What Counts as a Business Mile?

A mile is a business mile only if it is driven between two business locations, and your home does not count as a business location unless it is your principal place of business. That single rule — the “commuting rule” — is what most mileage-log mistakes come from, in both directions: people undercount by leaving out miles that do qualify, and overcount by including their regular drive from home, which almost never does.

The reason this trips people up is that the rule is about where you drove between, not how the drive felt. A drive that clearly served the business — picking up supplies on the way to a job — can still fail the test if one end of it was your own front door and your home is not your qualifying workplace.

The commuting rule, in one table

Drive	Counts as business?
Home to your one regular workplace	No — this is a commute, same as any employee’s
Home to a client site, when home is your principal place of business	Yes — see the home-office exception below
Between two client sites or job locations, same day	Yes
A detour for a business errand (bank, supply store) that starts and ends at home	No, if home is not your qualifying workplace — the whole trip is still commuting
Home to a temporary work location outside your metro area	Yes, regardless of a home office — this is travel, not commuting

The home-office exception

If your home qualifies as your principal place of business — a space used regularly and exclusively for the business, per IRS Publication 587 — then trips from home to any other business location are deductible, including the first trip of the day. This is the single biggest lever most solo tradespeople and consultants are not using: a mobile cleaner, contractor or consultant who does administrative work from a qualifying home office can usually deduct every trip out to a job, not just the driving between jobs.

Without that exception, the rule reverts to the ordinary one: your first drive of the day (home to the first job) and your last (the final job home) are commuting, and only the driving between jobs in between qualifies.

What never counts, home office or not

Personal errands, even if run “on the way” to somewhere business-related.
A regular commute to a fixed office, even if you do business calls in the car.
Moving your car for parking, or any driving with no defined business purpose you could state if asked.

A worked day

A mobile pet groomer with no qualifying home office drives: home → Client A (9 mi) → Client B (6 mi) → Client C (11 mi) → home (14 mi).

Leg	Miles	Counts?
Home → A	9	No — commuting
A → B	6	Yes
B → C	11	Yes
C → Home	14	No — commuting
Deductible miles	17	of 40 driven

The same groomer, if she does her invoicing and scheduling from a qualifying home office, would deduct all 40 miles instead — the trip becomes business travel from a business location, not a commute from a residence. That difference, run at the 2026 standard mileage rate (72.5¢ through June 30, 76¢ from July 1 — confirm the current rate at irs.gov before relying on it), is the gap between roughly $12 and $29 of deduction for one day’s driving. Multiplied across a year, the home-office qualification is often worth more than the mileage log itself.

Common questions

Does driving to a business meeting at a coffee shop count? Yes, if it is not your first or last stop of the day and you have no qualifying home office — it is travel between two business locations, same as a client site.

What if I have a side business and a regular job? Each is evaluated on its own. Miles driven for your regular commute to your employer are never deductible; miles driven for the side business follow the same commuting rule as any other business, independently.

Do I need to log the destination and purpose, not just the mileage? Yes — a defensible log records the date, the miles, and the business purpose for each trip. A running odometer total with no context is not evidence the miles were business miles if the log is ever questioned.