Does your gig app's mileage total match your deduction?

Why the gap exists, structurally

A platform's mileage figure is a byproduct of paying you, not a tax product. Uber and Lyft need to know trip distance to calculate your fare. DoorDash and Instacart need to know delivery distance for the same reason. None of them have a business reason to track the drive to a hotspot before you go online, the loop between a drop-off and your next accepted job, or the drive home at the end of a shift — even though several of those can be genuine business miles under IRS Publication 463. The platform isn't your tax preparer; its number was never built to be your log.

There's a second, quieter gap: none of the platform figures we found are date-segmented for the 2026 IRS rate change. The standard mileage rate is 72.5¢ per mile January 1–June 30 and 76¢ from July 1 onward, per Notice 2026-10 (IR-2025-128) and Announcement 2026-11 (IRB 2026-29). Even a platform total you trusted completely would still need to be split by the date each mile was driven before it produces a correct deduction — see the calculator for that math.

Uber (and Lyft): the broadest figure we could confirm

Uber's own driver help center describes its tax summary as containing "a record of all the online miles you drove last year, including waiting for a trip, while en route to a rider, and during a trip, which may qualify for deductions." That's a genuinely wide definition — it covers idle-online time, the drive to pick up, and the trip itself, not just the passenger-in-car portion some drivers assume it's limited to.

What it still doesn't reach: the drive from home before you go online, and any driving after you've gone offline. And it isn't split at the 2026 mid-year rate line.

Lyft's Annual Summary reports a comparable "online miles" figure, per Lyft's own help center, but Lyft's page we reviewed doesn't spell out exactly what's included the way Uber's does — so we're not asserting the same level of coverage for Lyft's number, only that Lyft reports one. Full deduction rules for both platforms, including the contested-miles questions Uber's own summary doesn't resolve, are covered on Uber and Lyft mileage deduction 2026.

DoorDash: on-delivery miles only, and DoorDash says so

DoorDash's own Dasher help center confirms it sends "mileage estimate emails by January 31 to US & Canada Dashers active during the year who dashed by Car and had on-delivery mileage." On-delivery is the narrower of the two definitions we found: it covers the drive from accepting an order through drop-off, not the drive to a hotspot, the wait between orders, or repositioning after a drop-off before your next accepted order — all of which a Dasher working a zone typically racks up a lot of. The full breakdown of what that leaves out, and which of it is settled versus contested, is on DoorDash mileage deduction 2026.

Instacart and Amazon Flex: we could not find a platform-reported mileage total at all

This is the honest answer, not a confident one: searching Instacart's and Amazon's own help centers and tax-document portals, we did not find an official article describing a shopper- or driver-facing mileage total the way Uber's and DoorDash's help centers do. Independent driver-tax guides consistently describe both platforms as not providing a usable mileage summary, which lines up with what their own account portals appear to offer (Instacart's shopper tax documents live in the Shopper app; Amazon Flex's live at Amazon's tax document portal) — but we're stating that as the consistent pattern we found, not as something either platform has published and confirmed in its own words the way Uber and DoorDash have. If you drive for either, treat "the app didn't give me a number" as the default rather than a gap to investigate. See Instacart mileage deduction 2026 and Amazon Flex mileage deduction 2026 for what miles are actually deductible either way.

What each platform's number is missing, side by side

The category the platforms are least likely to ever capture

Every platform figure above is anchored to an accepted job — a trip, a delivery, a batch, a block. None of them were built to answer the harder question of what counts while you're online with nothing accepted yet, driving toward where you think the next ping will come from. That's not a platform-reporting gap so much as a genuinely unsettled tax question; see "dead miles" between gig offers for the two cases and why they're treated differently.

What this means for your log

None of the four platforms above give you a number you can put directly on Schedule C. Even Uber's relatively complete figure needs the home-to-online and offline drives added and the 2026 rate split applied by hand. The practical fix is the same regardless of which platform (or platforms) you run: keep your own contemporaneous log — date, miles, destination, business purpose, per what a log actually needs — instead of reconstructing one from account exports at filing time.