Contractor mileage deduction: job sites, supply runs and the van
Drives from the shop to a job site, from site to site and out to a supplier are deductible. The drive from home depends on whether you work from a shop, a home office that qualifies, or neither. The rules, the van, the 2026 rates and a year worked through.
If you work for yourself in a trade and file Schedule C, the drives from your shop or yard to a job site, from site to site and out to a supplier are business: 72.5¢ a mile for drives up to June 30, 2026, 76¢ from July 1, plus business parking and tolls, on line 9. Home to your own shop is commuting unless your home office is your principal place of business. Whether the drive from home counts depends on where you work from: a shop you work at regularly, a home office that is your principal place of business, or neither.
If you work on a W-2 instead, for a general contractor or any other employer, the deduction is not yours: Publication 463 says an employee’s car costs “will no longer be allowed to be claimed as an unreimbursed employee travel expense”.
A one-owner LLC still files Schedule C unless you elected to have it taxed as a corporation. The Schedule C instructions say: “If you are the sole member of a domestic LLC, file Schedule C … unless you have elected to treat the domestic LLC as a corporation.”
Drives that count, and drives that don’t
For a shop or yard you work at regularly, with no home office that qualifies (the first setup below):
Publication 463’s example of a car’s business use includes trips to “meet with suppliers and other subcontractors”. Visits to a customer for an estimate count too: Publication 463 lists “Visiting clients or customers” as deductible transportation. Parking at your own shop is one of the “nondeductible commuting expenses”; “business-related parking fees when visiting a customer or client” are deductible.
The first and last drive of the day
“You can’t deduct commuting expenses no matter how far your home is from your regular place of work.” Publication 463, chapter 4, gives three answers to where that regular place is (the same three as for real estate agents), and yours decides the first and last legs of each day.
You work from a shop or yard regularly
If your home office does not qualify (the next case), home to the shop and back is the commute, and drives from the shop to job sites and suppliers are business. A job site is a temporary work location when the job is “realistically expected to last (and does in fact last) for 1 year or less”, and for those:
If you have one or more regular work locations away from your home and you commute to a temporary work location in the same trade or business, you can deduct the expenses of the daily round-trip transportation between your home and the temporary location, regardless of distance.
So a day that starts at one job and ends at another counts from driveway to driveway. A job expected to last more than a year “isn’t temporary, regardless of whether it actually lasts for more than 1 year”, and home to it is a commute, like home to the shop.
A job first expected to last a year or less, which you later expect to run past a year, stays temporary until that day: “It won’t be treated as temporary after the date you determine it will last more than 1 year.” The drives from home before that date still count; the ones after it are commuting.
Your home office is your principal place of business
Check this case before the other two: Publication 463’s chart says “Don’t use this chart if your home is your principal place of business.” The rule is: “If you have an office in your home that qualifies as a principal place of business, you can deduct your daily transportation costs between your home and another work location in the same trade or business.” The shop is another work location, so home to the shop counts too: the Schedule C instructions say so “regardless of whether that location is regular or temporary and regardless of distance.”
Publication 587‘s first example of a home office that qualifies is Sid, “a self-employed plumber” who works mostly at customers’ homes and offices and uses a small home office “exclusively and regularly for the administrative or management activities of the plumbing business, such as phoning customers, ordering supplies, and keeping the books.” With no other fixed location for that work, “Sid’s home office qualifies as a principal place of business for deducting expenses.”
A kitchen table the family also eats at fails the exclusive-use half. A shop desk where you do estimates and books can fail the other: you must have “no other fixed location where you conduct substantial administrative or management activities”. A shop used only to store, cut and load materials does not: under Publication 587, “substantial nonadministrative or nonmanagement business activities at a fixed location outside your home” do not disqualify a home office. Home office and mileage goes through the test in full.
Neither
Publication 463, Example 3: “the location of your first business contact inside the metropolitan area is considered your office.” Home to the first job and the last job to home are commuting; everything between them counts. The exception is a job outside your metro area: you “can deduct daily transportation costs between home and a temporary work site outside that metropolitan area.”
Tools in the back don’t change the commute
“Hauling tools or instruments in your car while commuting to and from work doesn’t make your car expenses deductible.” Only the extra cost of hauling them is deductible, “such as for renting a trailer you tow with your car”.
The van or pickup
Publication 463: “In this publication, ‘car’ includes a van, pickup, or panel truck.” Its cost goes on line 9 one of two ways:
- The standard mileage rate: business miles times the rate for each drive’s date, plus business parking and tolls. For 2026 that is 72.5¢ a mile (Notice 2026-10), and 76¢ for drives “on or after July 1, 2026” (Announcement 2026-11); both are in the 2026 rates.
- Actual expenses: the business share of what the van cost to run. For Publication 463’s contractor, with 12,000 business miles out of 20,000: “You can claim only 60% (12,000 ÷ 20,000) of the cost of operating your car as a business expense.” Car expenses on Schedule C covers that side.
The standard rate is chosen early: “If you want to use the standard mileage rate for a car you own, you must choose to use it in the first year the car is available for use in your business.” For a leased van or pickup the choice is stricter: “If you want to use the standard mileage rate for a car you lease, you must use it for the entire lease period.” It is closed to a vehicle you depreciated under MACRS or by any method other than straight line over its estimated useful life, took a section 179 deduction or the special depreciation allowance on, or leased and claimed actual expenses for after 1997, and to every vehicle when you use five or more at the same time. Before a section 179 deduction on a new truck: “If, in the year you first place a car in service, you claim either a section 179 deduction or use a depreciation method other than straight line for its estimated useful life, you can’t use the standard mileage rate on that car in any future year.”
Five or more means in use at once. Publication 463’s Example 2 is a landscaping business with four pickups in use, two of them traded in during the year: “You can use the standard mileage rate for the business mileage of all six of the trucks you owned during the year.”
Two vehicles, two logs
Each vehicle needs its own figures. Table 5-1 asks, for each car, for “the cost of the car and any improvements, the date you started using it for business, the mileage for each business use, and the total miles for the year.” The Schedule C instructions: “If you used more than one vehicle during the year, attach a statement with the information requested in Schedule C, Part IV, for each additional vehicle.” That statement goes with Part IV, which is the place for the vehicle questions when you take the standard mileage rate, lease the vehicle or have fully depreciated it, and don’t otherwise have to file Form 4562. If you claim depreciation on the van, or file Form 4562 for any other reason (for tools or equipment placed in service this year, say), the same questions go in Form 4562, Part V instead. Car expenses on Schedule C shows both.
A year, worked through
Marco, a self-employed electrician, rents a shop six miles from home where he keeps stock, loads the van and does his books: it is his regular place of work, and his home office does not qualify. His van has been on the standard rate since its first business year. Tuesday, August 11, 2026:
| Leg | Miles | Counts? |
|---|---|---|
| Home to the shop | 6 | No: commuting |
| Shop to the Alvarez kitchen rewire | 11 | Yes |
| Alvarez job to the electrical supply house | 4 | Yes |
| Supply house to a callback at the Kim house | 7 | Yes |
| Kim house to home | 9 | Yes: a temporary site, and the shop is his regular workplace |
| The day | 37 | 31 business, 6 commuting |
At 76¢, the 31 business miles are 31 × $0.76 = $23.56. If he drives from home straight to the Alvarez job (13 miles) and skips the shop, what counts depends on where he works from:
| Where he works from | Home to the Alvarez job (13 mi) and the Kim house to home (9 mi) | Business miles at 76¢ |
|---|---|---|
| A shop, regularly | Both count | 33 × $0.76 = $25.08 |
| A home office that qualifies | Both count | 33 × $0.76 = $25.08 |
| Neither | Both are commuting | 11 × $0.76 = $8.36 |
For the year, his log shows 7,150 business miles January through June and 7,600 July through December, each half at its own rate:
| Period | Business miles | Rate | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|
| January 1 – June 30 | 7,150 | 72.5¢ | $5,183.75 |
| July 1 – December 31 | 7,600 | 76¢ | $5,776.00 |
| Parking at job sites | — | at cost | $210.00 |
| Tolls | — | at cost | $64.00 |
| Line 9 | 14,750 | $11,233.75 |
His odometer readings give the van 21,300 miles for the year, split in Part IV into 14,750 business (line 44a), 1,450 commuting (44b) and 21,300 − 14,750 − 1,450 = 5,100 other (44c). The $11,233.75 lowers the profit he is taxed on; it is not money back. The mileage calculator splits a year at July 1 for you.
The log a contractor needs
Table 5-1 asks for the same four things for every business drive: the date, “your business destination”, the business purpose and the miles. The same chapter asks you to record them “at or near the time”, and a weekly log counts: “If you maintain a log on a weekly basis that accounts for use during the week, the log is considered a timely kept record.” For a trade, the purpose names the job or the customer:
| Drive | A purpose line |
|---|---|
| Shop to a job | Rough-in, Alvarez kitchen, 14 Elm St |
| Supply run | Wire and boxes for the Alvarez job |
| Estimate | Estimate for the Patel basement finish |
| Callback | Callback, tripping breaker at the Kim house |
What to write as the business purpose of a drive has more, and what the IRS wants in a mileage log the rest of the record.
A contractor’s mileage log
- every business drive: date, from, to, miles and a purpose naming the job or the customer
- home to the shop kept apart as commuting, unless your home office qualifies
- parking and tolls with the drive they belong to
- for each van or truck: its own log, what it cost (plus any improvements), the date it went into business use, and odometer readings at both ends of the year
- kept every week, not rebuilt in April
Where OdoTax fits
OdoTax records each drive on its own, with both addresses and the miles; there is no start button. Name your home and the shop as places of the kinds Home and Work, and drives between them are offered as Commute, kept out of the deduction and counted for Part IV. If your home office qualifies, leave the shop as an ordinary place. A drive between home and a job site (and home to the shop, if it is an ordinary place) is suggested as Personal, because one end is home: file it as Business when the rules above say it counts.
Add Supply run and Callback once as your own purposes. A route you drive daily for weeks, such as the shop to one job, can be a frequent drive with its own purpose, filed the moment it arrives.
Add each van or truck as a vehicle. A drive goes on your default vehicle unless you pick another on the drive; on Android, pairing a truck’s Bluetooth puts its drives on that truck. The PDF report lists the drives and the Part IV figures for each vehicle, and the CSV has a Vehicle column on every drive. The free plan covers 35 drives a month; Pro removes the limit, at $7.99 a month or $74.99 a year.
The bottom line
Drives from the shop to job sites, between sites and to suppliers are business. Home to the shop and back is a commute, tools or not, unless your home office qualifies. Home straight to a job site counts with a qualifying home office (any job, temporary or not), with a shop (a temporary job only), and with neither only to a temporary site outside your metro area. Keep a log per vehicle, name the job the same week, and price each half of 2026 at its own rate.
Sources
- IRS, Publication 463: Travel, Gift, and Car Expenses (2025) — chapter 4, Transportation: Figure B, Temporary work location, No regular place of work, Commuting expenses, Parking fees, Hauling tools or instruments, Office in the home, Examples of deductible transportation (Example 3); Car Expenses: a van, pickup or panel truck as a car, the cost of using your car as an employee, Choosing the standard mileage rate, Standard mileage rate not allowed, Five or more cars (Example 2), Parking fees and tolls, Business and personal use, Depreciation and section 179 deductions; chapter 5, Table 5-1, Timely kept records, Sampling.
- IRS, Publication 587: Business Use of Your Home (2025) — Exclusive Use, Principal Place of Business, Administrative or management activities performed at other locations, Example 1 (Sid, a self-employed plumber).
- IRS, Instructions for Schedule C (Form 1040) (2025) — single-member LLCs; line 9 and Information on your vehicle, with the statement for each additional vehicle; Part IV, line 44b, commuting.
- IRS, Notice 2026-10 and Announcement 2026-11 — the 2026 business rates, 72.5¢ and then 76¢ for drives on or after July 1.
This article is general information, not tax advice. Tax situations vary — check with a qualified professional before you file.
