Which Drives Are Not Deductible? The Commuting Rule, Explained
Driving between home and your regular place of work is a personal commute and is never deductible, regardless of distance. Once you are at work, driving from one business location to another is deductible — and if your home is your principal place of business, the trips out of it are too.
Commuting is the fault line in every mileage audit. It is also the rule people most often get wrong in their own favour, usually by accident: the drive feels like work, so it gets logged as work. The tax code has never seen it that way. Where you choose to live relative to your job is treated as a personal decision, and the cost of bridging that distance is personal too.
The basic rule
Home → regular workplace = commuting = not deductible. Forty miles each way does not change it. Neither does carrying tools, taking a work call on the way, stopping for coffee for the team, or the fact that there is no transit option.
Workplace → other business location = deductible. Once the working day is under way, travel between business stops is a business expense: office to client, client to client, job site to supplier, and back again.
Three situations that change the answer
1. Your home is your principal place of business
If you use a space in your home regularly and exclusively as the main place you conduct your business — the administrative and management work happens there and you have no other fixed office — then that home office is your workplace. Trips from it to clients, job sites and suppliers are business miles from the moment you pull out of the driveway. This is the single most valuable answer on this page for consultants, contractors and agents, because it converts what would otherwise be a non-deductible first and last trip of every day.
2. Temporary work locations
Travel to a work location that is realistically expected to last a year or less can be deductible even from home, particularly when it is outside the metropolitan area where you normally work. A construction supervisor assigned to a three-month site across the state is in a different position from one driving to the same yard every day for years. The one-year expectation matters: an assignment expected to be indefinite is not temporary even if it ends early.
3. No regular workplace at all
Delivery drivers, mobile technicians, in-home care workers and travelling sales reps often have no fixed business location. When the business is inherently mobile, the driving that the work requires is business driving — which is why gig drivers can count the drive to their zone while an office worker cannot count the drive to the office.
Things that do not rescue a commute
- Stopping for work on the way. A detour to a client can create a deductible leg, but it does not convert the whole home-to-office run. Log the business leg, not the commute around it.
- Working during the drive. Calls and dictation do not change the character of the trip.
- Hauling equipment. Carrying tools in your own car does not make the commute deductible; a narrow exception exists for the extra cost of a trailer, not for the trip.
- A second job later that day. Home to job one is commuting; job one to job two is deductible; job two home is commuting again.
Log the commute — do not delete it
A log that shows business miles, commuting miles and other personal miles separately is far more credible than one that shows only business trips. It demonstrates you applied the rule rather than avoided it. Mile keeps personal and commute drives in the log and simply leaves them out of the deduction total.
The practical test
Before you classify a drive, ask two questions. Where did the trip start and end? And would this trip exist if the business did not? Home to the same office you drive to every week fails the test no matter how the day went. Office to a customer, customer to a supplier, or home-office to a job site passes it cleanly — and a log that reflects that distinction is the one that survives scrutiny.
This article is general information about US federal tax rules, not tax advice for your situation. Rates and rules change — check IRS.gov or ask a tax professional before you file.