Tax write-offs for delivery drivers beyond mileage

By Sabett, founder of MileGravy ·September 6, 2026 ·6 min read

Mileage is the big one. It isn't the only one, and drivers leave real money behind because they assume the standard mileage rate swallows everything.

It doesn't. Some things sit right on top of it.

Tolls and parking — on top of the rate

Start here, because this is the one people get wrong in the direction that costs them.

Tax Topic 510: "Other car expenses for parking fees and tolls attributable to business use are separately deductible, whether you use the standard mileage rate or actual expenses."

The Schedule C instructions say the same thing operationally — take your business miles times the rate, then "add to this amount your parking fees and tolls."

So the airport run where you paid $8 to park, the toll bridge, the garage downtown: all deductible, all in addition to your per-mile deduction. Keep the receipts, or at minimum note the amount and the reason the day it happens.

What this doesn't cover is parking at your own home or your regular workplace. That's personal, same logic as commuting.

Your phone

You cannot deliver without a phone, and the business share of what it costs you is deductible. The word doing the work is share.

Figure out what percentage of your phone use is business and deduct that percentage of the bill. If you're on the apps forty hours a week and texting your family the rest, something in the 60–80% range is defensible. One hundred percent is not, unless it's genuinely a second phone you only use for work — which, if you do a lot of volume, is worth considering for exactly this reason.

One specific rule from the Schedule C instructions: "If you used your home phone for business, do not deduct the base rate (including taxes) of the first phone line into your residence. But you can deduct any additional costs you incurred for business that are more than the base rate of the first phone line."

Write down how you arrived at your percentage. "70% business" with no reasoning is a guess. "70% — I'm online 40 hours a week and the rest is personal" is a method.

Gear

The equipment you bought because you deliver is deductible when it's an ordinary and necessary business expense:

• Insulated hot bags and catering bags
• Phone mounts and car chargers
• Cargo shelving, floor liners, and tie-downs for a van
• Hand truck or dolly for the bigger platforms
• Drink carriers, coolers, ice packs
• Flashlight, umbrella, cleaning supplies for the vehicle

If something has both business and personal use, deduct the business share the same way you would the phone. A cooler you also take camping is not 100% business.

A year of the small stuff

Four hundred dollars for keeping a few receipts in an envelope. That's a day and a half of driving you don't have to do.

These deductions come off before the tax math the same way mileage does — if you want to see how a deduction turns into actual money in your pocket, the mileage deduction calculator shows the mileage version of the same arithmetic.

Documenting a percentage so it survives

Anything you split between business and personal — the phone above all — needs a method behind the number, not a vibe. An examiner isn't going to fight you over 70% versus 65%. They will absolutely fight you over a percentage you can't explain.

What a method looks like: pick a representative month, note roughly how many hours you were online versus how much you used the phone for everything else, write down the ratio and the date you worked it out, and keep that note with your tax records. One paragraph, once a year. That's the difference between a defensible allocation and a guess.

Same logic for anything else with dual use. If a tablet is your delivery navigation and your kid's cartoons, the split needs a sentence explaining itself.

Where these actually go

All of this lands on Schedule C, and the line matters less than you'd think — what matters is that the expense is there and that it's categorized consistently year to year. Car and truck expenses have their own line, and per the Schedule C instructions your parking fees and tolls get added into that figure alongside the mileage calculation rather than buried somewhere else.

The phone typically sits in utilities or office expense. Gear goes to supplies. Pick a home for each category, use the same home every year, and your return stops looking like it was assembled by a different person each April.

One thing to understand about all of it: these are business deductions against your delivery profit, not personal itemized deductions. You get them whether or not you itemize on your 1040. Every driver who tells you "I take the standard deduction so I can't write off my hot bags" has these two systems confused.

The traps

Tickets are never deductible

Parking tickets. Speeding tickets. Red-light camera fines. Every one of them is a payment to a government in relation to a violation of law, and the tax code specifically denies the deduction — that's section 162(f), and Treasury's final regulations spell out how broadly it applies.

It doesn't matter that you got the ticket while working, or that double-parking was the only way to make the delivery. Not deductible. Ever.

The tow fee to get your car back from an impound lot is a different animal — that's not a fine paid to a government — but the ticket that caused it isn't coming off your taxes.

Your lunch is not a business meal

This is the most common wishful deduction in delivery driving. You worked eight hours, you bought a sandwich, surely that's a business meal?

No. Eating while you work is a personal expense. Business meals are generally limited to 50% of the cost anyway — Publication 334: "Deductions for meal expenses generally remain limited to 50% of such expenses" — and that limit applies to meals that qualify in the first place, which usually means a meal with a business associate or a meal while traveling away from your tax home overnight.

Driving your normal delivery zone all day is not travel away from home. Skip this one.

Clothes have to be unwearable

The standard the IRS applies is whether the clothing is required for your work and not suitable for everyday wear. A branded uniform shirt you'd never wear otherwise can qualify. Jeans, sneakers, a winter coat and a hoodie do not — they're ordinary clothes, and it doesn't matter that you only bought them because the job is cold.

Genuine protective equipment is different. Steel-toe boots, work gloves and safety gear required for the work are deductible.

The vehicle itself, if you took standard mileage

Gas, oil changes, insurance, tires, repairs and depreciation are already inside the standard mileage rate. You don't get to take the rate and then deduct a tank of gas on top. Tolls and parking are the exception, and they're the exception because the IRS says so explicitly.

Keep it boring

The bar for all of this is ordinary and necessary for your business, and the proof is a receipt plus a note about why you bought it. An envelope in the glovebox and a photo of each receipt clears the bar.

Take everything you're entitled to. Take nothing you're not. The drivers who get in trouble are almost never the ones who missed a hot bag — they're the ones who deducted the whole phone, the daily lunch, and the parking ticket they got making a delivery.

I drive for a living and I read the IRS pages carefully, but I'm not an accountant and this isn't tax advice. Your return is yours — check anything that matters with a preparer who knows your situation.