Business vs Personal vs Commute Miles, Explained
Business vs personal vs commute miles: how to tag each trip, log a stop on the way home or a two-purpose drive, and where IRS Pub. 463 draws the line.
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Business miles are drives you make for your work. The big exception is the drive between home and your regular workplace: IRS Publication 463 calls that commuting, a personal expense. Personal miles cover everything else, like school runs or a weekend visit with family.
The hard trips are the ones that mix purposes, like a stop on the way home or a drive that covers a client and a family visit. Tag each trip when it happens, and split it where the purpose changes.
Road44, the app mentioned near the end, is our app. IRS wording was checked against the current editions of Publication 463 and the Schedule C instructions in September 2026. This is general information, not tax advice, so check the linked IRS guidance or a tax professional for your situation.
Why each trip needs a purpose tag
The tax forms ask for the split. Schedule C line 44 divides your vehicle’s total miles into business, commuting and other. Form 4562 asks for business, commuting and “other personal (noncommuting)” miles, then the total.
For car expenses, Table 5-1 in Pub. 463’s Recordkeeping chapter lists “the mileage for each business use, and the total miles for the year,” the date, “Your business destination” and the “Business purpose for the expense.”
Purpose is the detail you forget first. The same chapter says “A timely kept record has more value than a statement prepared later when there is generally a lack of accurate recall,” and “You can’t deduct amounts that you approximate or estimate.” Next spring, you won’t remember whether that Tuesday drive in May was a client visit or a hardware run, unless you tagged it.
Do you need to log personal miles?
You need the totals. Pub. 463’s “Business and personal use” section divides a mixed-use car’s costs by miles. In its example, a contractor drives 20,000 miles, 12,000 of them for business, and “can claim only 60%” of the operating cost. Personal miles shape that percentage too.
Pub. 463 asks for each business use and the year’s total miles, not a record of every personal trip. Tagging every drive (or reading the odometer at the start and end of the year) gets you the totals.
Why the date matters in 2026
The IRS changed its business and medical rates effective July 1. According to the IRS standard mileage rates page, business miles are 72.5 cents a mile from January 1 to June 30, 2026, and 76 cents a mile from July 1 to December 31, 2026. Medical miles went from 20.5 to 23.5 cents, and charitable miles stayed at 14 cents. Commuting and personal miles have no rate. So log the date along with the tag.
Business, commuting and personal miles: what the IRS says
Commuting
Pub. 463’s “Commuting expenses” section says the cost of “driving a car between your home and your main or regular place of work” is a personal commuting expense. You can’t deduct it “no matter how far your home is from your regular place of work,” or “even if you work during the commuting trip.”
Business
The publication’s transportation chapter lists trips such as “Visiting clients or customers,” “Going to a business meeting away from your regular workplace” and driving from one workplace to another.
Three exceptions to the commuting rule
The Schedule C instructions for line 44b say travel that meets any of these conditions “isn’t commuting; it is considered deductible business travel”:
- “You have at least one regular work location away from your home and the travel is to a temporary work location in the same trade or business, regardless of the distance.”
- “The travel is to a temporary work location outside the metropolitan area where you live and normally work.”
- Your home is your principal place of business under section 280A(c)(1)(A) “and the travel is to another work location in the same trade or business, regardless of whether that location is regular or temporary and regardless of distance.”
These trace back to Rev. Rul. 99-7. Whether a home office counts as your principal place of business is a separate test, set out in Pub. 587’s “Principal Place of Business” section.
“Temporary” alone doesn’t make a trip business. For someone with no regular place of work, Pub. 463’s “No regular place of work” section says: “You can’t deduct daily transportation costs between your home and temporary work sites within your metropolitan area.”
Personal and medical
Personal miles are everything else: shopping, school runs, the gym, weekend drives. Form 4562 calls them “other personal (noncommuting)” miles.
Medical miles are their own bucket. Pub. 502’s “Transportation” section counts “transportation primarily for and essential to medical care” as a medical expense, but not “Going to and from work, even if your condition requires an unusual means of transportation.” Medical mileage goes with the itemized medical-expense deduction, under Pub. 502’s rules.
The IRS’s own short version
Pub. 463’s Figure B sums up the common cases, with one caveat: “Don’t use this chart if your home is your principal place of business.”
| Between | Figure B says |
|---|---|
| Home and regular or main job | Never deductible |
| Home and temporary work location | Deductible if you have a regular or main job at another location |
| Home and second job | Never deductible on a day off from regular or main job |
| Regular or main job and temporary work location | Always deductible |
| Regular or main job and second job | Always deductible |
| Temporary work location and second job | Always deductible |
It defines a temporary work location as “A place where your work assignment is realistically expected to last (and does in fact last) one year or less.”
Mixed trips: everyday examples and how to log them
Real days are messier than that. Where the IRS text is silent, the logging advice below keeps the facts in your log so you, or your tax preparer, can sort it out later.
A call or a colleague on the commute
Pub. 463’s commuting section covers this. Business calls and a business discussion with a colleague riding along “don’t change the trip from personal to business.” Neither does advertising on your car, or hauling tools, though you can deduct “additional costs” for hauling, such as renting a trailer.
Log it: Commute.
A personal stop on the way home
Picking up groceries or a child on the way home doesn’t turn anything into business. It’s still your commute, with a personal stop.
Log it: Commute. If the detour adds real distance, log the extra leg as its own Personal drive so your commute total stays honest. That’s a logging habit, not an IRS rule.
A lunch stop between two business stops
Pub. 463’s car expenses recordkeeping section allows this outright: “Minimal personal use, such as a stop for lunch on the way between two business stops, isn’t an interruption of business use.” The Treasury regulation, §1.274-5T, calls it “De minimis personal use.”
Log it: one Business drive.
A personal detour between two work sites
Say you visit a client, stop at the gym, then head to the office. Pub. 463’s “Two places of work” section says that if “for some personal reason you don’t go directly from one location to the other, you can’t deduct more than the amount it would have cost you to go directly from the first location to the second.”
Log it: split at the gym and read the odometer there. Note the direct client-to-office distance and how you measured it. Tag the direct distance as Business and the extra miles as Personal.
A client visit on the way to the office
Figure B answers this one. Home to a temporary work location is “Deductible if you have a regular or main job at another location,” and regular job to temporary work location is “Always deductible.”
Log it: Business, with the client or site name in a note.
A business errand, like buying supplies on the way in, is different: it isn’t a work location, and the Pub. 463 text we read doesn’t address it. Split the trip at the stop, note what it was and ask a tax professional.
Two jobs in one day, or a side job on your day off
If you work at two places in one day, the “Two places of work” section says “you can deduct the expense of getting from one workplace to the other.” Driving “between home and a part-time job on a day off from your main job” is commuting, though.
Log it: the job-to-job leg as Business, the home-to-job legs as Commute.
A doctor visit on a workday
Home to the clinic and back can count as medical under Pub. 502’s rules. But Pub. 502 excludes “Going to and from work,” so a clinic-to-office leg isn’t medical, and the text we read doesn’t say how to classify it.
Log it: split at the clinic, tag each leg separately and add a note.
One drive, two purposes
You drop off a customer’s order across town, then visit your sister nearby. Split it into two drives where the purpose changes, reading the odometer at the split. If a drive can’t be separated cleanly, note both purposes and let your tax preparer decide.
Gig and delivery drivers: the first and last legs of a shift
This is where tax guides disagree most. Pub. 463’s examples of deductible transportation include Example 3:
“You have no regular office and you don’t have an office in your home. In this case, the location of your first business contact inside the metropolitan area is considered your office. Transportation expenses between your home and this first contact are nondeductible commuting expenses. Transportation expenses between your last business contact and your home are also nondeductible commuting expenses.”
It adds that “you can deduct the costs of going from one client or customer to another.”
A home office can change that. Pub. 463’s “Office in the home” section says that if your home office “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.” Under Pub. 587’s “Principal Place of Business” section, a home office qualifies as your principal place of business if you use it “exclusively and regularly for administrative or management activities” of your business and have “no other fixed location where you conduct substantial administrative or management activities” of it. Read the full test before assuming you pass it.
Some gig-tax blogs say the first and last legs are business because home is your base. Others cite Example 3 and call them commuting. The IRS pages we read don’t define a “business contact” for app-based work, and they don’t address miles driven while logged in and waiting, or deadhead miles between orders. We can’t tell you which way those go; a tax professional who knows your setup can.
How to log it either way: make the leg from home to your first pickup and the leg from your last drop-off home their own drives. Read the odometer at each split and add a short note (“drove to zone, first order at 5:42”). Then those legs can be counted whichever way applies, without rebuilding them from memory.
A tagging habit that makes the year-end split easy
It takes seconds per drive:
- Tag every drive when you finish it, personal ones included.
- Split a drive when its purpose changes, and read the odometer at the split.
- Note the destination and reason for anything that isn’t routine, since Pub. 463’s list includes both.
- Review once a week. Pub. 463 says a log kept “on a weekly basis that accounts for use during the week” is “considered a timely kept record.”
- Keep the year’s total miles.
W-2 employees are in a different spot. Pub. 463 says the cost of using your car as an employee “will no longer be allowed to be claimed as an unreimbursed employee travel expense as a miscellaneous itemized deduction,” apart from exceptions it lists, such as Armed Forces reservists. For most employees the split matters for reimbursement, so check what your employer’s policy counts.
Tagging trips in Road44
Road44, our driving log app, keeps the tag with the trip. When you start a drive or fill in its details afterward, pick a purpose: Business, Personal, Commute or Medical. Add a start and end odometer reading or a typed distance, and use notes for the destination and reason. There’s no Charitable tag, so write “charity” and the organization in notes.
To split a trip, stop the drive at the stop and start a new one, or add two past drives. Totals grouped by purpose are in the Insights screen’s Breakdowns (Pro). They read in miles when Distance is your goal, and they cover rolling windows rather than a tax year. History, the calendar and exports in Text, CSV, PDF and PNG are free, with no watermark.
Know the limits before you rely on the app. The export has no purpose column, so type the purpose into notes and switch the Notes field on when you export (it starts off). History filters by date, not purpose. There’s no GPS or automatic sorting, and drives stay on your phone, so export regularly. It’s a personal record, not an official or certified log, and not tax advice.
The drive from home to your regular workplace is commuting, even with a business call or a personal stop on the way. Tag and split each trip when it happens. Anything unusual, like a home office or the first leg of a gig shift, goes to Pub. 463 and a tax professional. If you want an app for the tagging part, download Road44.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Does driving to work count as business miles?
Not if it's your regular or main workplace. IRS Publication 463 calls that drive a personal commuting expense no matter how far you live from work, and even if you make business calls or talk shop with a colleague on the way. The Schedule C instructions list three exceptions: a temporary work location when you have a regular one elsewhere, a temporary site outside the metro area where you live and normally work, and a home that is your principal place of business. Check Publication 463 or a tax professional for your situation.
How do you log a trip that is part business, part personal?
Split it where the purpose changes. Read the odometer at the stop, log each part as its own drive with its own tag, and note what the stop was. Publication 463 lets a lunch stop between two business stops stay one business record, and for a personal detour between two work sites it caps the deduction at what going directly would have cost.
Should you log personal miles in a mileage log?
You need the totals. Schedule C and Form 4562 ask for business, commuting and other personal miles, and the business share of a car you use both ways is worked out from the miles. Publication 463 asks for each business use and the year's total miles, not a record of every personal trip. Tagging every drive, or reading the odometer at the start and end of the year, gets you the totals.
Does stopping at a client on the way to the office make my commute deductible?
Publication 463's Figure B treats the drive from home to a temporary work location as deductible if you have a regular or main job at another location, and the drive between your regular job and a temporary work location as always deductible. A stop for an errand that isn't a work location, such as the post office, isn't addressed in the IRS text we read. Split the trip at the stop, note what it was and ask a tax professional.
Are the miles from home to my first delivery or ride deductible?
It's disputed. Publication 463's Example 3 says that with no regular office and no office in your home, the trips from home to your first business contact and from your last one back home are commuting. If your home qualifies as your principal place of business under Publication 587's tests, different rules apply. Tax guides disagree about app-based drivers, and the IRS pages we read don't address logged-in or waiting time. Log those legs as separate drives and ask a tax professional.
Is driving to a second job deductible?
Between two workplaces on the same day, Publication 463 says you can deduct the cost of getting from one to the other. Between home and a part-time job on a day off from your main job, it calls the drive commuting, which you can't deduct. For W-2 jobs, Pub. 463 also says most employees can no longer claim unreimbursed car costs, so this mostly matters for self-employed work or employer reimbursement.
Is driving to a temporary job site a commute?
It depends. Under Publication 463 and Rev. Rul. 99-7, the drive is business if you have a regular work location elsewhere (regardless of distance) or if the site is outside the metro area where you live and normally work. A temporary site inside your metro area, with no regular workplace and no qualifying home office, is commuting. Temporary generally means realistically expected to last, and actually lasting, one year or less.
Can I tag trips as business, personal or commute in Road44?
Yes. Each drive can carry an optional purpose tag (Business, Personal, Commute or Medical), a distance from a start and end odometer reading or a typed number, and free-text notes. Totals grouped by purpose are in the Insights screen's Breakdowns, part of the Pro subscription. Exports are free but don't include the purpose tag, so type the purpose into notes and turn on the Notes field if you need it on the exported page. Road44 is a personal record, not tax advice.