The first and last trip of the day
This is the most argued-about question in gig mileage, and this page is not going to pretend to settle it.
What is settled: commuting between your home and a regular place of business is personal and not deductible. That is not in dispute.
What is genuinely contested is how it applies to a driver with no regular place of business. A delivery driver has no office. There is a reasonable argument that once you are online and available for work you are working, so the drive out is not a commute. There is also a reasonable argument that the first drive toward your working area is exactly what the commuting rule exists to exclude.
Both readings are held by competent people. The facts that move the answer are yours, and the honest advice is to get one conversation with a tax professional — because this recurs for every mile you drive, every day, all year.
The three facts that actually matter
1. Were you online before you left? A driver who goes online in the driveway, accepts an offer, and drives to collect it is in a materially different position from one who drives twenty minutes to a city centre and only then opens the app. This is the fact most people think is decisive, it is genuinely relevant, and it is entirely within your control to be consistent about.
2. Do you have a qualifying home office? If your home is your principal place of business under the tests in Publication 587, trips from it to work locations are treated differently. That is a real test with real requirements — regular and exclusive use, principal place of business — not a box you tick because you do your admin at the kitchen table. It also affects every trip you claim, which is why it deserves advice rather than optimism.
3. Is there a pattern that looks like a commute? Driving to the same suburb at the same time every day starts to resemble the thing the rule describes, regardless of how you characterise it. A driver who works wherever demand is does not have that problem.
What this changes in practice
Take a driver doing 20,000 miles a year, of which the first and last trips are 15 percent.
| Treatment | Deductible miles | Deduction at 2026 rates |
|---|---|---|
| Both legs counted | 20,000 | $14,500 – $15,200 |
| Both legs excluded | 17,000 | $12,325 – $12,920 |
| Difference | 3,000 | $2,175 – $2,280 |
At a combined income and self-employment rate near 30 percent that is roughly $650 to $680 of real money, every year, on one classification decision. Which is why it is worth an hour with someone qualified rather than a forum thread.
How to keep a log that survives either reading
This is the part that is unambiguous, and it is the part that actually protects you.
Record every trip, including the ambiguous ones. The failure that costs money is not misclassifying the first trip. It is not recording it, so the question never gets asked and the miles are gone under any reading.
Do not let an app decide. A tracker that silently buckets ambiguous trips as personal quietly undercounts. One that silently buckets them as 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.
Note the facts, not just the classification. "Went online at home, accepted offer before leaving" is a one-line note that answers the question before anyone asks it. Publication 463's adequate-records standard already asks for the business purpose of each trip, so this is the requirement rather than extra work.
Be consistent. A log treating 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 record the basis.
Keep personal trips in the log, marked personal. A log that visibly contains classification decisions is more credible than one containing only business trips, and you need the total-miles figure for Part IV of Schedule C regardless.
Why 2026 makes this sharper
2026 has two business mileage rates: 72.5 cents through June 30, 76 cents from July 1. So a trip you reclassify later has to keep its date, or the reclassification lands on the wrong side of the boundary and gets the wrong rate.
A log without per-trip dates cannot survive being revisited, and this is precisely the category of trip most likely to be revisited after advice. The two-rate explainer. · The commuting rule for gig drivers.
This page deliberately does not resolve the ambiguity for you, because it cannot. It cites IRS publications so you can read the source. The first-and-last-trip question is one of the few places where an hour of professional advice reliably pays for itself, because the answer applies to every working day of the year.
About MileTruth
MileTruth is an iOS app from Baker Ventures LLC that tracks deductible business mileage for gig and delivery drivers and shows true net pay: what is left after mileage, fuel and self-employment tax, not what the platform showed you at acceptance. It is built for people driving several platforms in the same shift, and for anyone who needs a mileage log that would hold up if the IRS asked for it. The app is in development.
Everything on this site is free and needs no account: the mileage deduction calculator, the per-platform pay breakdowns, and the answers, each one linked to the IRS publication or platform document it came from. MileTruth publishes the source for every number, including the 2026 split-year standard mileage rate, because a deduction you cannot substantiate is not a deduction.
Questions and answers
Is driving from home to start a delivery shift deductible?
There is no single clean answer that fits every driver, and anyone giving you one without asking about your circumstances is guessing. Commuting between home and a regular place of business is personal. Gig drivers generally have no regular place of business, which changes the analysis without automatically resolving it in your favour.
Does going online in the driveway make the first trip deductible?
It is the fact that most people believe is decisive, and it is genuinely relevant, because a driver who is online and available for work before pulling away is in a different position from one who drives twenty minutes and only then opens the app. Whether it is decisive for you is a question for a tax professional.
Is the drive home at the end of a shift deductible?
Same analysis as the drive out and the same ambiguity. If you go offline before leaving the working area, you have made the classification easy and unfavourable. If you stay online and accept offers on the way, the position is different.
Does a home office change the answer?
It can, if your home qualifies as your principal place of business under the tests in Publication 587. That is a specific test with real requirements, not a box you tick because you do your invoicing at the kitchen table, and it affects every trip you claim.
What is the safest way to handle it?
Record every trip with its date, mileage and purpose, classify deliberately rather than letting an app default, be consistent across the year, and get one conversation with a tax professional. It recurs for every mile you drive, so it is worth settling properly once.
MileTruth. “The first and last trip of the day.” Baker Ventures LLC, September 6, 2026. https://miletruth.bakerventuresstudio.com/answers/first-and-last-trip-of-the-day/