Blog / Rideshare & delivery

Rideshare & delivery

Mileage deductions for Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash drivers

Your car is the business. For most rideshare and delivery drivers, mileage is the single biggest deduction you have, and the easiest one to lose. Every drive you forget to log is money you hand back at tax time. Here is how the deduction works in 2026, what miles actually count, and how to keep a record the tax people will accept, without spending your night off doing math.

Why miles matter more than you think

Say you drive 20,000 business miles in a year. At the 2026 IRS standard mileage rate that is a deduction of roughly $14,500 off your taxable income. Forget to log a quarter of your trips, which is easy to do across a busy year, and you have quietly thrown away thousands of dollars in write-offs. The miles are worth real money, but only the ones you can prove.

If you drive in the United States

Rideshare and delivery income is self-employment income, which you report on Schedule C with your Form 1040. If you drive for more than one app, say Uber and DoorDash both, that is still one combined Schedule C, not one per platform.

For the car itself, you pick one of two methods:

• Standard mileage rate. You multiply your business miles by the IRS rate, which is 72.5 cents per mile for 2026 (up from 70 cents in 2025). That single rate is meant to cover gas, insurance, repairs, and depreciation, so you do not deduct those separately.
• Actual expenses. You total your real car costs for the year and deduct the business-use share. More paperwork, sometimes a bigger deduction if your car is expensive to run.

Tolls and parking for a job are deductible on top of either method. One rule to know early: if you ever want to use the standard mileage rate on a car, you generally have to choose it the first year you use that car for work. And a leased car that starts on the standard rate has to stay on it for the life of the lease.

If you drive in Canada

The idea is the same, the mechanics differ. Your gig income and car costs go on Form T2125 as a sole proprietor. Here is the part that trips people up:

The CRA lets you keep either a full-year logbook (every business trip, with date, destination, purpose, and kilometres, plus odometer readings at the start and end of the year) or, once you have kept one complete year, a three-month sample in later years that stands in for the whole year as long as your driving pattern stays consistent. Keep your records for six years.

Which miles actually count

The clean answer: the miles you drive for the work. That includes driving to pick up a rider or an order, the trip itself, and repositioning between jobs while you are on the clock. The everyday commute from your home to wherever you start your day is generally personal, not business. The line can get fuzzy, so the safe move is to log everything with its purpose and let the rules sort it out at tax time, ideally with an accountant.

The easy way to keep the log

Nobody wants to tap start and stop between deliveries with a hot bag on the seat. That is the entire reason automatic tracking exists, and it is what PocketMile does. Flip on Working mode at the start of your shift and it logs every drive on its own, using GPS and motion, with the date, distance, and route. Your trips sort into business and personal, and at tax time you export a clean log built for the IRS or the CRA, in miles or kilometres, plus a summary for your accountant.

And because it is PocketMile, all of that stays on your phone. No account, nothing uploaded to our servers, which for a record of everywhere you drove all year is the way it should be.

← Back to the blog