Commuting — the drive from home to your regular workplace — is not deductible, and that rule catches a lot of self-employed people off guard. Three exceptions matter. If you have a qualifying home office as your principal place of business, trips from home to job sites become deductible business miles. Travel to a temporary work location outside your metropolitan area counts. And once your business day has begun, travel between work locations counts. For gig drivers the practical line is logging on: miles driven while available for work are business miles, the drive out and the drive home generally are not.
Ask a room full of self-employed drivers whether commuting miles are tax deductible, and almost everyone says the same thing: "No — the drive from home to your first job is commuting."
They're right — usually. And that "usually" is quietly costing a lot of people thousands of dollars a year.
Because the IRS spells out three specific situations where that drive is deductible. One of them applies to a huge share of self-employed people who have never claimed it, because they assumed the commuting rule was absolute. It isn't.
Quick answer: Commuting miles — home to a regular workplace — are not deductible. But under IRS Revenue Ruling 99-7, the drive from home to a work location is deductible if (1) your home qualifies as your principal place of business, (2) you're driving to a temporary work location outside your metro area, or (3) you have a regular office elsewhere and you're driving to a temporary work location. The home office rule is the one most self-employed drivers can actually use.
What counts as commuting miles?
Start with the default rule, because it's the one everybody knows and it's genuinely correct most of the time.
Commuting miles — the drive from your home to your regular place of work — are a personal expense. The IRS treats it as a choice: you chose where to live relative to where you work, so it isn't deductible. That's true whether you drive five minutes or fifty. It's true even if you're carrying tools or equipment. It's true even if you make business calls the entire way.
The same applies to the drive home from your last stop of the day. Personal. Not deductible.
What is deductible under the default rule is everything in between. Once you've arrived at your first work location and started your workday, the miles between jobs are business miles — every mile to the next job, and the next, plus the run to the bank or the supply store. That's the piece most people get right.
What's the exception to the commuting rule?
Here's where it gets interesting. In Revenue Ruling 99-7, the IRS laid out three situations where the home-to-work drive stops being a commute and becomes deductible business travel:
- Your home is your principal place of business. If your home office qualifies under IRC §280A(c)(1)(A), your workday starts at home — so the drive to any work location in that same business is travel between two business locations. Deductible, regardless of distance, and regardless of whether the destination is regular or temporary.
- You're driving to a temporary work location outside your metro area. If the job is realistically expected to last a year or less and it's outside the metropolitan area where you live and normally work, the drive is deductible whether or not you have a home office.
- You have a regular office elsewhere, and you're driving to a temporary work location. If you already have one or more regular work locations away from your home, drives from home to a temporary work location in the same business are deductible — even inside your metro area.
For most self-employed people who drive — notaries, contractors, cleaners, real estate agents, mobile mechanics, trainers — rule #1 is the one that matters. You probably don't have a downtown office. You have a house, a vehicle, and a schedule. And that's exactly the scenario the home office rule was written for.
How does the home office rule make my commute deductible?
The logic is simple once you see it. Under the default rule, your commute is nondeductible because you're traveling from a personal place (home) to a business place (work). But if your home is a business place, that trip becomes travel between two business locations — which has always been deductible.
The Tax Court put it plainly back in Curphey v. Commissioner: there's no reason the rule allowing deductions for travel between business locations shouldn't apply when one of those business locations is your residence.
So if your home office qualifies, the drive to your first job of the day isn't a commute anymore. Neither is the drive home from your last one. Your entire working day — door to door — becomes deductible mileage.
What that's worth: Say the drive to your first job and back from your last adds 20 miles a day, 250 days a year. That's 5,000 miles you've been writing off as personal. At the 2026 rate of 76¢, that's $3,800 in deductions — for driving you were already doing.
Does my home office qualify?
This is where honesty matters more than optimism, because the bar is real and the IRS enforces it. Your home office has to pass two tests under §280A(c)(1)(A).
1. Regular and exclusive use
You need a specific area of your home used only for business. Not mostly. Only. If the kids do homework at that desk on weekends, it fails. If the space doubles as a guest room, it fails.
The good news: it doesn't need to be a whole room, and it doesn't need walls. A clearly identifiable area — a desk in the corner of the spare bedroom, used exclusively for your business — can qualify. "Regularly" means what it sounds like: ongoing use, not once a quarter when you're panicking about receipts.
2. Principal place of business
Your home office qualifies as your principal place of business if you use it regularly and exclusively for the administrative or management activities of your business — scheduling, invoicing, bookkeeping, client calls, record-keeping — and you have no other fixed location where you do a substantial amount of those activities.
That second half is the part people miss. It doesn't matter that you earn your money out in the field. What matters is where you run the business from. If your admin happens at your kitchen counter, in your truck, and at a coworking space, you have a problem. If it happens at your desk at home, you likely qualify.
There's also a separate path: you qualify if you meet clients or customers at your home in the normal course of business.
Who can deduct the drive to their first job?
Think about how a mobile notary actually works. The signings happen at title companies, hospitals, and kitchen tables all over the county. But the scheduling, the invoicing, the journal entries, the record-keeping — that happens at a desk at home. If that desk is used only for the business, the home office likely qualifies, and the drive to the 9am refi stops being a commute.
Same shape for a lot of people:
- A self-employed cleaner who books jobs and does the books from a home desk, then drives to the first house.
- A contractor who quotes, orders, and invoices from home, then drives to the site.
- A real estate agent whose brokerage doesn't give them a dedicated office and who does their admin at home.
- A gig driver who manages multiple platforms, tracks expenses, and handles their taxes from a dedicated home workspace, then drives to their first pickup.
The common thread isn't the profession. It's that the business is run from home, even though the work happens elsewhere.
Are miles between jobs deductible without a home office?
Then the default rule applies, and it's still worth real money — most people just under-claim it.
Your home-to-first-job and last-job-to-home drives are personal. But everything between jobs is deductible, and for anyone running multiple stops a day, that's the bulk of the driving. Job 1 → job 2 → job 3, the run to FedEx, the trip to the supply store, the drive to the bank to make a deposit — all business miles.
And if you take a job outside your metro area that's expected to last under a year, exception #2 applies: that drive is deductible even without a home office.
How do I prove any of this?
This is where the whole thing lives or dies, and it's the part nobody wants to hear.
A deduction you can't document is a deduction you don't have. The IRS wants a contemporaneous mileage log — recorded at or near the time of the trip — showing the date, the miles, where you went, and the business purpose. "Contemporaneous" is doing heavy lifting there: reconstructing your year from memory in April is exactly the thing that gets deductions thrown out in an audit.
And if you're claiming the home office rule, the stakes go up. You're now asserting that your first and last drives of the day are business travel. That claim rests on the home office qualifying — so you want the log and a defensible home office, not one without the other.
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"Commuting miles aren't deductible" is a good rule of thumb and a bad place to stop thinking. For a large share of self-employed people who drive, the home office rule flips it — and turns two personal drives a day into business miles they've been giving away.
It's worth a conversation with your tax pro about whether your setup qualifies. And it's worth logging every mile starting now either way, because the answer doesn't help you if you can't prove the miles.
This article is general information, not tax advice. Home office qualification depends on your specific facts and circumstances — talk to a qualified tax professional about your situation.
Frequently asked questions
Are commuting miles tax deductible?
Generally no. The drive from your home to your regular place of work is a nondeductible personal commuting expense, and so is the drive home from your last stop. However, IRS Revenue Ruling 99-7 provides three exceptions, the most useful being that if your home qualifies as your principal place of business under IRC 280A(c)(1)(A), the drive from home to any work location in that business becomes deductible business travel.
Is the drive from home to my first job deductible?
Usually it is treated as commuting and is not deductible. But if your home office qualifies as your principal place of business, your workday begins at home and the drive to your first job is travel between two business locations, which is deductible regardless of distance. The drive home from your last job is deductible as well.
How do I know if my home office qualifies as my principal place of business?
Your home office must be used regularly and exclusively for business, with no personal use of that space. It must also be where you conduct the administrative or management activities of your business, such as scheduling, invoicing, and bookkeeping, and you must have no other fixed location where you perform a substantial amount of those activities. Alternatively, you qualify if you meet clients or customers at your home in the normal course of business.
Are miles between job sites deductible?
Yes. Once you have arrived at your first work location and started your workday, every mile driven to another job site, to the bank, to a supply store, or to any other business stop is deductible business mileage. This applies whether or not you have a qualifying home office. You need a contemporaneous log showing the date, distance, destination, and business purpose of each trip.