Commuting vs. business miles for gig drivers

The rule, in the IRS's own terms

Commuting expenses — the cost of getting from home to your main place of business — are personal expenses, not business expenses, and are never deductible. This is a long-standing rule that predates gig work entirely and applies identically to a self-employed contractor and a W-2 employee. Publication 463 is the primary source for this and every mileage rule on this site.

Once you're past that first stop, the rule flips: travel between two business locations in the same day — job to job, delivery to delivery, store to a member's door — is business mileage, fully in scope for the standard mileage rate or actual expenses.

Where gig work makes this genuinely harder

A fixed job has one obvious "first work location": the office, the store, the site. A gig shift doesn't. The moment you go online in the app isn't a location, and where your first delivery or ride actually starts can be anywhere in your service area. That ambiguity is the real source of the disagreement among tax preparers about exactly where "commuting" ends for gig work — not a loophole, an unresolved fact question the IRS hasn't published gig-specific guidance to settle.

Two positions show up in practice:

• Conservative: the drive from home to wherever you get your first offer or start your first ride is commuting, full stop — treated the same as a drive to a single fixed office, because "going online" isn't a business location.
• Less conservative: if a driver qualifies for the home-office exception (see below), miles from home directly become business miles the moment the workday's first business activity begins, even before a specific delivery is assigned.

Which position holds up depends on facts specific to you — whether you maintain a genuine home office used regularly and exclusively for the business side of gig work (tracking, vehicle maintenance records, expense logging), not just the fact that you drive for a living.

The home-office exception, briefly

If a part of your home qualifies as your principal place of business under the home-office rules, trips between that home office and other business locations can be treated as business travel rather than commuting — even the very first trip of the day. This is a real exception, not a technicality to lean on casually: it requires the space to genuinely meet the home-office test (regular and exclusive business use), which most gig drivers who simply drive from their kitchen table's laptop don't automatically clear. Confirm your specific setup with a tax professional before relying on it.

What's unambiguous either way

• Store to store, delivery to delivery, ride to ride — business miles, no debate.
• The drive from your last stop of the day back home — commuting, symmetric with the morning rule.
• A personal errand in the middle of a shift (grocery run for yourself, picking up your kid) — personal miles, carved out of the business log for that segment.

For the miles genuinely in dispute — waiting-online time, the very first and very last leg of a shift — see which gig miles count for the fuller breakdown of what's settled versus contested.

Why this matters for your log

Whichever position you take, apply it consistently across the whole year and record enough detail — per mileage log requirements — that a reviewer can see which miles you classified as business and why. A log that's silently inconsistent about where "the shift starts" is a much weaker record than one that states a clear, defensible rule and applies it every day.