You drove your mother to chemotherapy every second Tuesday for a year. You drive a Meals on Wheels route on Saturdays. Neither of those is work, so every mileage guide you have read — including most of the ones on this site — has quietly assumed they do not count.
They can count. The IRS publishes three standard mileage rates, not one, and two of them have nothing to do with running a business. Almost nobody claims them, partly because the rates are small and partly because one rule disqualifies most households before they start.
Here is what each is worth in 2026, the rule that decides whether any of it helps you, and how to keep a log that would survive a question.
The three rates for 2026
The IRS revised its rates mid-year in 2026, so the year has two halves:
| Purpose | 1 Jan – 30 Jun 2026 | From 1 Jul 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Business | 72.5¢ / mile | 76¢ / mile |
| Medical (and moving, where it applies) | 20.5¢ / mile | 23.5¢ / mile |
| Charitable | 14¢ / mile | 14¢ / mile |
The charity rate did not move, and it will not. Business and medical rates are set by the IRS from cost data and get revised when driving costs move sharply. The charitable rate is fixed in the tax code itself, so it takes an act of Congress to change — which is why it has sat at 14¢ for decades while the business rate has more than doubled.
Tip: Because 2026 has two rate periods, a year's driving cannot be valued at a single figure. A trip on 20 June is worth 20.5¢ a mile and the identical trip on 20 July is worth 23.5¢. Any log you keep needs dates, not just a yearly total.
The rule that disqualifies most people
This is the part worth reading before you go looking for old appointment cards.
Medical and charitable mileage are itemised deductions. They go on Schedule A. If you take the standard deduction — and the large majority of households do — they are worth exactly nothing to you. There is no version of these where you claim them on top of the standard deduction.
Medical mileage carries a second hurdle on top of that. It joins your other medical expenses, and only the portion of that total above 7.5% of your adjusted gross income is deductible. On an AGI of $60,000 the first $4,500 of medical costs does nothing. Mileage at 23.5¢ is usually the last few hundred dollars stacked on a pile that was already large — a serious year of treatment, a hospital stay, a major dental bill. If your medical year was ordinary, the mileage will not get you over the line by itself.
Charitable mileage has no floor, but it still needs you to be itemising, and it only counts when you are driving in service of a qualified organisation — the same kind of registered charity whose cash donations you could deduct. Driving to a fundraiser you are attending as a guest is not it. Driving the route, delivering the meals, transporting the animals: that is.
Who this actually helps
Be honest with yourself about which of these you are:
- You already itemise — usually because of mortgage interest, state and local taxes, or large charitable giving — and you had a heavy medical year or drive regular volunteer routes. This is worth your time.
- You itemise but your medical year was routine. Log the charity miles; skip the medical arithmetic.
- You take the standard deduction. None of this changes your return. Read the business-mileage guides instead, because business miles are deducted against self-employment income and do not require itemising.
That last distinction is the one people get wrong most often. If you drive for work as a contractor, your business miles reduce your income on Schedule C whether or not you itemise. Medical and charity miles never work that way.
What counts, trip by trip
Medical: driving to and from care for yourself, your spouse or a dependent. Doctor and dentist appointments, hospital visits, the pharmacy run for a prescription, treatment centres, and trips to visit a dependent receiving care where that visit is part of the treatment. Parking and tolls are deductible on top of the mileage rate, not folded into it.
Charitable: miles driven while performing services for a qualified organisation. The volunteer route, the supply collection, the drive to the shelter for your shift. You may deduct the 14¢ rate, or instead deduct your actual gas and oil for those trips — but not depreciation, insurance, repairs or general maintenance. Parking and tolls are again additional.
Moving: treat this as the special case it is. For most of the last decade the moving-expense deduction has been unavailable to civilians and limited to active-duty members of the Armed Forces moving under orders to a permanent change of station. That provision has a legislated expiry that Congress has revisited more than once, so confirm the position for the year you are filing before you count on it. If you are a service member moving under orders, your mileage is valued at the medical rate shown above.
The log has to be as good as a business log
The record-keeping standard does not soften because the rate is smaller. For each trip you want the date, the miles, the purpose, and enough of the destination to make the purpose obvious. "14 Feb, 22 miles, oncology appointment, Regional Medical Center" is a record. "About 900 miles of hospital trips this year" is a number you made up in April, and it is the first thing that falls apart under a question.
Same-day capture matters more here than anywhere, because medical and volunteer trips are irregular. Business miles follow a pattern you can partly reconstruct from a calendar. A year of appointments at varying intervals does not reconstruct — you either wrote it down or you did not. Our guide on same-day notes versus April reconstruction covers why that gap is so hard to close after the fact.
Tag the trip when you take it
TaxMiles records drives automatically and lets you mark each one Medical, Charity or Moving as well as Business — so the three categories total separately at the right rate for the date, instead of collapsing into one number you have to untangle next April.
Get TaxMilesIf you are outside the United States
This is a US-only structure. HMRC, the Canada Revenue Agency and the Australian Taxation Office publish business mileage rates but no charitable or medical mileage rate at all — those claims are not worth less there, they are simply inapplicable, and relief for medical or volunteer travel where it exists comes through entirely different mechanisms. If you are filing outside the US, our guide to mileage deductions in the UK, Canada and Australia covers what your authority actually pays.
The short version
Three rates exist. Two of them only reach you if you itemise, and the medical one only after clearing 7.5% of your AGI. If you clear both hurdles, the miles are real money and most people leave them on the table. If you do not, the honest answer is that this deduction is not for you, and no amount of careful logging will change that.
For the rate that applies to nearly everyone reading this site, see the 2026 IRS mileage rate and what the July increase changed.
This is general education, not tax advice. Rates and rules verified against IRS guidance on 12 September 2026. Your circumstances decide what you can claim — check with a qualified preparer before filing.