Does waiting time online count toward your mileage deduction?

What Schedule C's vehicle section actually asks for

Part IV of Schedule C, "Information on Your Vehicle," has exactly one question about how you used the car: "Of the total number of miles you drove your vehicle during [the year], enter the number of miles you used your vehicle for: a. Business b. Commuting (see instructions) c. Other." That's the verbatim wording from the IRS's own form. All three boxes are miles. There is no fourth box for hours online, and no version of the form asks what fraction of your shift you spent waiting.

The same is true if you use the actual-expense method instead of the standard mileage rate: the business-use share that gets applied to your actual vehicle costs is still figured as business miles divided by total miles driven for the year, per IRS Publication 463 and Tax Topic 510, Business use of car — not hours worked divided by hours in a day.

The mix-up worth correcting directly

It's an easy leap to make: "I was online 6 of my 8-hour shift, so 75% of my driving that day was business." That reasoning has the relationship backwards. Business-use percentage isn't derived from how much of your shift you were online — it's derived from the miles themselves, counted trip by trip. Being online longer doesn't manufacture additional business miles on its own; a shift with lots of online-waiting time and relatively few actual miles driven can have a lower business-mile total than a shorter, busier shift, even though the first shift "felt" more work-heavy.

In practice this rarely changes what you log, because you should already be recording actual drives rather than estimating from time online — see what a mileage log needs. But it's worth knowing the two numbers aren't interchangeable, especially if you've ever tried to back into a mileage estimate from your online hours instead of your actual trip history.

Parked and waiting produces zero miles, deductible or not

This part is genuinely simple, unlike the dead-miles question: a parked or idling car isn't accumulating mileage. There's no gray area to resolve, because there's no mile in dispute — the car didn't move. The moment you start driving again, whether toward an accepted job or just repositioning while still online, you're back in mileage-log territory, and that's where the harder, still-unsettled question from "dead miles" between gig offers picks up.

Where waiting time actually does matter: your real hourly pay

None of this means waiting time is irrelevant — it's just irrelevant to the mileage deduction specifically. An hour spent online and available, car parked, not earning a fare, is still an hour you weren't free to do something else with. Leaving it out of your own math produces an hourly rate that looks better than what you actually experienced. If you multi-app while waiting — available on two or three platforms at once hoping whichever pings first — the same waiting hour is doing double or triple duty, which is its own consideration covered in running two or three gig apps at once.

This is exactly the gap between "miles driven" and "time worked" that makes offer-by-offer math misleading if you only look at what a single ping pays — see is this gig offer actually worth it for the fuller version of that math, including why the drive and wait time around an offer change its real value.

What to actually log, and why it's two separate things

Keeping both isn't extra tax work — the mileage log is what the IRS actually wants; the online-hours record is what tells you whether the work is worth doing at the rate you're actually getting, which is a business decision, not a filing requirement.