Commuting Miles vs Business Miles: What Gig Drivers Can Deduct

GigOdo Team · Published July 26, 2026 · Every figure sourced to the IRS unless noted

Which gig miles are commuting?

Your drive from home out to the zone where you start working, and your drive home after the last drop-off, are generally nondeductible commuting miles. Almost everything in between is business mileage: driving to pickups, driving to customers, and repositioning between orders while you are working. The split turns on where each leg started and ended, not on whether the app was running.

That single boundary decides thousands of dollars a year in either direction. Claim the commute and you have an overstated deduction on your return. Skip the between-order miles and you hand back the largest block of driving you do.

The rule the IRS actually applies

There is no gig-specific mileage regulation. The controlling authority is Revenue Ruling 99-7, which holds that daily transportation expenses incurred in going between a taxpayer's residence and a work location are nondeductible commuting expenses, subject to three narrow exceptions. Publication 463 restates the same rule for self-employed people.

The ruling rests on two regulations that predate every delivery app: sections 1.162-2(e) and 1.262-1(b)(5) of the Income Tax Regulations, which treat commuting as a personal expense under section 262. Costs of going between one business location and another, by contrast, are ordinary and necessary business expenses under section 162(a). The whole analysis is about which category a given leg falls into.

Nothing about gig work changes that framework. The IRS has never issued a ruling, notice, or publication addressing app-based driving specifically, so drivers get the same rules written for plumbers, sales reps, and union tradesmen.

The first leg out and the last leg home

The drive from your driveway to the zone where you turn the app on is commuting, and so is the drive home after the final drop. Neither leg becomes deductible because you took a route through a hot spot, because the app was already running, or because a delivery bag was in the trunk. The IRS looks at the endpoints.

Publication 463 closes the two workarounds drivers reach for. On equipment: hauling tools or instruments in your car while commuting to and from work does not make your car expenses deductible, though genuine extra costs like renting a trailer are deductible. On assignments: if you get your work assignments at a union hall and then go to your place of work, the cost of getting from the hall to the job site is a nondeductible commuting expense, because you are employed where you work, not where the assignments come from.

That union hall rule is the closest thing in the IRS literature to an app-based dispatch system, and it cuts against the argument that an open app converts a commute. The order arrives on your phone; the work happens where you drive it.

The last leg draws the most disagreement, because it feels like the end of a shift rather than a commute. It stays commuting if you leave the app on, and it stays commuting if you worked your way toward your neighborhood at the end of the night. The miles inside that last accepted order are business miles; the stretch from the drop-off to your driveway is not.

The miles in the middle

Once you are working, the miles stack up fast and nearly all of them are business miles: driving to a pickup, driving to the customer, driving back toward a busier zone, and driving to the next order. These are trips between business locations, which the IRS has treated as deductible since Rev. Rul. 55-109. This is also the block of mileage platform year-end summaries leave out.

The practical problem is documentation rather than eligibility. Platform reports typically cover active-delivery miles only, so the repositioning and dead-head driving between orders exists solely in your own records. If you never wrote it down, it is gone - and rebuilding it later is a much harder exercise than logging it live.

The three exceptions, and which one you can use

Rev. Rul. 99-7 lists three situations where home-to-work driving is deductible: a temporary work location outside the metropolitan area where you live and normally work; a temporary work location when you already have one or more regular work locations away from home in the same trade or business; or a residence that qualifies as your principal place of business. Each deserves a straight look.

Exception one rarely helps. Publication 463 spells out the version that applies to workers with no regular place of work: if you ordinarily work in the metropolitan area where you live, you can deduct daily transportation to a temporary work site outside that metro area, but you cannot deduct trips to temporary sites within it. Those are nondeductible commuting expenses. Most gig drivers work their home metro every shift, so this exception sits idle - it only surfaces on the occasional trip to a distant market.

Exception two trips people up. It requires a regular work location away from your residence in the same trade or business as the temporary location. A W-2 job at a warehouse does not qualify you, because that is a different trade or business, and the Tax Court's reasoning in Curphey v. Commissioner treats deductibility on a business-by-business basis. Rev. Rul. 94-47 added the away-from-residence requirement explicitly.

Exception three is the one worth understanding.

The home office exception, in plain terms

Exception three is the only route most full-time gig drivers can realistically reach. If an office in your residence satisfies the principal place of business requirements of section 280A(c)(1)(A), your home counts as a business location, and daily transportation between it and another work location in the same trade or business becomes deductible - regardless of distance, and regardless of whether the other location is regular or temporary.

Publication 587 sets the test in two parts. You must use the space exclusively and regularly for administrative or management activities of the business, and you must have no other fixed location where you conduct substantial administrative or management activities. Billing customers, keeping books and records, ordering supplies, setting up appointments, and writing reports all count as administrative activities.

Exclusive use is where most claims fail. Pub 587 requires that you use a specific area of your home only for your trade or business, and its own example denies the deduction to an attorney whose den doubles as family recreation space. A kitchen table where you reconcile earnings on Sunday nights is not an exclusive-use space. A separately identifiable corner used for nothing else can be, and no permanent partition is required.

Two cautions before you rely on this. The determination that your residence is your principal place of business under 280A(c)(1)(A) is not automatically determinative for other purposes, including the travel-away-from-home deduction under section 162(a)(2). And this is a fact-specific position that changes the character of every first and last leg you drive, so it is worth confirming with a tax professional before you claim a year of them.

Errands, detours, and mixed trips

A personal stop in the middle of a shift does not poison the day, but the personal leg itself is not deductible. Drive to the grocery store between orders and those miles are personal, even though the shift around them is business driving. The clean approach is to close out the business trip, run the errand, and start a new business trip when you return to work.

Publication 463 applies the same logic to trips between two workplaces: if for some personal reason you do not go directly from one location to the other, you cannot deduct more than the amount it would have cost to go directly. Applied to a shift, that means a detour is deductible up to the distance of the direct route between the two business points - the extra miles are yours.

What the split looks like on one shift

Numbers make the boundary concrete. Below is an illustrative ten-hour delivery shift for a driver who lives eight miles from the zone they work, broken into legs. Total driving is 126 miles. Deductible business driving is 103 of them, which at the 76-cent second-half 2026 rate produces a $78.28 deduction for the day.

Illustrative shift, not survey data. Rate: 76 cents per business mile for July 1 - December 31, 2026 (Announcement 2026-11); January-June miles use 72.5 cents (Notice 2026-10).

Scale it across a year of driving and both errors get expensive. The 17 commuting miles in that shift, claimed across 250 shifts, would be 4,250 miles and roughly $3,230 of deduction the driver is not entitled to. The 41 between-order miles, dropped because only platform-reported trips got logged, would be 10,250 miles and about $7,790 of deduction left behind. Same log, opposite mistakes. Both come from the same rate math covered in our breakdown of the mid-year rate increase.

The gray areas worth naming

Three questions have no clean IRS answer for gig work. First, whether app-on waiting miles are business miles: professionals treat them as deductible while you are available and working, but no ruling says so. Second, whether a delivery zone is a work location at all, since you have no assigned site. Third, how the administrative-activities test lands for a driver whose paperwork takes ten minutes a week.

Treat the working consensus as a defensible position rather than settled law. That has a practical consequence: the weaker the legal authority, the more the record matters. An examiner who cannot resolve the question on the law will resolve it on your documentation, which is why a log that survives an IRS audit is the real protection here.

How to log the split so it holds up

Splitting commuting from business miles is a records problem, not a math problem. Your log needs the point where business driving started, the point where it stopped, and a date, mileage, destination, and purpose on each business trip. Publication 463 requires those records be kept at or near the time of the trip, and treats weekly upkeep as timely.

Three habits make it hold. Record the commuting legs rather than deleting them - a log that starts at the zone and ends at the zone looks reconstructed, while one that shows the commute and excludes it looks deliberate. Keep the annual odometer readings that tie total miles to business miles. And decide your home office position once, in writing, rather than treating the first leg as deductible in December and not in June.

Automatic trip detection handles the first habit without discipline: GigOdo timestamps each drive as it happens and lets you tag it business or personal, so the boundary gets set on the day it happened instead of in April. Which method those miles feed into is a separate decision - our standard mileage versus actual expenses guide walks the break-even, and either method needs this same split.

Bottom line

The first leg out and the last leg home are commuting unless your residence is a qualifying principal place of business. Everything between the start and end of your working day is deductible business mileage. Getting that boundary right is worth thousands either way, and the only thing that proves it is a log written while you drive. More in the Mileage & Records series, and the deduction lands on Schedule C.

FAQ

Sources: Rev. Rul. 99-7; IRS Publication 463; IRS Publication 587; IRS Notice 2026-10; Announcement 2026-11, IRB 2026-29; IRS Tax Topic 510; Curphey v. Commissioner, 73 T.C. 766 (1980); Rev. Rul. 94-47 and Rev. Rul. 55-109. This article is general information, not tax advice.