It’s the hopeful question every freelancer eventually asks: I drive for work — can I write off my commute?
The plain answer is no. The drive from your home to your regular place of work is a personal expense in the eyes of the IRS, full stop. It doesn’t matter that you’re self-employed, that the drive is long, or that you take work calls the whole way. Commuting is not deductible.
But that’s only half the story — and the other half is worth real money.
The 72.5¢ that is yours
Every business mile you drive in 2026 is worth 72.5¢/mile off your taxable income. Not your commute — but the trip from one client to the next, the run to pick up supplies, the drive to a job site once your workday has started. A contractor putting 8,000 legitimate business miles on the truck writes off $5,800 for driving they were doing anyway.
Business miles are broadly: travel between work locations, trips to clients or customers, runs for business supplies or the bank, and driving to a temporary work site. What’s not a business mile is the first and last trip of the day between your home and a regular office.
The exception that flips the rule
Here’s where it gets interesting. If your home office qualifies as your principal place of business, there is no “commute” to a separate office — you’re already at work when you’re at home. That means trips from your home office to a client, a job site, or a meeting become business miles from the moment you back out of the driveway.
For a lot of solo owners, qualifying the home office is the single move that converts thousands of “personal” commuting miles into deductible ones. (More on how to qualify a home office without inviting an audit in its own post.)
Mileage is one line in a much longer list of things the self-employed are allowed to deduct and routinely forget. We put the whole list — with this year’s exact numbers and the traps attached to each — in a free checklist you can run against your own bank statement.
The 2026 Self-Employed Tax Deduction Checklist
50+ write-offs, organized by category, with this year’s exact numbers — the tick-the-box version of everything above. Run it against your bank statement tonight.
