Mileage deduction calculator

Your mileage deduction comes off your self-employment income, so it saves you self-employment tax and income tax both:

yearly miles  = miles × 52 (if you entered a week)
deduction    = yearly miles × $0.76
tax rate     = (0.9235 × 15.3%) + federal% + state%
tax saved    = deduction × tax rate

The 15.3% is self-employment tax (Social Security and Medicare), and the 0.9235 is the 92.35% of net earnings that self-employment tax actually applies to. Together that's an effective 14.13% on top of your income tax brackets — which is why a mile is worth more to a 1099 driver than to a W-2 employee.

The 76¢ figure is the IRS standard mileage rate for business driving on or after July 1, 2026 (Announcement 2026-11, modifying Notice 2026-10). Before that date the 2026 rate was 72.5¢.

Any mile you drive with a business purpose once your work day has started. For gig driving that's the drive to pick up an order, the drive to drop it off, and the drive between one order and the next while you're online and available.

What doesn't count: personal errands, and the ordinary commute between your home and a fixed workplace. Gig drivers usually have no fixed workplace — if your home is your principal place of business, the drive from home to your first pickup is generally deductible, but this is exactly the point worth confirming with a preparer for your own situation.

Yes. The deduction is only as good as the record behind it. The IRS expects a contemporaneous log — written down at the time, not reconstructed in April — showing the date, the miles, the destination and the business purpose of each trip.

A platform's year-end summary is not a mileage log. It only knows the miles it paid you for, which is usually far short of the miles you actually drove, and it doesn't record your date-by-date detail. That is the whole reason MileGravy exists.

Standard mileage multiplies your business miles by the IRS rate and is done. Actual expenses means tracking gas, insurance, repairs, depreciation and registration, then deducting the business-use percentage of all of it.

Most gig drivers come out ahead on standard mileage, because they put a lot of miles on a paid-off, inexpensive car. Actual expenses tends to win for a new, expensive or heavily depreciating vehicle. One catch worth knowing: if you want the option to switch methods later, you generally have to use standard mileage in the first year you put the car in service.

2026 is a split year. Business miles driven January 1 through June 30 deduct at 72.5¢. Miles driven on or after July 1 deduct at 76¢.

That means you cannot take your whole year's miles and multiply by one rate — you have to split the total by when you drove it and add the two halves. This is a real source of quiet errors on 2026 returns, and it's the reason your log needs dates and not just a number.

You're not an employee — you're self-employed, and no tax was withheld from anything you were paid. Platforms report your earnings to the IRS on a 1099 (usually a 1099-NEC or 1099-K), and you report your income and expenses on Schedule C, with self-employment tax figured on Schedule SE.

Because nothing is withheld, you owe the tax yourself, and generally in quarterly estimated payments rather than one April lump. The practical move is to set a percentage of every payout aside the day it lands — which is the other half of what MileGravy does.

For a mileage deduction: your log. The examiner wants to see records that establish the miles, the date, the destination and the business purpose, and they want them to look like they were kept as you drove rather than assembled afterwards.

Records that hold up are dated, detailed, and consistent with the rest of your return — your logged miles should make sense next to the income you reported and the odometer readings on your own vehicle. Records that don't hold up are round numbers, a single annual total, or a spreadsheet with a creation date of last Tuesday.