How to track business mileage for taxes (2026 rate)

This is a general guide for planning, not tax advice. Confirm your situation with a tax professional.

Business miles are the deduction freelancers lose the most money on — not because they don’t drive for work, but because logging the trips is a chore that never quite gets done. At 72.5 cents a mile for 2026, a client visit across town and back is real money, and a self-employed person who drives regularly can leave thousands on the table over a year. The miss isn’t the driving. It’s the record.

Why is a mileage log worth so much?

Because a mile you can’t prove is a mile you can’t deduct.

The math is unforgiving. Each business mile is worth 72.5 cents off your taxable income in 2026. Drive 8,000 business miles in a year and don’t log them, and you’ve handed the IRS tax on nearly $5,800 of income you never had to pay. Multiply that by a few years and the forgotten trips add up to a serious sum.

The problem is that miles evaporate from memory faster than almost any other expense. A receipt at least leaves a slip of paper. A drive to a client, a supply run, a site visit — those leave nothing unless you write them down. And “I drive about this much for work” is not a number the IRS accepts.

What does the IRS require in a log?

A record that is contemporaneous — kept at or near the time you drove, not assembled the week before you file. For each business trip, the IRS wants four things:

• The date of the trip.
• The destination — where you drove.
• The business purpose — why the trip counts as work.
• The miles driven.

That’s it. No special form, no app required. But the timing is what gives the log its weight. A log written the day you drive reads as a genuine business record. A spreadsheet filled in the night before your return is due — with round numbers and no detail — is exactly what triggers an auditor’s doubt. Same miles, very different credibility. The IRS standard mileage rules reward the driver who kept the record honestly, as it happened.

Standard rate or actual expenses — which do I pick?

Two ways to turn business miles into a deduction.

1. The standard mileage rate. Multiply your business miles by 72.5 cents (for 2026). One number times one rate. It folds in fuel, insurance, maintenance, and depreciation, so you don’t track any of those separately. Simple, and for most freelancers it wins.
2. Actual expenses. Add up what the vehicle truly costs — gas, insurance, repairs, depreciation — and deduct the share that’s business use. More paperwork, but it can beat the standard rate for an expensive vehicle or one driven heavily for work.

A rule worth knowing before you choose: if you use actual expenses in the first year you put a car into service, you generally lock out the standard rate for that vehicle for as long as you own it. So start with the standard rate unless you’ve run the numbers and actual expenses clearly wins. Either way, the mileage log matters — the actual-expense method still needs your business-use percentage, which comes straight from miles driven.

Where Keel fits

The reason miles get lost is friction: logging a trip means opening a spreadsheet, and by the time you’re back at your desk the drive is forgotten. Keel closes that gap. Log a trip in a tap and Keel values it at the official IRS rate — 72.5 cents for 2026 — with the date stamped into its append-only, hash-chained ledger, where the entry sits in order and can’t quietly change. That’s the definition of a contemporaneous record: captured as it happened, held in a form that holds up. Pair it with the habit of scanning receipts on the spot and setting aside your tax share as you earn, and the deduction you used to forget becomes one you can actually claim — and defend.