Article Summary
- The standard mileage rate bundles gas, maintenance, insurance, and depreciation into one per-mile figure the IRS updates annually, so you don't need to track every gas receipt separately.
- Ordinary commuting from home to a fixed workplace is never deductible, but driving between job sites, to meet clients, or for supply runs generally is.
- Once you choose the actual expense method for a vehicle in its first year of business use, switching back to standard mileage later can be restricted, which makes the initial choice worth thinking through rather than defaulting to whichever seems simpler.
"Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship."
Benjamin Franklin
A freelance photographer driving to three shoots in a week, a dog walker crisscrossing a neighborhood, a consultant meeting clients across town — all of them are quietly racking up a deduction most never bother logging. Mileage feels too small and too routine to track, which is exactly why so many self-employed people leave it on the table or, just as often, claim it in a way that wouldn't survive a second look. The deduction rewards a habit, not a memory, and the habit is smaller than it seems.
What Counts as Business Driving
The core rule is simple even though it trips people up constantly: driving from your home to a regular, fixed place of business is a personal commute and is never deductible, no matter how far it is. But driving from your home office to a client's office, from one job site to another, to pick up supplies, to the bank for a business deposit, or to meet a customer for coffee generally counts as business mileage, because it's driving undertaken specifically for the business rather than to get you to work in the first place.
If your home qualifies as your principal place of business — for example, you meet the home office deduction's regular-and-exclusive-use test — then trips from home to any work location can typically count as business mileage, since you're effectively driving from one workplace to another rather than commuting. This is one reason the mileage deduction and the home office deduction are worth understanding together rather than in isolation.
Standard Mileage Rate vs. Actual Expenses
The standard mileage method multiplies your business miles by a per-mile rate the IRS sets each year, and that single number is meant to approximate gas, oil changes, tires, insurance, registration, and depreciation combined. It's simple to use and requires only a mileage log, which is why it's the more popular choice for people with modest vehicle costs or who drive a car used mostly for personal purposes with occasional business trips mixed in.
The actual expense method instead has you total every real cost of operating the vehicle — fuel, repairs, insurance, lease payments or depreciation, registration — and then deduct the percentage that matches your business-use share of total miles driven. It typically produces a larger deduction for people who drive an expensive, business-heavy, or high-cost-to-run vehicle, but it demands far more recordkeeping: every receipt, every repair, and a reliable total-mileage figure for the year, not just business miles.
The Log the IRS Actually Wants
A mileage deduction lives or dies on documentation, and the standard the IRS applies is a contemporaneous log — one kept at or near the time of each trip, not reconstructed from memory the week before filing. A workable log records the date, starting and ending odometer readings or total miles, the destination, and a short note on the business purpose of the trip. A smartphone app that tracks drives automatically satisfies this far more reliably than an end-of-year guess, and most people who lose a mileage audit lose it on documentation, not on whether the driving itself was legitimate.
It also helps to separate personal and business use clearly across the year, since mixed-use vehicles require you to know your total annual mileage, not just the business portion, in order to calculate the business-use percentage correctly under either method.
A Practical Framework for Claiming It
Start by tracking every trip for a full year using a simple app or a notebook kept in the car, regardless of which deduction method you eventually choose — you can't decide between standard mileage and actual expenses intelligently without knowing both your total miles and your business miles. Then estimate the deduction both ways at tax time and pick whichever is larger, keeping in mind that switching methods on the same vehicle in later years has restrictions worth checking with a tax professional.
Because standard mileage rates and specific eligibility rules are updated periodically, confirm the current year's rate and any recent rule changes before filing rather than relying on a prior year's numbers. The habit of logging trips as they happen, not the size of any single drive, is what actually makes this deduction worth claiming.