Mileage Deduction for Gig Drivers: Delivery & Rideshare

If you drive for delivery or rideshare platforms — DoorDash, Uber, Lyft, Instacart, Amazon Flex, or any of the others — you're an independent contractor running a one-person business, and your car is its biggest expense. The tax code lets you deduct that expense, and for most gig drivers mileage is by far the largest deduction available: at the 2026 IRS rate of 72.5¢ per mile, a full-time driver's 20,000 business miles are worth $14,500 off their taxable profit.

This guide covers the three questions that decide how much of that you actually keep: which deduction method to use, which miles legally count, and what the 1099 paperwork means.

You're taxed as a business now

Platforms don't withhold taxes for you. Your gig profit — earnings minus expenses — goes on Schedule C and gets hit twice: by regular income tax and by ~15.3% self-employment tax (Social Security + Medicare). That double hit is bad news that contains good news: every dollar of legitimate deduction saves you both taxes at once. For many drivers each 1,000 business miles is worth roughly $200–300 in real cash, depending on bracket. (If you'll owe more than $1,000 for the year, the IRS expects quarterly estimated payments along the way.)

Standard mileage vs. actual expenses

You get to pick one of two ways to deduct the car:

• Standard mileage rate — deduct 72.5¢ for every business mile in 2026. One number covers gas, maintenance, insurance, depreciation, and registration. Parking and tolls are deductible on top, as is the business share of car-loan interest and personal property tax.
• Actual expenses — total everything the car cost (fuel, repairs, insurance, depreciation, lease payments…), then deduct the business-use percentage, which you establish… with a mileage log. There's no escaping the log.

The standard rate usually wins for efficient, reliable cars driven a lot of miles — the typical gig setup. Actual expenses can win for newer, expensive vehicles with heavy business use. Two rules constrain switching:

• To preserve the choice, you must use the standard rate in the first year the car is in business use. Start with actual expenses, and standard mileage is off the table for that car permanently.
• On a leased car, choosing the standard rate commits you to it for the whole lease.

A sane default for a new driver: track everything, take the standard rate in year one, and let your tax software or preparer compare both methods at filing time from there on.

Which miles count

Business miles are the miles driven for the work, not just the miles with a passenger or a bag of food on board:

• Engaged miles — driving to a pickup and completing a delivery or ride. Always business.
• Between-gig miles — leaving one drop-off and repositioning toward the next order zone, or circling while active on the app waiting for the next ping. Business, when you're genuinely working: online, available, and driving in service of getting the next gig.
• Multi-app miles — running two platforms at once doesn't split anything: a business mile is a business mile once.

What doesn't count:

• Personal detours mid-shift — the school pickup, your own groceries, the gym.
• Commuting — under the general rule, driving from home to where you start work (and home again at night) is a personal commute, even for the self-employed. The conservative reading for gig drivers: the stretch from home to your working area or first pickup, and the final drive home, are commuting. Drivers whose home genuinely qualifies as their principal place of business (a real home office for the driving business) can treat home-to-first-stop as business — a fact-specific call worth making with a tax professional rather than assuming.
• "App on" alone doesn't convert a personal trip. Having the app open while driving to the beach isn't business driving. The purpose of the trip is what counts — which is exactly what your log's purpose field documents.

1099 basics: the paperwork platforms send

• Form 1099-K — payment-card/third-party network payouts (typical for rideshare fares). For 2026, federal law requires one only above $20,000 and 200 transactions (the 2025 tax law restored the old threshold; some states require them at lower amounts).
• Form 1099-NEC — non-employee compensation such as incentives and some delivery pay. The federal threshold rises to $2,000 for payments made in 2026.
• No form ≠ no taxes. Every dollar of gig income is reportable whether or not a form arrives. The forms report your gross — deductions like mileage are yours to claim on Schedule C, which is why the log matters so much.

The habit that makes it all work

Everything above collapses without records: the method comparison, the between-gig miles, the business-use percentage. The IRS requires a log kept at or near the time of each trip — and gig driving generates dozens of trips a shift, across multiple apps, at hours when nobody is filling in spreadsheets. That's the case for automatic tracking: an app that detects every drive, prices it at the correct year's IRS rate, and exports an accountant-ready report in April. If subscriptions put you off that category of app, there's a better model.

Sources

• IRS, Gig Economy Tax Center
• IRS, Topic No. 510 — Business use of car
• IRS, Publication 463 — Travel, Gift, and Car Expenses
• IRS, Notice 2026-10 — 2026 Standard Mileage Rates
• IRS, Form 1099-K threshold FAQs under the One, Big, Beautiful Bill

Platform names are used for identification only; this guide is not affiliated with or endorsed by any gig platform.