Is Your Commute Deductible? Business Miles vs. Commuting Miles

Here is the good news most self-employed drivers never hear: business miles vs commuting miles comes down to a single, knowable rule, and for anyone who works from a home office, the non-deductible commute can disappear entirely. Every mile you drive for work lands in one of two buckets. One is deductible. One is not. Once you can tell which trip is which, the guessing stops, and so does leaving real deductions unclaimed.

The one rule that decides

A trip is a business mile when its purpose is business and it runs between two work points. A trip is a commute when it carries you between home and your regular place of business. The distinction is not the vehicle, the distance, or the time of day. It is the purpose of the drive and where your business is based.

That second part, where your business is based, is the hinge the rest of this turns on.

What the IRS treats as a commute

Driving from home to your regular or main place of business is a personal commute. It is never deductible, no matter how far you drive or how early you leave. If you rent a shop, a studio, or an office, the daily drive from your house to that location is the classic non-deductible commute. The IRS treats getting yourself to work as a personal choice about where you live, not a business expense.

Commuting miles still have a place in the records. Schedule C asks for them, even though they do not reduce the tax. So the miles get counted. They just do not get deducted.

What counts as a business mile

Once you are working, the miles start counting in your favor. These are business miles:

• Driving between job sites or work locations in the same day
• Driving to meet a client or customer
• Driving to a temporary work location
• Business errands: the bank, the supply house, the post office, a shipping run
• Driving to the airport for a business trip

The common thread is that each trip has a business purpose and connects to the work itself, not to the simple fact of getting from home to a fixed workplace.

The home-office rule that changes everything

This is the biggest lever for the self-employed, and the one that quietly rewrites the whole calculation. If a home office qualifies as the principal place of business, there is no non-deductible commute at all. The trip from the home office to the first job site, the first client, or the supply store is a business mile from the moment the car backs out of the driveway.

Consider what that means over a year. The drives a shop owner has to write off as personal commuting are, for a home-based business, deductible business miles from door to door. For a lot of solo operators, the home office is the difference between a handful of deductible trips and nearly every work drive counting.

The condition is that the home office has to genuinely qualify as the principal place of business under the IRS rules. That is worth confirming with an accountant before relying on it.

Temporary work locations

There is one more useful exception. A trip to a temporary work location, a job realistically expected to last a year or less, can be deductible even when it starts from home. This works most cleanly when you already have a regular place of business, whether a shop, an office, or a qualifying home office, since a temporary site is measured against that regular workplace. A contractor driving to a three-month remodel and a photographer driving to a one-day shoot are heading to temporary locations, not commuting to a fixed workplace. The rules carry conditions worth checking with an accountant, but the principle is that short-term job sites are treated differently from a permanent place of business.

How this plays out across trades

The same rule lands differently depending on the work:

• A delivery or rideshare driver is on business miles once the app is on and the trips begin. The drive from home before going online can still be a commute.
• A contractor driving between two job sites in an afternoon is on business miles the whole way, and with a qualifying home office, from the first site of the day.
• A photographer heading to a shoot is driving to a temporary work location, not commuting.
• A mobile service provider, whose workplace is wherever the next customer is, is on business miles between calls.
• An online retailer running boxes to the post office or the shipping depot is on a deductible business errand, not a personal trip.

Logging it so the deduction holds

Knowing the rule is half of it. The other half is a record the IRS will accept, which means logging each trip with its purpose at the time you take it, not reconstructing it in April. Mileage Ledger is built for exactly that. The Mileage Form opens on a phone in any mobile browser, with no app to download, so you can log it in the moment before pulling out of the lot.

For a personal drive or a true commute, the Purpose field has a Commute option. Choosing it zeros the deduction while still totaling the commuting miles Schedule C asks for, so the line gets filled in without inflating the deduction.

The Mileage Log does the math

Each business trip lands in the Mileage Log with the deduction calculated per trip at the current IRS standard mileage rate. Set a qualifying home office as the base once, and every trip logs from the driveway forward as business.

For the year-end handoff, upgrading to Expense & Mileage Ledger + Reporting adds Email Mileage Log Report, which sends the full mileage log to an accountant as a formatted PDF, and Tab Export, which saves every tab to Drive, so the classifications kept all year arrive ready to file. Mileage Ledger itself is a one-time purchase that lives in a personal Google Drive. The log built this year works the same in year five, and the trips belong to the driver, not to a subscription that has to be renewed to keep access to the records.

This article is general information, not tax or legal advice. The rules around commuting, home offices, and temporary work locations carry conditions specific to each situation, so an accountant has the final word on what is deductible.