Two rates for 2026, split at July 1
The standard mileage rate is normally one optional figure the IRS announces for each tax year. For 2026 the agency published a rate for January 1 to June 30 (72.5 cents a mile, IR-2025-128) and then a second rate for July 1 to December 31 (76 cents a mile, IR-2026-29), both verified against the official source and kept on record.
You choose per vehicle per year between the standard rate and actual car expenses - gas, repairs, insurance, depreciation. The standard rate is the simple option and, for many drivers, the larger one.
Choosing the standard mileage rate is an election you make per vehicle per year, and once made it applies to the whole car - you cannot switch to actual expenses for the same car just because one method looks better on a particular year. The split does not change that election: the two 2026 rates are the same method applied to two stretches of the year, and the business rate is meant to cover the variable and fixed costs of running the vehicle, which is why it sits above the medical and charitable rates that carry fewer of those costs.
What counts as business miles
Business miles are the miles you drive for work from one workplace or client to the next: meetings, site visits, running business errands, and the drive from a home office to your first client each day. The daily commute between home and a regular workplace is personal, not business, and does not count.
Only the business share of your driving counts. If you use a car for a side business on weekends, those weekends are business miles and the commuting portion stays off the form.
Miles times each rate, then add the two
Once the miles are right the deduction is two multiplications and an addition: miles driven by June 30 times 72.5 cents, plus miles driven from July 1 times 76 cents. With the standard rate you do not track receipts for gas or repairs, and you avoid the depreciation calculation that the actual-expense method requires.
Parking fees and tolls are separate - they add on top of the standard rate rather than being folded into the cents-per-mile figure.
The narrowness of the math is the point: with the standard rate you are not reconstructing a year of gas receipts or computing depreciation by method, which is the burden the actual-expense option carries. What 2026 adds is a date question, not a second method - the two rates are the same election applied to two stretches of the year, and the only extra work is keeping the miles for each stretch apart. The 3.5-cent gap is worth $35 per 1,000 miles, which is why the page asks for the date split rather than a single total. Parking fees and tolls sit outside the cents-per-mile figure and add on top, so a complete deduction is both mileage blocks plus those separately-reported extras.
Other driving uses other rates
Business is not the only mile that deducts. For 2026 medical and military moving miles are 20.5 cents a mile from January 1 to June 30 and 23.5 cents from July 1 to December 31, while charitable driving stays at 14 cents all year. All three sit below the business rate because they do not carry the same operating costs.
This calculator prices the business rates only. If your deduction is medical mileage, military moving mileage or charitable mileage, the statutory rates above apply instead of the 72.5- and 76-cent business figures.
Because the calculator deliberately handles the business case, its job is to keep the 2026 figures current and to price them cleanly, not to claim every kind of driving carries the same value. Knowing that medical, moving and charitable miles use separate rates - and that two of those rates changed on July 1 - matters at tax time, and the note exists so the number on the page is not mistaken for the whole of the mileage story.
Why the logbook, not the calculator, decides the deduction
The arithmetic here is trivial — miles times a rate — and that is exactly why the deduction is not won or lost on this page. A mileage deduction stands on substantiation: date, destination, business purpose and miles, written down close enough to the drive that it can be defended. A reconstruction assembled in April for the whole of the previous year is the single most common way a clean number becomes a smaller one, and no rate table helps with that.
The other trap is the edge of “business”. The commute from home to a regular workplace is not deductible, and neither is the drive back, even though both burn the same fuel at the same rate. What deducts is the trip from the office to a client, the second job site of the day, or the drive from home when home is your principal place of business. Forty weeks of a twenty-mile round-trip commute is 8,000 miles — $6,040 at the 2026 blended rates, and $0 of it deductible. The calculator prices what you tell it; the classification is the part that has to be right first.
Danfio