The IRS treats your commute as a personal expense and business driving as deductible. The line between them decides how much of your mileage you can actually write off. Here is where it falls.
Commuting is the drive between your home and your regular place of work. The IRS treats it as a personal expense, so it is not deductible, no matter how far you drive or whether you take work calls on the way. Business mileage is driving that is ordinary and necessary for your work once your workday has started, and that is deductible at the standard rate (72.5 cents per mile in 2026).
For someone with a fixed office across town, the rule is simple: home to office is commuting, and the office to a client is business. For self-employed people, the picture is usually better than that, because of where their work actually starts.
Here is the part that matters most for freelancers: if your home is your principal place of business, the trip from home to a client, job site, or supplier is business mileage, not a commute. Your workday starts at your home office, so the drive out is a business trip from the start.
Most self-employed people who work from home meet this test, but the space has to earn it. The home office has to be used regularly and only for your business, and it has to be where you do your work or handle the administrative side of it, with no other fixed office where you mainly work. A kitchen table you also eat dinner at does not qualify. When the space does qualify, nearly all of your work driving becomes deductible, since you no longer have a nondeductible commute to a separate office.
Even without a home office, you can deduct some home-to-site trips. If you have a regular place of business, the drive from home to a temporary work location in the same line of work is deductible, regardless of distance. A location counts as temporary when you realistically expect the work there to last one year or less.
There is also a distance rule: a trip from home to a temporary work location outside the metropolitan area where you live and normally work is deductible even if you do not have another regular work location. This often covers an out-of-town job, a multi-day client engagement, or a one-off project site.
Travel between two business locations on the same day is always business mileage. If you leave home (a commute), drive to your first client, then to a second client, then to a supplier, every leg between those work stops is deductible. Only the first leg from home and the last leg back home might be commuting, and even those are deductible if your home office is your principal place of business.
| The drive | Deductible? |
|---|---|
| Home to a fixed, regular office you keep | No (commute) |
| Home office to a client or job site | Yes |
| Between two clients on the same day | Yes |
| Home to a temporary work location (with a regular workplace elsewhere) | Yes |
| Home to a temporary site outside your normal metro area | Yes |
| Office to the bank, post office, or to buy supplies | Yes |
| A personal errand on the way home from a client | No (personal) |
For app-based drivers, business miles generally start when you turn the app on and are available for trips, and they continue while you are en route to and between rides or deliveries. The drive from home to the area where you start working, before the app is on, is usually commuting. The miles after you go online, including waiting and repositioning between fares, are the deductible ones, which is why turning the app on early and logging the whole online session matters.
See what the IRS requires in a mileage log so your deductible miles hold up, and the 2026 IRS mileage rate guide for how to turn those miles into a Schedule C deduction. The full commuting and travel rules are in IRS Publication 463. The Self Employment Tax Estimator shows how the deduction lowers your quarterly tax.
Self Employment Toolkit records each business trip with its purpose and distance, so the deductible miles are separated from personal driving and ready for Schedule C. Free to use.
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