Running two or three gig apps at once: one log, not three

Why splitting miles by app is the wrong question

It's a natural instinct to want to know "how many of these miles were DoorDash's and how many were Uber's" — platforms report earnings separately, so it feels like mileage should split the same way. It shouldn't, for the deduction's purposes. Publication 463 asks for business miles with a date, destination, and business purpose — not an attribution to a specific employer or platform. "Delivering for gig platforms" is a legitimate single business purpose covering the whole shift.

The practical effect: you don't need to remember which app was on screen for any given mile. You need to know whether the mile was business (working your gig-driving trade) or not.

The trap: switching apps mid-drive

A common multi-apping pattern — you're driving toward a drop-off on one platform, get an offer on another, and take it once you're free — doesn't create a gap in your business-mile log. From the moment you go online for gig work until you go fully offline, you're generally in the same continuous business-purpose period, whether one app or three is generating the actual trips inside it. The record that matters is the start and end of your working period and the total miles inside it, not a per-app breakdown.

Where this can go wrong is double-logging: recording the same physical drive twice because two apps' own trip histories both show it. If you're building your log from platform data rather than a live GPS trace, cross-check for exactly this before you total anything.

What to record while you're online on multiple apps

The same four things every mile needs: date, miles, destination, business purpose — kept at or near the time. "Business purpose" can simply be "gig delivery/rideshare, multi-app" rather than naming every platform involved in a given stretch of driving. What matters is that the record is contemporaneous and the miles are genuinely business, covered in full at which gig miles count.

The 2026 rate applies the same way regardless of how many apps you run

2026 has two IRS business mileage rates: 72.5¢ per mile January 1 through June 30, 76¢ from July 1 onward, from Notice 2026-10 (IR-2025-128) and Announcement 2026-11 (IRB 2026-29). Your total business miles — combined across every app — get split by the date they were driven, same as a single-platform driver. Multi-apping changes nothing about which rate applies to which mile; it only changes how many trip-generating sources are feeding into the same one log. Run the two-rate calculator on your combined total.

One log is also just less work

Reconciling two or three separate, partially-overlapping, differently-formatted platform mileage estimates into a single accurate number is genuinely harder than keeping one contemporaneous log yourself from the start. Multi-apping is one of the clearest cases where the platform-reported numbers — even where they exist — are worth ignoring in favor of your own record.