The app for tracking business mileage that survives an audit.
An app for tracking business mileage has one real job: turn every trip into a record that still makes sense when the IRS reads it back to you. That's a narrower job than most mileage apps advertise, and mileage is rarely tracked on its own anyway — it usually rides alongside a bigger set of employee management apps a team already runs: hours, schedules, reimbursements.
This page covers what Publication 463 actually asks a mileage record to contain, what changed in the IRS's own mileage rate partway through 2026, and where a mileage tracker fits if you're building the rest of the app yourself.
The short version
One record, four fields, three years.
An app for tracking business mileage needs to record the date, the starting point and destination, the business purpose, and the miles driven for every trip, kept as they happen rather than rebuilt later, and held onto for at least three years. The IRS's standard mileage rate for 2026 was 72.5 cents per mile through June, then rose to 76 cents per mile starting July 1 — an unusual mid-year change driven by fuel costs, and one your app needs to apply by date, not treat as a single yearly constant. The rest of this page walks through both, plus when it makes sense to build your own tracker instead of using a generic one.
Where mileage tracking actually breaks
A generic app and a tracker built for you aren't the same thing.
Both can produce a record the IRS will accept. What changes is whether mileage stays its own disconnected app, or becomes one field among the others your business already tracks.
A generic consumer mileage app
- Detects trips automatically and applies the current per-mile rate
- Doesn't know your reimbursement policy or client codes
- Mileage lives in its own silo, disconnected from hours or invoices
- A second or third driver usually means a second or third seat
A tracker built into your app
- Same GPS-based trip detection, tuned to the fields you actually need
- The rate updates the moment the IRS changes it, mid-year included
- Mileage sits on the same screen as hours, stops, or invoices
- One app, one login, for as many drivers as the team actually has
The required fields
What Publication 463 actually asks you to record.
The IRS doesn't care what tool produces your mileage record, only that it's accurate and timely. Publication 463's recordkeeping rules for car expenses come down to the same short list on every trip, and an app for tracking business mileage is really just the machine that fills these fields in automatically instead of a driver remembering to:
- The date of the trip
- Where you started and where you went
- The business purpose of the trip
- The miles driven
- A running total of miles for the year
Timely beats detailed
Publication 463 puts real weight on when the record was made, not just what's in it. Records kept at or near the time of the trip — weekly is treated as timely — carry more weight than a mileage total reconstructed from memory months later, even if the final number happens to be right. That's the actual case for automatic tracking: not that a phone is more honest than a person, but that it can't forget to log a trip until tax season.
None of this has to live in a specific format. A log, diary, notebook, or app all count. Records built on that data, along with anything a mileage deduction depends on, need to be kept for at least three years from the date you file the return that used them. Read IRS Publication 463.
Try it
Does your mileage log already capture this?
Check off what your current mileage record, app, spreadsheet, or notebook, already includes for every trip.
0 of 7 · Start here — none of this is captured consistently yet.
The 2026 rate
Why the mileage rate moved mid-year.
The IRS set the 2026 business standard mileage rate at 72.5 cents per mile, up from 70 cents in 2025, effective January 1. It then did something the IRS rarely does and raised the rate again mid-year: travel from July 1 through December 31, 2026 uses 76 cents per mile instead, a change tied to rising fuel costs rather than the usual annual adjustment. See the IRS's current standard mileage rates.
For an app for tracking business mileage, that split matters more than the headline number. A tracker that stores one flat rate for the whole year will misstate every deduction calculated on a trip from the second half of 2026 — the rate needs to be looked up by the date of the trip, not hardcoded once and forgotten.
Standard rate vs. actual expenses
The standard mileage rate is a stand-in for the actual cost of running the car — gas, depreciation, repairs — so once you use it for a vehicle in a given year, you can't also deduct those costs separately for the same vehicle. Business-related tolls and parking are the one exception: Publication 463 allows those on top of the standard rate either way, which is why a mileage app worth using tracks them as a separate field rather than folding them into the per-mile number.
Try it
What does the 2026 rate change add up to?
Enter business miles driven in each half of 2026 to see how the mid-year jump from 72.5¢ to 76¢ per mile changes the standard-mileage deduction. Illustrative math, not tax advice.
Standard-mileage deduction, 2026
Enter miles for either half of the year above.
The full path
How a trip becomes a deduction.
Four steps, in order, and the first two are the ones that actually determine whether the record holds up later.
- 1
Drive
A trip starts. Whether it's picked up automatically by GPS or entered by hand, this is the only moment the underlying facts, exactly where you went and why, are freshest.
- 2
Log
The date, starting point and destination, business purpose, and miles get recorded right away, not reconstructed at tax time. Publication 463 treats a weekly log as timely; the further a record drifts from the trip, the weaker it gets.
- 3
Rate
Whichever standard mileage rate was in effect on the date of the trip gets applied — 72.5 cents for a trip in the first half of 2026, 76 cents for one in the second half. A tracker that hardcodes a single number for the whole year gets this step wrong.
- 4
Report
Trips roll up into a running annual total, ready to drop onto a tax return, with the underlying records kept for at least three years in case anyone ever asks to see them.
Picking an approach
Paper, a consumer app, or something built for your team.
Every option below can technically produce a record the IRS will accept. What actually changes between them is how much of the accuracy is automatic, and whether the mileage data connects to anything else your business already tracks.
| Approach | Timely record | Auto-detects trips | Rate updates automatically | Who maintains it | Best for | Typical cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Paper log or notebook | yes, if kept accurately | No | manual | you, by hand | One vehicle, a handful of trips | Free |
| Spreadsheet | yes, if kept accurately | No | manual | you, and it drifts | Comfortable rebuilding formulas | Free |
| Consumer mileage app | Yes | Yes | usually | the vendor | One driver, mileage only | Free tier, then per seat |
| Custom-built mileage tracker | Yes | Yes | your rules | you | Mileage tied to payroll or billing | Starts at $25/mo |
Mileage rarely stays a standalone problem for long. A crew that drives between job sites is usually the same crew clocking in and out with a time clock app for employees, and a driver logging miles between stops is often the same driver who needs a proof of delivery app at the end of the route. Once mileage has to line up with hours worked or delivery stops, tracking it in a separate, disconnected app usually creates more reconciliation work than it saves.
Try it
Which approach actually fits you?
Pick the description closest to how your team actually drives.
A consumer mileage app is enough
A handful of trips a month is exactly what a free-tier consumer mileage app is built for. Auto-detect the trips, export a report at tax time, done.
Free vs. paid
Is there a free app for tracking business mileage?
For a single driver logging a modest number of trips, sure. Most consumer mileage apps offer a free tier, usually capped by a monthly number of automatically detected trips before they ask you to upgrade. That's a reasonable way to see whether automatic tracking is worth it at all. It stops being the best app for tracking business expenses and mileage once you need mileage tied to a specific client, a reimbursement policy, or more than one driver — at that point you're either paying for a business-tier plan built around someone else's fields, or building the ones your team actually uses.
When to build your own
A mileage tracker that fits how your team drives.
The honest reason to build your own app for tracking business mileage instead of buying a consumer one usually isn't the per-seat price, it's that a generic tracker doesn't know about your reimbursement policy, your client codes, or the fact that mileage should really share a screen with the hours and stops your team is already logging elsewhere. A team whose process doesn't fit an off-the-shelf tool tends to end up building its own, and that's what Newly is for — describe the trip fields, the rate rules, and whatever else mileage needs to connect to, and it builds a real native app around them instead of around a vendor's schema.
The fields and the rate logic are worth settling on paper first, since they're cheap to change before anything is built. Getting automatic trip detection right — permissions, battery use, telling a real drive from someone walking to their car — is a separate engineering decision that comes after those are settled, and one we cover on its own in GPS tracking in mobile apps.
Sources
Where the specifics came from.
The numbers and rules on this page come from the IRS directly, not secondhand summaries:
FAQ
Mileage tracking, answered.
The IRS set the 2026 business standard mileage rate at 72.5 cents per mile for travel between January 1 and June 30, then raised it to 76 cents per mile for travel from July 1 through December 31, 2026, citing rising fuel costs. A mid-year change is unusual — rates are normally set once a year — so an app for tracking business mileage needs to apply the rate that was actually in effect on the date of each trip, not just whatever number was correct when the app was built.
Start with the trip, not the spreadsheet.
An app for tracking business mileage lives or dies on a handful of boring fields, captured on time, every trip. Get those right, then build the rest of the app around them in Newly, starting at $25 a month.