Standard mileage vs actual expenses — and the trap in year one
You get one method per vehicle per year: the standard mileage rate, or your actual costs (gas, repairs, insurance share, depreciation). Most gig drivers with efficient cars do better on standard mileage, but the election rules have teeth. For a car you own, the IRS says you "must choose to use it in the first year the car is available for use in your business": use actual expenses in year one and standard mileage is off the table for that car in later years. For a car you lease, choosing standard mileage commits you to it "for the entire lease period (including renewals)." First year with a new-to-you gig car? That choice matters beyond this April.
Why the first-year choice quietly decides the later ones
The mechanism deserves a slow read, because no app or software will shout about it while you file. Topic 510 puts the owned-car rule this way: "To use the standard mileage rate for a car you own, you must choose to use it in the first year the car is available for use in your business. Then, in later years, you can choose to use the standard mileage rate or actual expenses." The gate is that first year: the first year the particular vehicle became available for business use, not the first year you filed a Schedule C and not the first year somebody mentioned mileage to you. Walk through the gate on the standard mileage rate and both doors stay open afterwards: every later year you may weigh the two methods and take whichever produces the bigger number. Deduct actual operating costs in year one instead, and the standard rate is shut for that vehicle from then on.
Leasing reverses the direction of the lock. For a leased car, Topic 510 says "you must use the standard mileage rate method for the entire lease period (including renewals) if you choose the standard mileage rate." On a lease the commitment runs forward from the moment you choose; on a purchase it reaches backward to the very first year. Either way the election attaches to the vehicle rather than to you. Buy a second, cheaper car for deliveries next spring and it arrives with a fresh first year, its own election, and its own separate log.
The common gig-driver version of this: you already owned a car personally, and this is the season you started taking orders in it. The year the car became available for use in your business is therefore this one, and this is the year the choice is live. If your records are thin and the temptation is to just total up the fuel receipts you happen to have kept, understand what that trade actually costs — not this April, but every April after.
Worked example
Why 2026 has two rates, and how a split year is handled
In an ordinary year the IRS publishes a single optional standard mileage rate covering all twelve months, announced the previous December, and the arithmetic is one multiplication. 2026 refused to be ordinary. The rate is 72.5¢ a mile for business expenses incurred before July 1, 2026, revised to 76¢ a mile for expenses on or after July 1, 2026 (IRB 2026-29). One tax year, two rates, still one line on the return.
Handling it is less exotic than it sounds, and it is the whole job of the tool above. There is no blending, no averaging, no proration by some clever fraction of the year. You sort your business miles by when the expense was incurred (which side of the boundary you were actually driving on), multiply each pile by the rate that governs it, and add the two products. That is the entire reason the form asks for two mileage figures rather than one. And the boundary is a date, not a percentage: a mile driven on June 30 is a 72.5¢ mile, a mile driven on July 1 is a 76¢ mile, and no amount of annual averaging changes which is which.
That is precisely why the split raises the stakes on your records this year. If the only evidence you carry into filing season is one odometer-derived annual total, you have no principled way to allocate it across the boundary, and any allocation you invent afterwards is exactly the kind of after-the-fact reconstruction that carries the least weight. A driver who logged dates all year simply sorts. A driver who didn't is guessing at a number that changes the answer.
The same 15,000 miles, walked all the way through
Take the placeholder figures the calculator suggests: 8,000 business miles in the first half of 2026, 7,000 in the second, and $40.00 of business parking and tolls. Every step below is arithmetic you can repeat on a phone.
Three things fall out of that once you poke at it. First, the effective rate across the whole year is whatever your own mix produces: $11,120 ÷ 15,000 miles works out to roughly 74.1¢ a mile, a figure the IRS never published and you should never write anywhere. It is simply the shadow your particular driving pattern casts across the boundary. Second, the same 15,000 miles under the 2025 rate of 70¢ would have produced $10,500, so this year's structure is worth $620 more on identical driving. Third, and most usefully, the sensitivity is easy to hold in your head: moving 1,000 miles from the first half to the second changes the result by 1,000 × 3.5¢ = $35. Reverse the example entirely (7,000 miles early and 8,000 late) and you get $11,155 instead of $11,120. The gap between halves is real but modest, which is the honest reason not to panic if your split is approximate: it is worth getting right, and it is not worth inventing.
Which miles are business miles, and which quietly aren't
The calculator multiplies whatever number you type by a published rate. It has no way of knowing whether those miles qualify, and qualification, not arithmetic, is where drivers get into difficulty.
Two points are settled enough to state without hedging. Ordinary commuting, the travel between your home and a regular place of work, is generally not deductible (Pub 463). And driving you would have done anyway for personal reasons does not become business driving because a delivery app happened to be open on the passenger seat: the grocery stop wedged between orders, the detour to collect a kid from practice, the weekend visit to relatives. Those are personal miles wearing a work uniform.
Past that, honesty requires hedging, because the answer turns on facts rather than on a lookup table. Miles driven with the app on while waiting for or repositioning toward offers, and miles between one drop-off and the next pickup, are commonly treated as business miles, but eligibility depends on your particular circumstances, and the first and last trips of a shift are the ones most sensitive to where your business would be said to begin and end. If a meaningful share of your annual total hangs on that question, an hour with a professional beats a confident guess.
One item is not in dispute at all: business parking fees and tolls are deductible in addition to the standard mileage rate rather than being absorbed by it (Schedule C instructions), which is why they get a box of their own above. Meter money outside a busy restaurant and a bridge toll on a long drop are separately deductible even though the rate already compensates the driving itself.
The log is the deduction
An uncomfortable way to put it, and the right one: a deduction you cannot substantiate is a deduction you may not get to keep. Pub 463 is direct that records kept at or near the time of use carry more weight than a later reconstruction. A timely kept record beats a sincere estimate assembled in April from bank statements and memory, every time. This calculator can convert miles into dollars; nothing can convert a recollection into a record.
What a workable log holds is unglamorous: the date of the driving, the mileage, the destination, and the business purpose. A tracking app humming in the background captures all four automatically. So does a cheap notebook in the door pocket with the odometer written down when you start and when you finish, provided you actually write it as you go rather than reconstruct it later. Photographing the odometer on the first and last day of the year costs nothing and gives you an outer boundary to sanity-check the total against. And this particular year, the date column is doing double duty: it is the only thing that decides whether a mile earns 72.5¢ or 76¢.
If you drive more than one vehicle for the work, keep the logs apart. Miles are tracked, and the method election is made, per car. A mixed total is unusable for both purposes.
What this calculator can't tell you
- Whether your miles qualify. It trusts your input completely. The eligibility questions above are the ones that decide whether the output means anything.
- What actual expenses would give you. Comparing methods means tallying a year of fuel, insurance, repairs, tires and depreciation for the car and apportioning it by business use, a different exercise entirely, and one Pub 463 walks through.
- Your saving in dollars. A deduction is not a refund. It lowers the business profit carried onto your return, which reduces income tax and, because that same profit is the base for self-employment tax, reduces that too. Self-employment tax runs generally at 15.3% on 92.35% of net self-employment earnings, roughly 14.1% before the wage-base limit, Additional Medicare Tax and the deduction for half of it (Topic 554). What the combination amounts to for you depends on filing status, household income, withholding elsewhere and credits, none of which this page asks for on purpose.
- Anything about your state. Federal rules only; state treatment can differ and is out of scope here.
- Your other deductions. Phone service, insulated bags, and similar work costs live outside the mileage rate. Real returns have more lines than this page does, generally in your favor.
Why this pairs with the cost-per-mile page
Your actual cash cost per mile in an older paid-off car usually sits well below the 72.5–76¢ the deduction pays. The worked example on that page lands at 33¢ a mile. Both numbers are legitimate, one economics and one tax law, and the gap between them is the best part of gig-driving an efficient paid-off car. Just never mix them in one calculation: cash decisions use your cost, tax math uses the IRS rate.
Federal rules only; states can differ. This page explains, it doesn't advise. A tax professional applies these rules to your facts.
Frequently asked questions
What is the IRS mileage rate for 2026? 2026 is a split year: 72.5 cents per business mile for expenses incurred January 1 through June 30, 2026, and 76 cents per mile for expenses on or after July 1, 2026, per IRS guidance. The 2025 rate was 70 cents. Business miles in each half of 2026 are multiplied by that half's rate.
Can DoorDash drivers deduct all their miles? Only business miles are deductible, and eligibility depends on the facts: miles driven with the app on looking for orders and between deliveries are commonly treated as business miles, while ordinary commuting from home can be nondeductible. The IRS expects records that show date, mileage, destination, and business purpose, and gives more weight to records kept at or near the time of driving. A tax professional can apply the rules to your specific situation.