Are "dead miles" between gig offers deductible?
It depends which kind of "in between" you mean — and the two cases are genuinely different, not just cautious hedging.
Drive from a completed job to an already-accepted next one, and that's business mileage on the same footing as any other accepted job. Drive around online but with nothing accepted, repositioning toward where you think the next ping will come from — that's a real, unsettled question the IRS hasn't directly addressed, and you shouldn't treat either answer as automatic.
The settled case: between two accepted jobs
If you drop off order A and immediately start driving toward pickup B because you already accepted job B, that drive is a business trip in the ordinary sense — you're traveling to perform a task you're contractually engaged to do. This is the same reasoning covered on which gig miles count: once a job is accepted, the miles to get there are business miles, whether or not you're currently carrying a passenger or package.
The contested case: online, available, nothing accepted yet
This is different. Driving around while merely logged into the app, with no job accepted, is closer to waiting for work than performing it — some tax preparers treat time and miles like this as fully business (the argument being that you're conducting your trade the whole time you're available for hire), and others limit deductible miles to trips connected to an actual accepted or in-progress job. IRS Publication 463 doesn't address gig-economy "available but idle" driving specifically, and no IRS guidance we could find settles this exact question either way.
We'd rather tell you that plainly than repeat a vendor's confident-sounding number for how much more mileage this "unlocks." If you drive this way regularly, it's worth a direct conversation with a tax professional about which position you're comfortable taking and why — and keeping a log either way, so the decision is yours to make with real records in hand rather than a guess at filing time.
What to log regardless of which case you're in
| Situation | Log it as |
|---|---|
| Driving to an accepted job's pickup point | Business — same as the job itself |
| Driving from drop-off to next accepted job | Business — settled |
| Driving online, no job accepted, repositioning | Log the miles either way; classify with your preparer's guidance |
| Driving after you've gone offline for the day | Personal |
The reason to log the contested miles too, even before you've decided how to treat them, is simple: you can always exclude a mile from your return later, but you can't reconstruct one you never recorded. Every mile still needs a date, distance, destination, and purpose — that discipline doesn't change based on which category a mile eventually lands in.
The 2026 rate, once you know what's deductible
Whichever miles you and your preparer decide count, the 2026 IRS standard mileage rate splits by date: 72.5¢ per mile January 1–June 30, 76¢ from July 1 onward, from Notice 2026-10 (IR-2025-128) and Announcement 2026-11 (IRB 2026-29).
MileTruth. "Are 'dead miles' between gig offers deductible?" Baker Ventures LLC, September 8, 2026. https://miletruth.bakerventuresstudio.com/answers/dead-miles-gig-driving-deduction