Here is a mistake that costs freelancers real money every year: deducting the drive from your house to a client’s office and calling it business mileage. The IRS calls that commuting, and commuting is not deductible. Get it wrong on enough trips and you have inflated your deduction with miles that would not survive an audit.

The line between commuting and business driving is one of the most misunderstood rules in self-employment taxes. It is also one of the easiest to get right once you understand how the IRS actually thinks about it. Let’s break it down.

The Core Rule: Commuting Is Never Deductible

The IRS treats the trip between your home and your regular place of work as a personal expense. It does not matter how far you drive, how early you leave, or whether you are checking email at every red light. That drive is your commute, and you cannot write it off.

Business mileage, on the other hand, is driving you do for your work once you are already working, or driving between work locations. At the 2026 standard mileage rate of $0.725 per mile, those miles are worth real money. A freelancer who drives 6,000 legitimate business miles in a year is looking at a $4,350 deduction.

So the entire game is knowing which miles fall into which bucket.

What Counts as Commuting

Commuting is the travel between your home and a fixed, regular work location. Examples that are not deductible:

• Driving from your apartment to the coworking space you rent every day
• Driving to a client’s office you report to on a recurring basis
• Stopping for coffee or dropping off dry cleaning on the way to work (still commuting)

Even if you make business calls during the drive or the trip is 45 minutes each way, it stays a commute. Distance and inconvenience do not change the category.

What Counts as Business Mileage

Business mileage is driving connected to your work that is not a simple home-to-work trip. Deductible examples:

• Driving from your home office to a client meeting
• Driving between two client sites in the same day
• Driving to pick up supplies, ship products, or visit the bank for business
• Driving to a temporary work location outside your normal area
• Driving to meet a prospect, attend a networking event, or shoot a client’s photos on location

The pattern: the trip serves a specific business purpose beyond getting you to your regular workplace.

The Home Office Changes Everything

Here is the detail that works heavily in favor of freelancers and independent contractors: if your home qualifies as your principal place of business, your first trip out the door can be deductible.

When your home office is your main workplace, there is no commute to a separate office. So when you drive from home to a client, a job site, or a supply store, that is travel between two business locations, and it counts as business mileage. The same goes for the drive home at the end of the day.

This is a big deal. A consultant who works from a home office and drives 20 miles to a client and 20 miles back is deducting all 40 miles. A consultant who rents an office across town and drives to that office first is commuting for that leg.

To lean on this rule, your home office needs to actually qualify. That means a space used regularly and exclusively for business. If you are claiming it, understand how the home office deduction works so the whole thing holds together. The mileage benefit and the home office claim are linked, and the IRS looks at them together.

Real Examples Freelancers Run Into

The web developer with a home office. You work from a spare bedroom set up as your office. You drive 15 miles to meet a client for lunch to discuss a project, then drive home. All 30 miles are business miles. Your home office is your regular workplace, so this is business travel, not commuting.

The photographer with recurring shoots. You do product shoots at the same studio you rent three days a week. That studio is a regular work location. Your drive there is a commute and not deductible. But if you drive from the studio to an on-location shoot across town, that leg is business mileage.

The consultant embedded with one client. You have a contract that has you driving to the same client’s office five days a week for six months. Because you report there regularly, the IRS is likely to treat that as your regular workplace, making the drive a commute. A short-term assignment can be different, but a months-long daily pattern usually reads as commuting.

The contractor running errands. You leave your home office, drive to a client, then to an office supply store, then home. The home-to-client, client-to-store, and store-to-home legs are all business miles because your home office is your base and every stop had a business purpose.

The Temporary Work Location Exception

There is one more rule worth knowing. If you have a regular workplace but travel to a temporary work location, meaning a job you realistically expect to last a year or less, the drive to that temporary location can be deductible even from home.

So a freelancer who normally works from a rented office but takes a two-week on-site project across town can generally deduct that driving. The key word is temporary. Once an assignment is expected to run beyond a year, it stops being temporary.

Why This Is an Audit Trigger

Vehicle expenses are one of the deductions the IRS scrutinizes most, because they are easy to inflate and hard to prove after the fact. Claiming a high number of business miles with no documentation, or claiming miles that look like a daily commute, draws attention.

The defense is simple: a contemporaneous log. The IRS wants to see the date, the destination, the business purpose, and the miles for each trip. If you claim 8,000 business miles, you need records that back up those 8,000 miles. A reconstructed guess at tax time does not hold up. Know the exact mileage log requirements before you file, and build the habit of tracking business mileage as you drive rather than after.

How to Report It

Business mileage flows onto your Schedule C, where you report the deduction under car and truck expenses. You will choose between the standard mileage rate and deducting your actual vehicle expenses, so it is worth running both to see which saves more. If you bought a vehicle largely for the business, also look at Section 179 and depreciation.

Either way, commuting miles never enter the equation. You track them only so you can subtract them from your total and cleanly separate personal driving from business driving, which is the same discipline that keeps your personal and business expenses apart everywhere else in your books.

Get the categories right and mileage becomes one of the most reliable deductions you have. Get them wrong and it becomes the reason an auditor calls.

numlr automatically tracks and classifies every trip so you can tell commuting from business mileage without a spreadsheet or a guess at tax time. Try numlr free.