Calculating your mileage tax deduction doesn’t have to be complicated or time-consuming. Our free IRS mileage calculator helps you instantly estimate your tax deduction (or reimbursement) by simply entering the miles you’ve driven for business this year!

Whether you’re a gig worker delivering food, a real estate agent visiting properties, or a small business owner meeting clients, every mile you drive for work represents a potential tax deduction. At the 2026 IRS rate of 72.5 cents per mile for business, you could be putting thousands of dollars back into your pocket.

How to Use the Mileage Deduction Calculator

Using our calculator is easy. Just input your information and let it do the math for you! It’s designed to give you a quick estimate without requiring detailed tax knowledge.

Start by selecting your tax year from the dropdown menu. The calculator includes rates for the current year as well as previous years. You can also choose a custom rate.

Next, enter the total miles you’ve driven for business. If you have medical, charity, or military moving miles, you can find those under the “Additional categories” dropdown.

Once you’ve entered your miles, the calculator instantly multiplies each category by the appropriate IRS rate and displays your estimated deduction, giving you a clear view of how much you could potentially deduct on your tax return (or receive as reimbursement from your employer, if your company uses the IRS rate).

Keep in mind that this calculator provides estimates for planning purposes. To actually claim these deductions on your tax return, you’ll need detailed mileage logs that meet IRS requirements, including dates, destinations, purposes, and miles driven for each trip.

2026 IRS Business Mileage Rate Explained

For 2026, the business mileage rate is 72.5 cents per mile, up 3 cents from the 2025 rate of 70 cents per mile. This rate applies to miles driven for business purposes by self-employed individuals (and employees if the business is using that rate).

The IRS conducts an annual survey to determine the costs of owning and operating a motor vehicle. It’s designed to allow you to easily deduct what you’d approximately pay per mile for your car’s gas, oil changes, tire replacements, brake work, insurance premiums, vehicle depreciation, and more.

Using the standard mileage means you can’t separately deduct individual expenses like gas receipts or maintenance bills. You can choose either the standard mileage rate or the actual expense method, not both.

Most drivers choose to just use the IRS standard business mileage rate since it doesn’t require tracking every vehicle-related cost throughout the year. While some may get higher deductions, it requires significantly more record-keeping and complexity.

On the other hand, you just need to track your business miles to use the IRS mileage rate. It’s generous enough that it most likely will cover your actual per-mile costs for using your vehicle for work, and it’s a lot simpler.

Manual Mileage Calculation Example

The math is simple. Multiply your business miles by the mileage rate to determine your deduction.

Let’s say you drove 10,000 business miles in 2026. Multiply 10,000 by $0.725 (the 2025 business rate) to get $7,250 in potential deductions!

Keep in mind that you can’t deduct personal miles on your taxes. Things like your commute, for example, cannot be deducted.

Common Deductible Mileage Scenarios

Gig workers driving for platforms like Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, or Instacart can deduct all miles driven while waiting for requests (with the respective gig app open and ready), traveling to pickups, and completing deliveries. Like we said earlier, your commute from home to where you plan on waiting for deliveries or pickups and your drive back home won’t qualify.

Real estate agents can deduct miles driven to property showings, client meetings, broker visits, and continuing education classes. Travel between your office and these locations qualifies, though your initial commute doesn’t.

Sales professionals meeting clients can deduct travel between customer sites, vendor meetings, and business-related errands. Freelancers traveling to client locations, coworking spaces, or meeting venues can deduct those miles.

Medical professionals making house calls, contractors visiting job sites, and service providers traveling to customer locations can all benefit from the IRS business mileage deduction. Any driving directly related to generating business income will typically qualify.

Keeping an IRS-Compliant Mileage Log

Estimating your deduction with our calculator is just the first step. Actually claiming that deduction requires detailed mileage logs that meet the IRS’s standards.

Your mileage log needs to document the date of each trip, the start and end location, the business purpose, and the miles driven. Simply recording the total mileage on your car between the first and last day of the year and estimating your business mileage most likely won’t satisfy the IRS and could result in you not being able to claim your deduction.

The IRS expects contemporaneous records, meaning logs created at or near the time trips occur rather than reconstructed months later from memory. This requirement protects against inflated or fabricated mileage claims that can’t be verified.

The Easiest Way to Track Your Business Miles

Manual mileage logs are tedious to maintain and easy to forget, leading to lost deductions when trips go unrecorded. TripLog’s automatic mileage tracker app makes this easy by automatically tracking your trips using your phone’s GPS!

The app runs in the background and detects when you start driving, capturing your route, distance, and duration without requiring you to remember to start and stop tracking. You can easily set auto-categorization rules and download IRS-compliant reports come tax time!

You can download TripLog on iOS or Android and start tracking unlimited miles automatically for free today!