Every January the IRS resets the price of a business mile, and every April people discover they should have been counting them. For 2026 the standard mileage rates (set in Notice 2026-10) are:
- Business: 72.5¢ per mile — up from 70¢ in 2025
- Medical or moving: 20.5¢ per mile (moving applies only to qualifying active-duty military)
- Charitable: 14¢ per mile — fixed by statute, which is why it never moves
If you just want your number, the mileage reimbursement calculator has the 2026 rates built in — add your trips and it does the math. This post is the why behind the number.
What's inside the 72.5 cents
The standard mileage rate isn't a fuel allowance — it's the IRS's all-in estimate of what a mile costs to drive: fuel, yes, but also depreciation, insurance, registration, maintenance, tires. That's the deal you accept when you use it: one clean rate, no receipts for gas or oil changes, but no separate deduction for them either.
The alternative is the actual expense method — track every car cost, apply your business-use percentage, depreciate the vehicle. It can come out ahead for expensive cars or heavy business use, but it's bookkeeping-intensive, and there's a one-way door: if you want the option of standard mileage on a car, you generally need to use it in the first year you place that car in service. When in doubt for year one, start with standard mileage — you keep both options open. (The full standard-vs-actual comparison is its own post.)
Who can actually claim it
This is where most of the confusion lives:
- Self-employed, freelancers, gig drivers — yes. Business miles go on Schedule C against your income. Client visits, supply runs, driving between work sites all count. Commuting from home to a regular workplace doesn't.
- W-2 employees — generally not on your own return. The deduction for unreimbursed employee expenses is suspended at the federal level, so the route is your employer reimbursing you, ideally under an accountable plan: reimbursements at or below the IRS rate, against a real mileage log, arrive tax-free.
- Employers — you can reimburse at any rate you like, but the IRS rate is the safe harbor. Pay more and the excess is taxable wages; pay less and your people are quietly subsidising the company car-by-car.
The log is the whole game
Here's the part that decides whether any of this survives scrutiny: the IRS expects a contemporaneous record — date, destination or route, business purpose, and miles, written down near the time of the trip, plus your total annual mileage to establish the business-use share. A year of trips reconstructed from a calendar in April is exactly the pattern that gets claims reduced.
Practically, you have three options, in ascending order of reliability: a notebook in the glovebox, a spreadsheet, or automatic capture. If you want the middle path, the free mileage log template has the IRS columns and the math built in — set the rate cell to 0.725 and the reimbursement column fills itself. If you'd rather not maintain a spreadsheet at all, that's the job Starlog does in the background: the trip gets logged with its date, purpose, and distance when it happens, filed in your own Google Drive next to your receipts.
A worked example
Say you're a freelance designer who drove 4,200 business miles in 2026 — client meetings, print-shop runs, a couple of regional conferences. At 72.5¢, that's a $3,045 deduction. At a 24% marginal rate, roughly $730 of tax you don't pay — for driving you were doing anyway. The only thing standing between you and that number is whether the log exists.
The takeaway
The 2026 rate is 72.5¢ a business mile; the calculator will turn your trips into a claim in under a minute. But the rate is the easy half — the IRS pays out on documentation, not arithmetic. Start the log this week, whether that's the template or an app that keeps it for you, because the miles you can't document are the ones you donate back.