Can I Write Off Mileage as a Traveling Tradesperson?

The cases that come up on a road job:

• Site to site in one day — generally business.
• A parts run, a tool pickup, the equipment yard — generally business.
• Mobilizing out to the job and driving home at the end — generally travel rather than commuting, if the site is away from your tax home.
• Lodging out to the gate, every morning — this is the contested one. See below.

Notice that none of these turn on distance. A 90-minute drive can be a commute and a four-minute drive can be business.

We could give you a confident answer here and it would be worth nothing, so here is the honest version.

Publication 463 does say that if you have one or more regular work locations away from your home, daily transportation between your home and a temporary work location in the same trade can be deductible regardless of distance. Whether your motel three miles from the gate is "your home" for that purpose, and whether that site is temporary, are exactly the facts that decide it — and they are different for someone three weeks into an outage and someone fourteen months into a plant expansion.

What is true either way: if you do not have the drives recorded, the question is academic. Record them, then let your preparer classify them.

There are two methods, and you generally pick one: the standard mileage rate, or your actual expenses — gas, repairs, insurance, depreciation.

Use the standard rate and you are not also deducting those running costs separately; the rate is meant to stand in for them. Parking and tolls stay separately deductible either way.

The rate does not only change on January 1. When fuel prices move sharply the IRS can revise it part-way through the year — it did in 2011, in 2022, and again in 2026, when the business rate went from 72.5 cents to 76 cents on July 1.

That matters more than it sounds. A revised year has to be split: miles driven before the change at the old rate, miles after at the new one. Multiplying your whole year’s miles by a single figure is wrong either way you pick — and if you pick the January rate, it is wrong in the direction that costs you money. It is the kind of error nothing flags, because the total still looks perfectly reasonable.

An adequate record is not elaborate — a log, a diary, a trip sheet. Four facts a trip. But it does have to exist, and it has to have been kept while the driving was happening.

You will generally also be asked for your total miles for the year, your business miles, and your commuting miles — which means the commute you cannot deduct still has to be counted.

This is the part almost nobody does by hand for a whole season, and it is the reason the deduction gets left on the table more often than it gets disallowed.

Same answer as the tax-home page, and for the same reason: employee and self-employed travelers are treated very differently, and the rules for employee unreimbursed expenses have moved before and are scheduled to move again.

The mileage log is worth keeping regardless of which side of that line you land on. It costs nothing to have and cannot be created honestly after the fact.