Freelancer + 1099 Mileage: 2026 Schedule C Guide

If you freelance or take 1099 work, your car is one of your biggest tax assets — and one of the easiest deductions to lose in an audit. The single most important rule for 2026 is this: the trips that count as business depend on whether your home qualifies as your principal place of business. Get that one decision right and almost every mile you drive becomes deductible. Get it wrong and your first trip of the day is a nondeductible commute, no matter how much you charge the client.

That matters because the 2026 standard mileage rate is 72.5¢ per business mile (Notice 2026-10) and every dollar of Schedule C deduction reduces both your federal income tax and your 15.3% self-employment tax. A freelancer who drives 10,000 business miles in 2026 is sitting on a $7,250 deduction that — depending on bracket and QBI status — saves roughly $1,900–$2,700 in actual tax. Misclassify those miles and you give that money back to the Treasury.

The rules feel slippery because they live across IRC §162, §262, §274(d), §280A, §280F, Rev. Rul. 99-7, and a stack of Tax Court cases that almost no mileage app marketing blog ever mentions. This article fixes that. It walks you through the decision tree, the three exceptions to the commute rule, where the numbers go on Schedule C, three worked dollar examples, the state quirks that matter, and the recent Tax Court losses that show what happens when freelancers cut corners on documentation.

Key takeaways

• The 2026 business mileage rate is 72.5¢/mile (Notice 2026-10, Dec. 29, 2025).
• A qualifying home office under §280A(c)(1)(A) is the master key — it converts your home into your tax-law starting point so that the drive to a client is business, not commuting (Rev. Rul. 99-7, Exception 3).
• Self-employed mileage is reported on Schedule C, Line 9 (car and truck expenses), with Line 13 for depreciation, Line 20a for vehicle lease payments, and Line 30 for the home office deduction.
• OBBBA (P.L. 119-21) did not change Schedule C mileage rules but permanently killed unreimbursed W-2 employee mileage and raised the 1099-NEC reporting threshold to $2,000 for 2026.
• §274(d) requires contemporaneous records — the Cohan estimate rule does not apply to vehicles, and the Tax Court has repeatedly enforced this (Velez, Royster, Garza, Khan).

Why freelancer mileage is harder than rideshare mileage

A rideshare driver has one job: drive paying passengers. The miles between pickups all clearly relate to a single, ongoing business activity at a known set of locations. A freelancer’s day looks nothing like that.

You might start at your kitchen table answering emails, drive to a coffee shop to meet a client, swing by a coworking space for the afternoon, stop at the post office to mail an invoice copy, and end at a networking event. Some of those legs are deductible. Some are not. The deductibility depends on what your tax home is, whether you have a §280A-qualifying home office, and whether the destination is “temporary” within the meaning of Rev. Rul. 99-7.

That complexity is exactly why automatic, rule-aware tracking matters for this audience more than for any other. Manual logs break down the second your week stops looking the same. And the IRS knows this — which is why Schedule C Part IV asks for total business, commuting, and personal miles for the year, and why the Tax Court has spent decades disallowing reconstructed logs.

The freelancer mileage decision tree

Before any of the case law makes sense, learn this three-step decision tree. Apply it to every trip:

Step 1 — Does your home qualify as a principal place of business under §280A(c)(1)(A)?

• Yes → Rev. Rul. 99-7 Exception 3 applies. Every trip from your home to a business location is deductible. You are done.
• No → Continue to Step 2.

Step 2 — Do you have a regular work location away from your home (a separate office, a client site you visit constantly, a warehouse, a studio you rent)?

• Yes → Rev. Rul. 99-7 Exception 2 applies to drives from home to a temporary work location in the same trade — any distance, inside or outside your metropolitan area, is deductible.
• No → Continue to Step 3.

Step 3 — Is the work location outside the metropolitan area where you live and normally work?

• Yes → Rev. Rul. 99-7 Exception 1 applies — deductible, regardless of distance.
• No → It is a nondeductible commute under §262(a) and Treas. Reg. §1.262-1(b)(5).

That is the entire framework. The rest of this article is how each of those steps actually works in practice.

What “freelancer” and “1099 contractor” mean here

This article addresses U.S. taxpayers who report self-employment income on Schedule C of Form 1040. That includes:

• Sole proprietors — anyone running a business without a separate entity.
• Single-member LLCs — by default, disregarded entities filing Schedule C.
• Independent contractors receiving 1099-NEC for nonemployee compensation.
• Gig workers in non-driving roles — consultants, designers, writers, photographers, home health aides, IT contractors, field service techs, traveling sales reps, performing artists, therapists, and bookkeepers.

It does not address rideshare and delivery drivers (separate forthcoming article) or real estate agents under §3508 (covered in our real estate agent pillar). It also does not cover S-corp or partnership owners, whose vehicle deductions run through a different mechanic (accountable plans, K-1 unreimbursed partnership expenses).

A quick OBBBA note that matters to this audience: starting in 2026, the 1099-NEC reporting threshold rose from $600 to $2,000 (OBBBA §70433), and the 1099-K threshold reverted to $20,000 plus 200 transactions (§70432). Neither change affects your obligation to report income — you still report every dollar earned on Schedule C. But you may receive fewer information returns, which makes your own records the only complete record of what you made and what you drove.

The home office: your highest-value mileage move

The home office deduction is famous as a tax write-off, but for freelancers its bigger value is what it does to your mileage. A home office that satisfies §280A(c)(1)(A) turns your residence into a “regular work location” — and under Exception 3 of Rev. Rul. 99-7, every drive from that home to a business destination becomes deductible.

What qualifies under §280A(c)(1)(A)

Two tests must be met for a space in your home to qualify:

• Exclusive use — the space is used only for business. Not occasionally for personal email. Not as a guest bedroom when family visits. The Tax Court reads “exclusive” strictly.
• Regular use — used on a continuing basis for the trade or business, not sporadically.

Then the space must satisfy one of these:

• It is your principal place of business, or
• It is used to meet patients, clients, or customers in the normal course of business, or
• It is a separate structure used in connection with the trade or business.

For freelancers without a separate office, the principal-place-of-business test is what matters. And here is where Congress did freelancers a favor. In Commissioner v. Soliman, 506 U.S. 168 (1993), the Supreme Court denied a home office deduction to an anesthesiologist because his patient care happened at hospitals, not at his apartment. Congress disagreed. The Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 (§932) amended §280A(c)(1) to add a safe harbor: your home is the principal place of business if you use it for “administrative or management activities” of your trade and no other fixed location is used for substantial administrative or management activities.

In plain English: if you do your invoicing, scheduling, bookkeeping, client communication, and planning from home — and you do not have a regular office somewhere else for those tasks — your home qualifies, even if the actual client-facing work happens elsewhere. Curphey v. Commissioner, 73 T.C. 766 (1980), is the foundational case for using that home office as your transportation base for mileage purposes.

The simplified vs. actual method on Schedule C Line 30

Once you qualify, you choose between:

• Simplified method (Rev. Proc. 2013-13) — $5 per square foot, up to 300 square feet, capped at $1,500 per year. No depreciation, no recapture, no Form 8829.
• Actual method (Form 8829) — your business-use percentage of utilities, insurance, repairs, depreciation, and (if owned) mortgage interest and property taxes.

Both methods give you the same mileage benefit under Rev. Rul. 99-7. The dollar amount you put on Line 30 changes; the unlock for your driving does not. Pick whichever produces the larger total deduction. You can switch between methods year to year.

Rev. Rul. 99-7: the three exceptions in plain English

Rev. Rul. 99-7, 1999-1 C.B. 361, is the single most important regulatory document for freelancer mileage. It states the general rule — commuting between residence and a work location is nondeductible — and then carves out three exceptions.

Exception 1 — Out of the metropolitan area

Daily transportation from your home to a temporary work location outside the metropolitan area where you live and normally work is deductible, regardless of distance. This exception covers the freelancer who lives in one city but takes a one-week job in another. The “outside the metropolitan area” piece is what makes this narrower than most people assume.

Exception 2 — You already have a regular work location

If you have one or more regular work locations away from home (a separate studio, a rented office, a client site you go to constantly), drives from your home to a temporary work location in the same trade are deductible — any distance, inside or outside your metro. This is the cleanest case for a field service tech who has a dispatch hub but visits varied job sites.

Exception 3 — Your home is the principal place of business

If your home qualifies under §280A(c)(1)(A), every drive from your home to any other work location in the same trade is deductible. Regular site or temporary site. Inside or outside the metropolitan area. Five miles away or fifty. This is the freelancer’s golden exception.

The “temporary” definition

Rev. Rul. 99-7 defines a work location as temporary if employment there is realistically expected to last one year or less and actually does last one year or less. If you start a project expecting it to last eight months and it does, every drive home-to-site qualifies under Exception 2 or 3. If you start expecting two years, none of those drives qualify from day one. And if your expectation changes mid-engagement — say a six-month project becomes “indefinite” — the change is prospective: drives are temporary until the date the expectation changed, then they become a regular commute.

The “metropolitan area” question and the worst-case freelancer

What is a “metropolitan area”? The IRS has never defined it. No regulation, no revenue procedure, no published private letter ruling. The Tax Court conceded as much in Bogue v. Commissioner, T.C. Memo. 2011-164, aff’d, 522 F. App’x 169 (3d Cir. 2013): “The term ‘metropolitan area’ is ill defined, and we therefore consider the facts and circumstances.”

Bogue was a self-employed construction worker who drove from his New Jersey home to job sites in Pennsylvania, each within roughly 20 miles. He had no home office and no regular work location away from home. The Tax Court denied every mile because none of the three Rev. Rul. 99-7 exceptions applied — the sites were within his metro area, he had no regular off-site workplace, and his home did not qualify under §280A.

Bogue is the worst-case scenario for freelancers, and it is more common than people think. If you have no qualifying home office and no regular off-site workplace and your client work happens within the same general area where you live, your daily drives are commutes — every one of them. The fix in most cases is to establish a §280A-qualifying home office, which moves you into Exception 3 immediately.

Aldea v. Commissioner, T.C. Memo. 2000-136, reinforces the point: the burden is on you, the taxpayer, to prove the work site is outside the metropolitan area. Distance alone is not enough; what matters is where you “live and normally work.” Practitioners often use a rough 35–50 mile benchmark as a rule of thumb, but no authority sets that number.

A historical note: in Walker v. Commissioner, 101 T.C. 537 (1993), the Tax Court allowed a self-employed logger to deduct miles between home and forest job sites even though his home did not meet the §280A principal-place-of-business test. The IRS issued a formal nonacquiescence, and Rev. Rul. 99-7 was written to reject Walker’s reasoning. Do not rely on Walker — the IRS will not.

Coworking, temporary work sites, and project-based engagements

A few specific freelancer scenarios deserve attention because they trip people up.

Coworking spaces. A coworking membership is typically a regular work location — not a temporary one. That means trips from your home to your coworking space are commutes unless your home itself qualifies under §280A. If you go to coworking three days a week and also do administrative work at home, you may still qualify the home office because Rev. Rul. 99-7’s §280A test asks whether no other fixed location is used for substantial administrative or management activities. A coworking desk used for client work is not necessarily a “fixed administrative location.” This is fact-specific. Document it.

Multi-month client engagements. An IT contractor on a six-month build at a client’s office faces a sharper question: is the client site temporary under the one-year rule? If you contracted for six months expecting six months, yes — Exception 2 (or Exception 3 with a home office) applies. If the engagement extends and you now realistically expect more than a year, the site stops being temporary on the date your expectation changed, and from that date forward those drives become a commute.

Multiple clients in a day. Once you have started your business day at a deductible first stop, drives between business locations are deductible under §162(a) regardless of any home office issue. The only legs at risk are the first-stop-out and last-stop-back if you do not qualify for an exception.

Hantzis v. Commissioner, 638 F.2d 248 (1st Cir. 1981), is worth remembering for traveling freelancers: your “tax home” requires a real business connection to the city you call home. A freelancer who lives in Denver but works exclusively in Seattle for ten months does not get to deduct lodging or transportation as “away from home.”

Schedule C, line by line — where the numbers actually go

Every line below assumes you are filing Schedule C of Form 1040.

Two reporting traps catch freelancers:

1. Part IV asks for commuting miles. If you have a home office and treat all of your trips as business, your “commuting” number should be near zero — and you should be able to explain why. If you do not have a home office and put zero commuting miles, you have likely made a §274(d) substantiation problem worse.
2. Form 4562 is required if you placed the vehicle in service in the current year, are claiming §179 or bonus depreciation, or are using actual expenses with depreciation. The standard mileage rate avoids Form 4562 in most years but does not avoid the recordkeeping.

Line B: a small choice with audit-selection consequences

Schedule C’s Line B asks for a six-digit Principal Business Activity (PBA) code drawn from the chart at the back of the IRS Schedule C instructions. Pick the code that best describes the activity generating your Line 1 income — consultants typically file under 541611 (Administrative Management & General Management Consulting), graphic designers under 541430, photographers under 541921, writers under 711510, and IT contractors under 541510. The code doesn’t change the tax you owe, but it feeds the IRS Discriminant Function (DIF) audit-selection system: a return that looks anomalous against its peer group draws extra scrutiny, while one that matches the industry profile typically doesn’t.

For driving-heavy self-employed work (rideshare, delivery, real estate, owner-operator trucking), the code choice matters more — high mileage relative to gross income looks normal under 485300, 492000, or 531210 and unusual almost anywhere else. Our Schedule C NAICS codes for self-employed drivers guide maps personas to codes, calls out the census.gov codes that are not on the IRS Schedule C chart (so they cause e-file rejections), and explains the DIF system in more detail.

Standard mileage vs. actual expense after OBBBA

The two methods produce different numbers and lock you in differently.

Standard mileage rate (72.5¢ for 2026). Simpler. No receipt collection for gas, oil, or repairs (you still track tolls and parking separately). The 72.5¢ is built from an estimated cost-per-mile that includes 35¢ of depreciation. Under Rev. Proc. 2019-46, to use standard mileage on an owned vehicle you must elect it in the first year the vehicle is available for business; if you elect actual expense with MACRS, §179, or §168(k) bonus in year one, you are locked out of standard mileage for that vehicle’s life. For leased vehicles, if you choose standard mileage, you must use it for the entire lease term, renewals included.

Actual expense. Often better for expensive vehicles or low-mileage drivers. You deduct the business-use percentage of actual costs plus depreciation. After OBBBA §70301, 100% bonus depreciation is permanent for property placed in service after January 19, 2025 — so a freelancer who buys a heavy SUV (over 6,000 lb GVWR) for business in 2026 may be able to expense most of the cost in year one, subject to the §280F caps in Rev. Proc. 2026-15 ($20,300 year-one limit for passenger autos with bonus, $12,300 without).

Most freelancers driving a moderately priced car with 5,000–20,000 business miles a year come out ahead with standard mileage. The exception is the freelancer who just bought a $60,000 vehicle and drives it heavily for business — actual expense plus bonus depreciation will usually win in year one. We cover this trade-off in depth in our standard mileage vs. actual expenses guide.

What the IRS requires in your log

§274(d) is the strict-substantiation rule for listed property, and §280F(d)(4) classifies passenger autos as listed property. The combination means the Cohan rule does not apply to your car. You cannot ask the Tax Court to estimate.

Treas. Reg. §1.274-5T(c)(2)(ii) requires records made “at or near the time of the use” showing:

• Amount — miles for each business use.
• Time — the date of the trip.
• Place — the destination, at least in general terms.
• Business purpose — specific enough that someone else can tell what the trip was for. “Client meeting” alone is rarely enough; “Client meeting — proposal review at Acme Co., Inc.” is better.

The regulation includes a weekly log safe harbor: a log maintained on a weekly basis is treated as contemporaneous. That sets the outer limit. Reconstructed-at-year-end logs do not satisfy §274(d), as the Tax Court keeps reminding us:

• Velez v. Commissioner, T.C. Memo. 2018-46 — an attorney lost $18,946 of mileage and ate a 20% accuracy-related penalty when his iPad calendar and Amex statements were used to reconstruct a log after the fact.
• Royster v. Commissioner, T.C. Memo. 2010-16 — a record of only total miles and odometer readings, without trip-by-trip detail, was disallowed.
• Garza v. Commissioner, T.C. Memo. 2014-121 — a log with dates and destinations but no specific business purpose for each trip failed §274(d).
• Khan v. Commissioner, T.C. Summ. Op. 2025-5 — a recent reaffirmation; vehicle and travel deductions disallowed for inadequate records. (Tax Court Summary Opinions are non-precedential under §7463(b) but show how the Court is currently applying the rule.)

The pattern is consistent: the IRS and the Tax Court will throw out an entire deduction over recordkeeping before they ever get to the merits. Velez did not lose because his miles were not really business miles; he lost because he could not prove it the right way.

Worked example 1: Maya, the home-office consultant

Maya is a 35-year-old marketing consultant in Austin. She is a single-member LLC filing Schedule C. She works primarily from her home office — a converted bedroom used exclusively for business — and visits two or three clients in person each week. 2026 numbers:

• Gross Schedule C receipts: $120,000
• Direct business expenses (software, contractors): $22,000
• Business miles driven (all from home office to clients and back): 6,500
• Home office: qualifies under §280A; simplified method, 200 sq ft × $5 = $1,000
• Filing status: single; standard deduction $16,100

Because Maya’s home qualifies under §280A(c)(1)(A), Rev. Rul. 99-7 Exception 3 applies — every client drive is business mileage. She uses the standard mileage rate.

QBI status: Consulting is an SSTB under §199A(d)(2). Maya’s taxable income is well below the 2026 single SSTB threshold of $201,775 (Rev. Proc. 2025-32), so she gets the full 20% QBI deduction on her qualified business income.

That is the real value of a mile for Maya: not 72.5¢, but roughly 30¢ of cash in her pocket after stacking SE tax, income tax, and the QBI offset.

Worked example 2: Devon, the mobile photographer with no home office

Devon is a wedding and event photographer in Denver. He rents a small commercial studio downtown — his regular work location — where he edits and meets couples for consultations. He does not have a qualifying home office. 2026 numbers:

• Gross receipts: $85,000
• Studio rent and direct expenses: $26,000
• 9,200 business miles split between (a) drives from the studio to event shoots (4,400 miles) and (b) drives from home directly to event shoots (4,800 miles)

Analysis:

• Drives from the studio to a shoot and back are clearly business under §162(a). All 4,400 miles deduct.
• Drives from home to a shoot are deductible only if the shoot is a “temporary work location” — which event shoots inherently are. Because Devon has a regular work location away from home (his studio), Rev. Rul. 99-7 Exception 2 applies: home-to-temporary-shoot mileage is deductible, regardless of distance, inside or outside the Denver metro.
• All 9,200 miles qualify.
• Drives from home to the studio (his regular workplace) are nondeductible commutes — Devon does not count these.

QBI status: Photography is not an SSTB. Devon qualifies for the 20% QBI deduction in full (well below threshold).

The takeaway for Devon: his studio rental is the key fact, not a home office. The studio gives him Exception 2, which is more flexible than most freelancers realize. If he gave up the studio and worked solely from a non-qualifying home setup, every home-to-shoot drive becomes a Bogue-style commute.

Worked example 3: Priya, the IT contractor on a six-month engagement

Priya is a software contractor in suburban Atlanta. She has a §280A-qualifying home office. In March 2026 she signs a six-month contract to build out a client’s data platform on-site three days a week. The other two days she works from her home office for other smaller clients. 2026 numbers:

• Six-month engagement: 26 weeks × 3 days × 22 miles round-trip = 1,716 miles
• Other client work: 2,800 miles scattered
• Gross receipts: $165,000

Analysis under Rev. Rul. 99-7:

• Priya’s home qualifies under §280A → Exception 3 in play.
• The six-month engagement was realistically expected to last one year or less when it began. It is a temporary work location. Both Exception 2 (because the home qualifies as a regular workplace) and Exception 3 (home as principal place) cover those drives.
• All 1,716 miles to the client site are deductible; all 2,800 miles for other client work are deductible.

But what if the engagement extends? Suppose in August 2026 the client asks Priya to commit to another year. From the date her expectation changes, the client site is no longer temporary and is now a regular workplace. Drives between her home and the client site from that date forward are commutes — even though she still has a home office. (Why? Because once a second location becomes a regular workplace at the same level as the home office, the “principal place of business” status of the home weakens. Document carefully and consider whether the engagement should be restructured as part-time so the home remains clearly principal.)

Line 9 deduction (assuming the engagement stays temporary): (1,716 + 2,800) × $0.725 = $3,274 QBI: IT contracting that is not “consulting” within Reg. §1.199A-5’s meaning is not an SSTB. Priya gets the full 20%.

Combined savings on the $3,274 deduction at her 24% marginal rate (taxable income near the top of the 22% bracket — 2026 single 24% starts at $105,700 per Rev. Proc. 2025-32): roughly $1,050 — about 23¢ per mile net of SE tax, income tax, and QBI.

Priya’s case is the most fragile of the three because expectation about engagement length is the deductibility switch. An automatic tracker tagging trips by client and project makes the “when did the expectation change” question answerable — instead of guessable.

State tax considerations

Federal Schedule C rules do not necessarily flow through cleanly to your state return. The biggest 2026 issues to know:

• California (FTB). Does not conform to federal bonus depreciation and caps §179 at $25,000 (versus the federal OBBBA-restored 100% bonus on assets placed in service after January 19, 2025). For a freelancer who buys a vehicle and elects actual expense plus bonus, expect to add back the federal bonus on Schedule CA and depreciate over standard MACRS for state purposes. California generally conforms to §280A for home office; the simplified $5/sq ft method is allowed.
• Pennsylvania (PA-40). Requires a separate PA Schedule C for each business. PA does not allow the federal simplified $5/sq ft home office method — you must compute actual expenses. PA also does not allow federal bonus depreciation, with separate state recovery over the asset’s life.
• New Jersey. NJ uses a gross income tax base that starts not from federal AGI but from statutory categories. Several federal Schedule C adjustments do not flow through: no deduction for half of SE tax, no §199A QBI deduction, no full federal bonus depreciation (NJ §179 capped at $25,000). Vehicle deductions on the federal Schedule C must be re-computed for NJ purposes via NJ-BUS-1.
• New York. Generally rolling conformity at the personal level, but decouples from §168(k) bonus depreciation. Add back federal bonus, depreciate on standard MACRS for state.
• Massachusetts. Does not conform to federal bonus depreciation. Conforms to §179 dollar limits.
• No-income-tax states (2026): Alaska, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire (interest & dividends tax repealed effective 1/1/2025), South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington (note WA’s 7% capital gains tax above ~$262K and B&O gross receipts), and Wyoming. Freelancers in these states still file federal Schedule C but skip state income tax on the net profit.

If you live in a non-conforming state, you may need to maintain two depreciation schedules and two home office calculations. This is one of the reasons standard mileage is appealing — the rate is the rate, federally and for most states.

Tax Court warnings every freelancer should read

The cases below all involved real taxpayers who probably did drive the miles they claimed. They lost anyway, because of how they documented those miles.

• Velez v. Commissioner, T.C. Memo. 2018-46 — Attorney with five offices. Built a mileage log from iPad calendar entries and Amex statements after the IRS opened the audit. Tax Court: $18,946 of mileage disallowed; 20% accuracy penalty under §6662(b)(1).
• Royster v. Commissioner, T.C. Memo. 2010-16 — Total miles and odometer readings without trip-level detail. Disallowed.
• Garza v. Commissioner, T.C. Memo. 2014-121 — Log had dates and destinations but the “business purpose” column was vague or missing. Disallowed.
• Khan v. Commissioner, T.C. Summ. Op. 2025-5 — As recently as 2025, the Court is still throwing out mileage for inadequate records. “Petitioners did not maintain adequate books or records that support the claimed expenses under section 274(d).”

The unifying lesson is that §274(d) overrides the Cohan rule (39 F.2d 540) for cars. You cannot ask the Court to estimate. You either have records made at or near the time of the trip, or you have nothing.

How automatic tracking solves the freelancer problem

The freelancer’s mileage problem is not “I forgot to write down miles.” It is structural. Three features of the freelance life break manual logs:

• Variable schedules. No fixed daily route. Your Tuesday looks nothing like your Thursday.
• Multi-client days. Different clients, different trip purposes, sometimes different Schedule Cs if you run more than one business.
• The home office decision is silent. Whether your first stop counts as deductible depends on a tax rule the manual logger has to remember every morning.

A rule-aware automatic tracker handles all three. EveryLastMile, an iOS mileage tracking app, detects drives via on-device motion + GPS, classifies them based on your home office election under §280A, tags trips to clients or projects, and reconciles the totals back to Schedule C Part IV at year-end. Specifically:

• Treats your first business stop of the day as deductible if you’ve marked your home as your §280A principal place of business — and flags it as commuting if you have not.
• Captures total business miles, commuting miles, and personal miles separately, so Schedule C Part IV fills itself.
• Splits reports by client or project, so you can run one report per Schedule C if you have multiple businesses.
• Generates a contemporaneous audit-defensible export — date, route, mileage, purpose, and a timestamp showing each trip was logged within the §1.274-5T weekly safe harbor.

For the freelancer who is one IRS letter away from a Velez-style outcome, that is the difference between a deduction the Tax Court will honor and one it will not.

Make the next 10,000 miles count

Your mileage deduction is the difference between paying tax on $90,000 of net profit and paying tax on $82,750. Over a freelance career that compounds into real money. The catch is that the IRS rewards rule-aware, contemporaneous tracking — and penalizes everything else.

If you want to stop guessing whether your first stop counts, stop scrambling to reconstruct a log in April, and stop leaving money on the table because your records are not Tax-Court-ready, that is exactly what EveryLastMile is built for.

Frequently asked questions

Can I deduct mileage from my home to my first client?

Yes, if your home qualifies as your principal place of business under §280A(c)(1)(A) — Rev. Rul. 99-7 Exception 3 applies. Without a qualifying home office, the first trip of the day is usually a nondeductible commute unless an exception (regular workplace elsewhere or out-of-metro temporary site) applies.

Does my home office have to be a separate room to qualify?

No, but the space must be used exclusively and regularly for business. A clearly identified portion of a room can qualify; a desk you also use to pay personal bills generally does not.

Can I deduct mileage to a coworking space?

Usually no. A coworking space you use regularly is typically your regular work location, making home-to-coworking a commute. The exceptions are if your home itself qualifies under §280A (then Exception 3 covers it) or if a particular trip is to a true temporary site.

Is driving to pick up supplies or to the post office deductible?

Yes — running business errands between business activities is deductible under §162(a). The risk is the leg from home to the first errand if your home does not qualify under §280A.

What is the 2026 IRS standard mileage rate for the self-employed?

72.5¢ per business mile (Notice 2026-10). Medical and moving (active-duty military and OBBBA-eligible intelligence community) is 20.5¢; charitable is 14¢; the depreciation component of the business rate is 35¢.

Can I switch from standard mileage to actual expense in a later year?

Yes, for owned vehicles, if you started with standard mileage. You then depreciate the vehicle on straight-line (not MACRS) for its remaining useful life under Rev. Proc. 2019-46. For leased vehicles, once you elect standard mileage you must keep it for the entire lease term.

Do I need a mileage log if I use the standard mileage rate?

Yes. §274(d) requires substantiation regardless of method. The standard mileage rate is a way to value each business mile; it is not a substitute for proving you drove them.

Are reconstructed mileage logs accepted?

Generally no. Treas. Reg. §1.274-5T requires records made “at or near the time” of use. Velez, Royster, Garza, and Khan all rejected after-the-fact reconstructions.

Where on Schedule C do I report mileage?

Line 9 (Car and truck expenses) for the deduction itself. Line 13 (Depreciation) and Line 20a (Lease) are used with the actual expense method. Complete Part IV of Schedule C with vehicle info. File Form 4562 if depreciating, expensing under §179, or placing the vehicle in service in the current year.

Does the mileage deduction reduce self-employment tax?

Yes. Schedule C net profit is the base for both income tax and SE tax. Reducing net profit by your mileage deduction lowers both — combined, that is roughly 15.3% SE + your marginal income tax rate (less the QBI haircut if applicable).

Is mileage reimbursement from a 1099 client taxable income?

Generally yes, if you receive a separate payment without an accountable plan — it goes on Schedule C as gross receipts, and you deduct your actual mileage on Line 9. If the reimbursement is reported on a 1099-NEC, it is fully taxable. The deduction offsets it.

What is a “temporary” work location for Rev. Rul. 99-7 purposes?

A location where employment is realistically expected to last one year or less (and actually does). If your expectation changes, classification changes from that date forward — not retroactively.

Did OBBBA change mileage deductions for the self-employed?

No for Schedule C. OBBBA §70110 made the W-2 employee unreimbursed mileage disallowance permanent. OBBBA §70301 made 100% bonus depreciation permanent, which can favor the actual-expense method for freelancers buying vehicles after January 19, 2025. OBBBA §70433 raised the 1099-NEC reporting threshold to $2,000 starting 2026.

How long do I need to keep my mileage records?

At least three years from the date you filed (the general statute of limitations under §6501). Keep records six years if a substantial understatement is possible, and indefinitely for vehicles you are depreciating until disposition plus three years.

What is the §199A QBI deduction's effect on the value of mileage?

If you qualify for QBI, every Schedule C deduction (including mileage) reduces your QBI dollar-for-dollar, so the income-tax value of the deduction is roughly (1 − 20%) × marginal rate, on top of SE tax. For a 22% bracket QBI-eligible freelancer, each mile of standard mileage is worth roughly 30¢ in combined federal tax savings — not the headline 72.5¢.