How to Track Mileage as a Contractor (IRS Rules and Best Apps)

If you drive for work and you're not tracking every mile, you're leaving money on the table. At the 2026 IRS standard mileage rate of 72.5 cents per mile, a contractor driving 10,000 business miles a year has a $7,250 deduction. Most contractors who drive that much log fewer than half their eligible miles.

Contractor mileage tracking is one of the highest-value, lowest-effort tax moves available to self-employed tradespeople. This post covers exactly how IRS mileage deductions work, what you need to log, what qualifies, and which apps make it easiest to stay compliant.

The 2026 IRS Standard Mileage Rate

The IRS sets a standard mileage rate for business use each year. For 2026, that rate is 72.5 cents per mile, up 2.5 cents from 2025. This is the amount you can deduct for every business mile you drive.

The rate is published by the IRS each December for the following year. It's designed to cover the typical costs of operating a vehicle: fuel, maintenance, depreciation, and insurance. You don't need to track your actual costs; you just track the miles and multiply.

For a trade contractor who covers 15,000 business miles a year, that's a $10,875 deduction. At a 22% effective tax rate, that saves $2,393 in federal taxes.

Standard Mileage vs. Actual Expenses: Which to Use

You have two options for deducting vehicle costs:

Standard Mileage Rate: Track miles driven for business, multiply by 72.5 cents, and that's your deduction. Simple. No need to save fuel receipts or maintenance records.

Actual Expenses Method: Track your total vehicle expenses (fuel, oil, tires, insurance, repairs, registration, depreciation) and deduct the percentage of total miles that were for business. More paperwork, sometimes a larger deduction for vehicles with high operating costs.

For most contractors, the standard mileage rate is simpler and produces a competitive deduction. The IRS also has a rule: if you want to use the standard mileage rate, you must choose it in the first year the vehicle is used for business. After that, you can switch to actual expenses in later years, but you can't go back.

For leased vehicles, you must stick with whichever method you choose for the entire lease period.

What Miles Qualify as Business Miles

This is where contractors often get it wrong. Not all driving is deductible.

Deductible business miles:

• Driving from a home office to a job site (when home is your principal place of business)
• Driving between job sites on the same day
• Driving to a supplier, hardware store, or equipment rental for job materials
• Driving to bid a job or walk a site
• Driving to meet a client, sub, or inspector

Not deductible:

• Driving from home to a fixed, regular office location (that's commuting)
• Personal errands mixed into a work trip (the business portion may still qualify)
• Driving to a job site if that site has become your regular office

For most solo contractors who work out of their homes, the home-to-job-site drive qualifies. The IRS considers your home your principal place of business if you use it regularly and exclusively for administrative work, like estimates, invoicing, and job scheduling.

IRS Documentation Requirements

The IRS is specific about what a mileage log needs to contain. For each trip, you need:

• Date of the drive
• Business destination (where you went)
• Business purpose (why you went)
• Number of miles driven

"Home to job site" is fine for purpose. "30 miles, Tuesday" is not enough. You need to be able to show any auditor that each logged drive had a clear business reason.

The gold standard, according to tax professionals, is same-day logging, meaning you record the trip when it happens, not weeks later from memory. That's where apps change the game.

Mileage Tracking Apps That Work for Contractors

Manual logbooks work but require discipline. Apps automate the hard part.

Built into Bit & Grain: The mileage tracking feature is built for contractors. You log drives tied to specific jobs, so your mileage records connect directly to your job cost data. When your accountant asks for records, everything is organized by job, not just by date. Pair it with route planning to optimize your drive time across jobs and capture all your mileage in one place.

MileIQ: Auto-detects drives via GPS and prompts you to classify them as business or personal with a swipe. Clean IRS-ready reports. Monthly subscription fee.

Everlance: Similar automatic tracking to MileIQ, adds expense logging. Popular with gig workers and independent contractors.

Hurdlr: Mileage plus income and expense tracking in one app. Useful if you want a broader tax picture.

TripLog: More features, slightly more complex. Includes options for team logging if you have drivers on a crew.

The common thread: all of these use GPS to auto-detect trips, which removes the friction of manual logging. You review trips, classify them, add notes if needed, and move on.

The Mileage Most Contractors Miss

Beyond the obvious job-site drives, there are miles contractors routinely miss:

Supply runs: Every trip to the hardware store, lumber yard, or equipment rental for a specific job is a deductible business mile. These are often short, frequent, and forgotten.

Bid walks: Driving to look at a potential job and quote it is a business mile, even if you don't land the work.

Client meetings: Driving to meet a client to review plans or walk a completed project.

Tool pickups and returns: Driving to rent or return equipment for a job.

Bank and post office runs: If you're depositing job checks or mailing job-related documents, those miles may qualify.

The Grain AI assistant can help you categorize and review your logged drives to make sure you're not missing trip types that belong in your deduction count.

What a Mileage Log Audit Actually Looks Like

Most contractors have never been audited. The IRS audits fewer than 1% of individual returns in a given year. But if your business mileage claim is large relative to your income, it draws more scrutiny.

An auditor reviewing your mileage deduction will ask for:

• Your mileage log (date, destination, business purpose, miles per trip)
• Odometer readings at the start and end of the year to verify total miles
• Corroborating records: client invoices, job records, calendar entries, supply receipts that confirm you were at the locations you claimed

The corroboration is the key piece most contractors miss. A mileage log that says "hardware store, 12 miles" on a date you have a supply receipt from that store is strong. A log full of entries with no supporting records is weak.

When you use a tool that ties mileage to jobs, like Bit & Grain's mileage tracking feature, the job records themselves serve as corroboration. The system knows you worked at 1423 Main Street on Tuesday. The drive log for Tuesday shows 22 miles to 1423 Main Street. That's the kind of layered documentation that holds up.

Mileage and the Actual Expenses Comparison

Before you commit to the standard mileage rate for a vehicle you're putting into service, it's worth doing a rough comparison.

Standard mileage is easy: 72.5 cents per mile for 2026, multiply by your business miles, done.

Actual expenses require tracking fuel, oil, maintenance, insurance, registration fees, and depreciation across the year, then applying the business-use percentage to the total. The formula:

(Business miles / Total miles) x Total vehicle expenses = Deductible amount

When actual expenses usually beat the standard rate: high-cost vehicles (expensive SUVs or trucks with higher depreciation), vehicles that burn a lot of fuel, or years with major repair bills.

When standard rate usually wins: typical cargo vans, pickups, or sedans with normal depreciation and maintenance, especially if you're driving lots of highway miles (efficient fuel use lowers actual expenses).

One practical note: the IRS requires you to track both business and personal miles regardless of which method you use. The standard mileage method doesn't eliminate the mileage log requirement. You still need to document every business trip.

How to Start If You're Behind

If you're mid-year and haven't been tracking, here's what to do:

1. Download a tracking app and start today. Your phone already has GPS.
2. Pull your calendar for the year. You can reconstruct approximate mileage from past job dates and locations. It won't be perfect, but it's better than nothing and a reasonable reconstruction is more defensible than a blank log.
3. Check your credit card statements and invoices for supply runs you can match to dates.
4. Do not make up numbers. Estimates backed by supporting evidence (calendar entries, purchase receipts, client records) are fine. Fabrication is not.

Going forward, log every drive the day it happens.

How Bit & Grain Helps

Bit & Grain's mileage tracking is built into the same system where you run your jobs. You're not managing a separate app. When you create a job, you can log drives tied to that job: the initial site visit, the days you worked, the supply runs.

That job-centric structure matters at tax time. You can see total mileage by job, by week, by month, or for the full year. If you get audited, you can show the auditor exactly which job each drive was for, with client names, addresses, and dates.

The route planning tool helps you sequence your stops efficiently, which reduces total drive time and fuel costs, and keeps your mileage records clean because you're running planned routes, not improvised ones.

At $29 a month, the software costs less than the deduction value of a single supply run to the hardware store. The tracking pays for itself quickly.

Mileage Deductions by Trade: What the Numbers Look Like

The value of proper mileage tracking varies by trade, but the math is consistently significant across all of them.

Plumber or HVAC tech with multiple service calls per day: Service-call-heavy trades often log 15,000 to 20,000 business miles per year. At 72.5 cents per mile, that's $10,875 to $14,500 in deductions. At a 25% combined tax rate, that's $2,719 to $3,625 in taxes saved.

General contractor visiting multiple job sites: GCs running three to five active projects often drive 12,000 to 18,000 business miles per year between job sites, supply houses, inspections, and client meetings.

Solo tile or flooring installer: Fewer jobs but often longer drives to project locations. Annual business mileage commonly runs 8,000 to 12,000 miles.

Landscape or irrigation contractor with daily crew routes: Even with crew driving separately, the owner/manager often logs 10,000 or more miles in estimate walks, supplier runs, and job checks.

Across all these trades, the pattern is the same: the miles are there, and the deductions are available. The question is whether you're capturing them.

One data point from tax professionals: self-employed contractors who track mileage diligently claim an average of $700 in additional deductions per 1,000 logged miles compared to those who estimate from memory. Over 10,000 miles, that's a $7,000 gap.

Contractor Mileage Tracking Checklist

Before year-end, confirm you have:

• A mileage log with date, destination, purpose, and miles for every business drive
• Consistent logs from January through December, not just the months you remembered
• Records for supply runs, bid walks, and client meetings, not just job-site days
• A record of your vehicle's odometer reading at the start and end of the year
• Documentation that separates business and personal miles

Hand this to your accountant with your other records and they can calculate the exact deduction.

The Bottom Line

Contractor mileage tracking is one of the simplest high-value deductions available to self-employed tradespeople. At 72.5 cents per mile for 2026, every 1,000 business miles is worth $725 in deductions. Most trade contractors drive far more than 10,000 business miles a year.

The only reason to miss this deduction is not tracking. A GPS-based app, a consistent habit of reviewing and categorizing trips, and a clean year-end log are all it takes. Start today. The miles you drive tomorrow are worth documenting.