Here is the short version. The IRS raised the standard business mileage rate to 76 cents per mile for miles you drive between July 1 and December 31, 2026. The rate for the first half of the year, January 1 through June 30, stays at 72.5 cents per mile. That means when you file your 2026 taxes next spring, you cannot just multiply all your miles by one number. You have to split them into two piles and use a different rate for each.

For a driver who runs a lot of miles, that 3.5 cent bump on the back half of the year is real money. It is also easy to get wrong if you were not tracking the date each mile was driven. Here is how it works.

What actually changed

Most years the IRS sets one mileage rate in December and leaves it alone. 2026 is one of the rare years they changed it partway through. The last time they did a mid-year adjustment like this was back in 2022. The reason this time is gas prices. When the IRS set the original 72.5 cent rate in late December 2025, the national average for regular was around $2.89 a gallon. By mid-July 2026 it had climbed to roughly $3.87, close to a dollar higher. The mileage rate is supposed to reflect the real cost of operating a vehicle, so they moved it up to 76 cents to keep pace.

It helps to be clear about one thing here. The standard mileage rate is not only gas. It bundles gas, plus wear on your car, tires, brakes, oil changes, insurance, and depreciation, all into a single per-mile number. That is why it is so much higher than what you actually spend on fuel per mile. We break that down further in our mileage deduction guide.

Why this matters more for you than for a regular employee

If you drive for DoorDash, Uber Eats, Instacart, Spark, Amazon Flex, or any other app, you are a 1099 independent contractor. Nobody withholds taxes from your pay, and nobody reimburses your car costs. The mileage deduction is the main way you lower the profit the IRS taxes you on. Every mile you can document knocks 72.5 or 76 cents off your taxable income, depending on when you drove it. For a lot of drivers this deduction is the single biggest thing standing between them and a painful tax bill.

So a change in the rate is not a small technicality. It directly changes how big your deduction is and how much you owe.

The two-pile math, with an example

Say you drove 12,000 miles for delivery work across all of 2026, and roughly half of them landed in each half of the year. This is an illustrative example, not a promise about your own numbers. It splits like this:

First half, January through June: 6,000 miles times 72.5 cents is $4,350. Second half, July through December: 6,000 miles times 76 cents is $4,560. Add them together and your total mileage deduction for the year is $8,910.

If you had ignored the change and run all 12,000 miles at the old 72.5 cent rate, you would have claimed $8,700. The mid-year increase is worth $210 in extra deduction in this example. That is not life-changing, but it is money you are entitled to, and leaving it on the table just because you did not know the rate moved would be a shame. For a full-time driver putting 25,000 or 30,000 miles on the car, the gap gets bigger.

The trap: you need the date of each mile, not just the total

This is the part that trips people up. In a normal year you only need one number for taxes, your total business miles. This year you need your miles split by date, June 30 and earlier in one pile, July 1 and later in the other. If all you have is a single yearly total with no dates behind it, you cannot cleanly apply the two rates, and you are stuck either guessing the split or claiming the whole year at the lower rate to be safe.

If you keep a mileage log with dates, this is easy, you just add up each half separately. If you have been eyeballing your mileage or trying to reconstruct it from memory at tax time, this is the year that habit finally costs you. A log that records the date of every trip turns this from a headache into two quick sums.

One more change most drivers will skip past

The medical and moving mileage rate also went up mid-year, from 20.5 cents to 23.5 cents per mile as of July 1. For most gig drivers this one does not apply, since it covers driving for medical care or an eligible move, not delivery work. It is worth knowing it exists, but your delivery miles all fall under the business rate above.

Run your own numbers

If you want to see roughly what your deduction and take-home look like, plug your own miles and earnings into the calculator below. It uses the current rate so you can get a rough after-costs number without doing the arithmetic by hand.

The bigger point behind all of this: your deduction is only as good as your records. A rate change like this one is a reminder that the IRS math shifts under you sometimes, and the drivers who come out fine are the ones who logged their miles with dates all year instead of scrambling in April. If you want to see what the deduction does to your real profit, our post on what DoorDash drivers actually keep after costs walks through the full picture, and if you owe enough to make quarterly payments, our quarterly tax guide covers the deadlines.

This is the exact problem Giggie was built for. It logs your GPS mileage automatically on every shift with the date attached, so a mid-year rate change like this one is handled for you, the first half of your miles gets the 72.5 cent rate and the second half gets 76 cents without you thinking about it. It also runs your quarterly self-employment tax estimate in real time so the bill never lands as a surprise. Free for 7 days, then $2.99 a month.

The takeaway

For your 2026 return, use 72.5 cents a mile for anything driven January through June and 76 cents for July through December. Keep the dates behind your mileage so you can split it cleanly. If you have been tracking all along, this costs you two minutes of extra addition and puts a bit more deduction in your pocket. If you have not been tracking, this is the nudge to start, because next spring the drivers with a dated log will breeze through this and the ones without it will be guessing.