The IRS raised the mileage rate mid-2026. Here's what it means for your miles.

By Sabett, founder of MileGravy ·September 6, 2026 ·6 min read

If you deduct your miles, 2026 is the year to pay attention to the calendar. The IRS changed the business mileage rate in the middle of the year, and most drivers I talk to still think there's one number.

There are two.

The two rates

The IRS set the 2026 business standard mileage rate at 72.5 cents per mile in Notice 2026-10, up 2.5 cents from 2025.

Then fuel prices moved, and in Announcement 2026-11 the IRS revised it to 76 cents per mile for expenses "paid or incurred for business, medical, or moving expense purposes on or after July 1, 2026." The announcement says plainly: "Notice 2026-10 is modified."

So for the 2026 tax year:

• Miles driven January 1 through June 30, 2026 → 72.5¢ each
• Miles driven July 1, 2026 onward → 76¢ each

That's it. No blending, no averaging, no picking the one you like. Each mile deducts at the rate in force the day you drove it.

Why this trips people up

Every mileage habit most of us built is annual. You drive all year, you pull one number off an app or a notebook in March, you multiply it by the rate, you put it on Schedule C. One number times one rate.

That habit produces a wrong answer in 2026, and it produces it in the direction the IRS cares about — too high. If you take a full year of miles and multiply by 76¢, you have just claimed the July rate on miles you drove in February.

The other direction happens too. Drivers who did their reading in January, saw 72.5¢, and never checked again will short themselves 3.5 cents on every mile from July onward.

1,000 miles in June vs 1,000 miles in July

What the split costs on a real year

In 2025 I logged about 30,600 business miles across 14 platforms, driving out of Ypsilanti in a 2017 Ford Transit 250. Say 2026 lands in the same place, and say the miles fall evenly on either side of July 1 — 15,300 in each half.

Five hundred and thirty-five dollars of deduction you can't support. That's not a rounding error and it's not a gray area — it's a number that doesn't match the rate table, sitting on a return you signed.

And it cuts the other way if your driving isn't evenly split. Heavy summer and fall, light spring? The flat-72.5¢ approach costs you real money. My deliveries lean heavier in the back half of the year, which means the July rate applies to more of my miles than half.

You can't split a year you didn't date

Here's the part that actually matters, and it's why I keep hammering it: you cannot split miles by rate period unless your records have dates on them.

A single annual total is now structurally unusable. "I drove 30,600 miles for work in 2026" doesn't tell you or anyone else what your deduction is, because the answer depends entirely on when. Two drivers with identical annual totals can have deductions hundreds of dollars apart.

Publication 463 already asks you to keep timely records showing the time, place and business purpose of your travel. The mid-year rate change just turned that from good practice into arithmetic you can't do without.

If you want to see what your own miles are worth at the current rate, I built a free mileage deduction calculator that does the math and shows the formula.

What the rate covers — and what it doesn't

The standard mileage rate is meant to stand in for the whole cost of operating the vehicle: gas, oil, maintenance, repairs, tires, insurance, registration and depreciation. You take the rate instead of those costs, not in addition to them. Deducting the rate and then a tank of gas on top is double-dipping, and it's a fast way to lose credibility on everything else in your return.

Two things sit outside it. Parking fees and tolls attributable to business use are separately deductible, whether you take the standard rate or actual expenses, per Tax Topic 510. So the toll bridge and the $8 garage downtown come off on top of your per-mile number. Keep those receipts — they're the one vehicle cost the rate doesn't already pay you for.

It's not only your business miles that changed

Announcement 2026-11 revised the rates for "business, medical, or moving expense purposes" together. If you're deducting medical mileage, or you're one of the narrow set of taxpayers still eligible for a moving expense deduction, those rates moved on July 1 too, and the same date-splitting applies.

The charitable rate is set by statute rather than by the IRS, so it doesn't move with fuel prices and isn't affected here.

Check your estimated payments too

A bigger deduction from July onward means less taxable profit than you may have projected back in the spring. If you're making quarterly estimated payments and you set your quarterly number in April using 72.5¢, your September and January payments are probably higher than they need to be.

That's not a crisis — you'll get it back at filing — but it's your cash sitting with the Treasury for six months instead of in your account. Recompute after you've split your first-half and second-half miles.

What if your records are just one number?

Say you already have 2026 half over and all you've got is an annual-style running total with no dates behind it. You have two honest options.

The first is to reconstruct the split from whatever dated evidence you do have — bank deposits by platform, order history, calendar entries, fuel receipts — and document how you arrived at the two halves. It's not as good as a contemporaneous log, but a documented methodology beats a number you can't explain.

The second is to apply the lower rate to everything. Using 72.5¢ on the whole year understates your deduction, which costs you money but doesn't overstate anything on a return you signed. If your records genuinely cannot support the split, that's the conservative position, and it's the one I'd take over guessing high.

Neither is a good place to be. Both are better than multiplying a dateless total by 76¢ and hoping.

What to actually do

Three things, in order of how much they'll save you:

1. Find out where your June 30 line is. Go back through whatever records you have and get a first-half total and a second-half total. If your records can't produce that, you've learned something important about your records.
2. Do the two-line calculation. First-half miles times 0.725, second-half miles times 0.76, add them. Put the sum on Schedule C. Keep the two halves in your notes so you can show your work.
3. Start dating every entry from today. Whatever you use — an app, a notebook, a spreadsheet — every trip gets a date. The IRS could split the rate again. It did this year with about two weeks' notice.

The rate going up is good news. It's more deduction per mile for the same driving. Just don't let it become a number you got wrong on a return you have to defend.

I drive for a living and I read the IRS pages carefully, but I'm not an accountant and this isn't tax advice. Your return is yours — check anything that matters with a preparer who knows your situation.