporaneous logging immediately.

Be aware of the asymmetry, though. A reconstructed stretch inside an otherwise contemporaneous log is a patch on solid fabric. A log that is entirely reconstruction is exactly what the contemporaneous requirement exists to reject. The earlier in the year you start logging properly, the smaller this problem ever gets.

What happens in an audit without a log

Bluntly: the deduction is disallowed. Because vehicle expenses are subject to strict substantiation, an examiner is not obliged to accept a reasonable-sounding estimate the way they might for a minor expense category. No records generally means no deduction, and the tax (plus interest, and potentially penalties) gets recalculated without it. For a driver claiming a four-figure mileage deduction, that is real money lost to a record-keeping failure rather than to any actual rule of tax law.

The flip side should be motivating: a complete, contemporaneous log makes the mileage deduction one of the most defensible numbers on your whole return. The rules are mechanical. Meet them, and the biggest deduction a driver has is also the safest. For where the deduction lands on your return, see our guide to Schedule C for gig workers, and to see how mileage changes your bottom line, the gig earnings calculator models it directly.

This guide is general information, not personalized tax advice. If your vehicle situation is unusual (leased vehicles, multiple cars, mixed fleet use, or a switch between deduction methods), a CPA usually saves you more than they cost. The numbers here are sourced from IRS publications and current at 2026-06-10; rates and thresholds change.