Real Estate Agent Mileage: The Deduction Agents Most Often Lose

Real estate agents are usually well drilled on the visible write-offs: MLS dues, lockboxes, signage, photography, the CRM subscription, the marketing spend. Those are easy to remember because each one arrives as an invoice. Mileage arrives as nothing at all — which is why the largest single deduction on many agents' returns is the one they estimate at the last minute, or skip.

The drives that count

• Showings — every property, every buyer tour, including the ones that go nowhere.
• Previewing inventory and caravan or broker tours.
• Listing appointments and pre-listing visits.
• Open houses, including the setup run and the sign drop.
• Inspections, appraisals, final walk-throughs and closings.
• Trips to the title company, the courthouse, the sign shop, the printer, the key drop.
• Brokerage meetings, association events, CE classes and conferences.
• Driving to photograph a property or meet a stager, contractor or cleaner.
• Client coffee meetings and buyer consultations.

Note how many of those are short. A ten-minute run to swap a lockbox does not feel like a deduction, and a hundred of them a year quietly are.

The drives that do not

If you have a desk at the brokerage and drive to it as your regular workplace, that run is commuting — not deductible, even though the destination is obviously work. Once you are at the office, everything after it is business.

This is where the home-office answer becomes valuable. Many agents genuinely run the business from home: the CRM, the paperwork, the calls, the marketing. If a space in your home is used regularly and exclusively as the principal place of your business and you have no other fixed office, then trips from home to a showing are business miles from the driveway — including the first and last trip of every day, which are otherwise the two you lose. It is worth an hour with a tax professional to establish whether you qualify, because the answer repeats every day of the year.

What the numbers look like

An agent doing 20 transactions a year, with showings most days, commonly lands between 12,000 and 20,000 business miles. At 2026 rates — 72.5 cents through June and 76 cents after — 15,000 business miles is about $11,100 of deduction. Estimating that at "maybe 8,000 miles" costs roughly $5,000 of deduction, and estimating it at 25,000 with no log invites a different kind of problem.

Keep it defensible

Agents are a well-known high-mileage profession, which is a reason to be exact rather than generous. Record the address you drove to and the reason — "showing, 1420 Marlow" — and keep your personal driving in the same log as personal rather than deleting it. A record that shows 18,400 total miles with 14,100 business and 4,300 personal reads as a real year; one that shows 14,100 business miles and nothing else does not. The full standard is in how to prove mileage to the IRS.

And the costs around the miles

Under the standard rate you skip fuel and maintenance receipts, but keep the ones the rate does not cover: tolls and parking at downtown closings and garage visits add up over a year of appointments. Log them against the trip they belong to, and both halves of the vehicle deduction land in the same export when it is time to file.