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The 2026 change every driver needs to know

2026 has two business standard mileage rates, not one. Miles driven January 1 through June 30 are worth 72.5 cents. Miles driven July 1 through December 31 are worth 76 cents. The rate is set by when you drove, not when you file.

That means a 2026 mileage log has to be date-segmented. A running annual total multiplied by a single rate is wrong no matter which rate it used — for a driver with 18,000 miles split evenly, the error is several hundred dollars in one direction or the other.

Publication 463 has always required a date on every trip. In 2026 that requirement stopped being paperwork and became arithmetic. Read the full explainer with a worked example.

What MileTruth will do

Capture every trip. Automatic detection built on motion-activity and geofence wake-ups rather than continuous GPS polling — the approach both iOS and Android are designed to deliver even to a suspended app, which is why it uses less battery and survives longer. Trip starts are back-filled so a trip is not short by the distance detection took. Ambiguous trips are left unclassified rather than silently bucketed.

Date-segment 2026 correctly. Both rates, applied on the correct side of June 30, in the export.

Price your miles against your own car. A three-step cost-per-mile setup — vehicle, fuel economy, real costs — that produces your number rather than a national average.

Report true net dollars per hour, once you log your online hours. Gross earnings minus (all working miles × your cost per mile), divided by hours online. Including the unpaid repositioning miles, which are commonly 30 to 50 percent of a delivery driver's total. Without logged hours, it shows the mileage deduction but not net hourly.

Export something a preparer accepts. A dated per-trip log with distance, classification and purpose, as PDF and CSV.

Import your platform earnings. Pull in weekly Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and Uber Eats statements instead of retyping every number by hand.

Why we are building it

The category has a shared, unadmitted failure. Search any major mileage vendor's help centre and you will find an article explaining why a trip was not recorded. Every one of them has that article. None of them publishes a capture rate, because the first vendor to publish one invites a comparison nobody wants.

Meanwhile the number drivers actually argue about in parking lots — what did that shift really pay after the car took its cut — is not computed by anything on the market, because computing it requires knowing what your specific vehicle costs per mile, and nobody asks.

MileTruth is built for those two gaps and nothing else. It is not an accounting suite, it does not have hotspot data, and it will not tell you where to drive. The full comparison, including where competitors beat us.

Who this is not for

• W-2 employees. Unreimbursed employee mileage is generally not deductible on a federal return under current law. A tracker may still help you claim reimbursement from an employer, but it is not going on your return.
• Companies administering reimbursement for multiple drivers. Driversnote and MileIQ are built for that; MileTruth is not.
• Anyone who needs an app today. MileTruth is in App Store review and is not live yet. If you need tracking this week, Stride is free and TripLog is close to it.

How this site is written

Every factual claim links to a primary source, and IRS claims link to the IRS. Competitor pricing is taken from each vendor's own pricing page and dated. Where sources conflict — and in this category they frequently do — both are given and the conflict is named. Where a claim comes from a single test or a self-interested source, it is labelled.

MileTruth is disclosed as our own product on every page where it appears, including the pages where a competitor is the better answer.

Questions and answers