The commuting rule, and which gig trips are personal
Commuting — travel between your home and a regular place of business — is personal and not deductible. That much is settled and it is not in dispute.
What is genuinely contested is how it applies to a driver with no regular place of business. A delivery driver does not have an office. There is a reasonable argument that once you are online and available for work, you are working, and that the drive out is therefore not a commute. There is also a reasonable argument that the first drive of the day toward your working area is exactly the kind of trip the commuting rule exists to exclude.
This page will not tell you which one is right, because that is a determination for your circumstances and a tax professional, not a website. What it will do is show you where the line sits, which trips are not ambiguous at all, and how to keep a log that survives either reading.
The three tiers of certainty
Clearly business
- Driving to collect an order after you accepted it
- Driving to the customer with the order
- Carrying a passenger
- Repositioning between offers while online and available
- Driving toward a hotspot while online and available
- Returning from a delivery zone toward your working area, still online
These are the bulk of gig miles and they are the ones people most often fail to record, not the ones they get wrong. See which gig miles count.
Clearly personal
- Errands you ran while offline
- The detour to the shops on the way home
- Driving to a second job you receive a W-2 for
- Any trip taken with the app closed and no intention to work
Genuinely ambiguous
- The first trip of the day, from home toward your working area, before going online
- The last trip of the day, home from your final drop
- A trip where you went online halfway through
- Driving to a working area far from home because it pays better
The ambiguity is real and it is not resolved by finding the right blog post. What resolves it in practice is facts about you — whether you have a qualifying home office, whether you go online before leaving, how your working pattern actually looks.
The two things that change the analysis
Going online before you leave. A driver who goes online in the driveway and accepts an offer before pulling away is in a materially different position from one who drives twenty minutes to a city centre and only then opens the app. Whether that difference is decisive is a question for a professional — but it is the fact that everything turns on, and it is entirely within your control to be consistent about.
A qualifying home office. If your home is your principal place of business under the relevant rules, trips from it to work locations are treated differently. That is a specific test in Publication 587 with real requirements, not a box you tick because you do your invoicing at the kitchen table. Get advice before relying on it, because it affects every trip you claim, not just one.
What to actually do
Record everything, classify deliberately. The failure that costs money is not misclassifying an ambiguous trip. It is not recording it at all, so the question never gets asked and the miles disappear either way.
Do not let an app default ambiguous trips. An app that silently marks them personal quietly undercounts. One that silently marks them business creates a worse problem — a log that overstates and cannot be defended. The correct behaviour is to leave them unclassified until you decide, which is how MileTruth is designed.
Be consistent. A log that treats the first trip one way in January and the other way in June is harder to defend than one that is consistently either. Pick a treatment with advice, apply it, and note the basis.
Keep personal trips in the log, marked personal. A log that contains only business trips looks like a log that was filtered. One that shows classification actually happening is more credible, and it also gives you the total-miles figure you need for the business-use percentage.
Note the reason. "Drove to zone, went online on arrival" is a one-line note that answers the question before it is asked. Publication 463's adequate-records standard includes the business purpose of each trip, so this is not extra work — it is the requirement.
Why this matters more in 2026
2026 has two IRS business mileage rates: 72.5 cents through June 30 and 76 cents from July 1. So every classification decision is now also a dating decision — a trip you reclassify later has to keep its date, or it lands on the wrong side of the boundary and gets the wrong rate.
A log without per-trip dates cannot survive reclassification. The two-rate explainer.
This is general information, not tax advice, and this page deliberately does not resolve the ambiguity for you. It cites IRS publications so you can read the primary source. The first-and-last-trip question in particular is one to put to a tax professional who knows your situation — it recurs every year for every mile you drive, so it is worth one conversation to settle properly.
Questions and answers
Is driving from home to start a delivery shift deductible?
This is the most argued-about question in gig mileage and there is no single clean answer that fits every driver. Commuting between home and a regular place of business is personal and not deductible. Gig drivers generally have no regular place of business, which changes the analysis - but the safe practice is to record every trip with its date, mileage and purpose and to classify rather than assume.
What is the commuting rule?
Travel between your home and a regular place of business is a personal commuting expense and is not deductible, regardless of how far it is or whether you do work on the way.
Do miles driven while online but without an order count?
Miles driven while you are online and available for work are generally treated as business miles, including driving toward a hotspot and repositioning between offers. These are frequently 30 to 50 percent of a delivery driver's total and are exactly the ones a manual-start tracker loses.
Does a home office change the commuting analysis?
It can, if your home qualifies as your principal place of business under the relevant rules. That is a specific test with real requirements and it is worth professional advice rather than assumption, because getting it wrong affects every trip you claim.
What is the safest way to handle ambiguous trips?
Record them with dates, mileage and purpose, and classify them deliberately rather than letting an app default them either way. A log that visibly contains personal trips marked personal is more credible than one containing only business trips.
MileTruth. “The commuting rule, and which gig trips are personal.” Baker Ventures LLC, September 6, 2026. https://miletruth.bakerventuresstudio.com/answers/commuting-rule-for-gig-drivers/