The 2026 mileage rate changed on July 1. Here is which rate each trip gets.

72.5 cents through June 30, 76 cents from July 1. A rare mid-year split, and most logs will get it wrong.

ExactSplit · Updated July 2, 2026

A change the IRS almost never makes

The standard mileage rate is normally set once, in December, for the whole of the following year. Notice 2026-10 did exactly that on December 29, 2025. It set the business rate at 72.5 cents per mile for 2026, up 2.5 cents from the 70 cents that applied in 2025.

Then fuel prices moved, and in July the IRS did something it has done only a handful of times in the last two decades. Announcement 2026-11, published in Internal Revenue Bulletin 2026-29, raised the business rate to 76 cents per mile for transportation expenses paid or incurred on or after July 1, 2026. The announcement modifies Notice 2026-10 rather than replacing it, which matters, because the earlier notice still governs the first half of the year.

So 2026 has two business rates. The last time this happened was 2022, when the rate jumped from 58.5 cents to 62.5 cents at mid-year for the same reason. If you have been driving for business for a while you may remember the confusion that caused. This year is going to cause the same confusion, and the point of this post is to make sure it does not cause it for you.

The rule is the trip date, not the filing date

Here is the single fact that decides everything. The rate that applies to a trip is decided by the date of the trip. It has nothing to do with when you record the trip, when you total up your log, or when you file the return.

A 100 mile drive to a client on June 30 is worth 72.50 dollars. The same drive on July 1 is worth 76.00 dollars. If your log is a single column of miles with one rate multiplied through at the end of the year, it is wrong for 2026 no matter which rate you picked. Use 72.5 cents and you have underclaimed every trip after June. Use 76 cents and you have overclaimed every trip before July.

The right approach is to keep two subtotals, one for miles driven January 1 through June 30 and one for miles driven July 1 through December 31, and apply the correct rate to each. If you use software, it needs to store a date on every trip and pick the rate from that date. If it applies one rate to the year, it is going to produce the wrong number this year.

One more subtlety. The rate follows the date the expense was paid or incurred, which for mileage is the date you drove. A trip you took on June 28 but did not log until July 3 is a June trip. The log date is irrelevant.

What else moved, and what did not

Medical and moving mileage moved with the business rate. It went from 20.5 cents to 23.5 cents on July 1. Fewer people use this rate since the moving expense deduction was suspended for most taxpayers, but active duty military members moving under orders still can, and medical mileage still counts toward the medical expense deduction for anyone who itemizes.

The charitable rate did not move and cannot move by IRS action. It is fixed at 14 cents per mile in the statute itself, under section 170(i), and only Congress can change it. It has been 14 cents since 1998. If you drive for a charity, the rate is the same on July 1 as it was on January 1.

The rates apply to all vehicle types the same way. Electric, hybrid, gasoline, diesel, it does not matter. The standard mileage rate is a blended national figure and the IRS does not publish separate rates by fuel type.

What the rate covers, and the mistake that follows

The standard mileage rate is an all-in figure. It is designed to cover fuel, oil, maintenance, repairs, tires, insurance, registration, and depreciation. When you take the standard rate you are taking a deduction for all of those things at once.

That means you cannot also deduct gasoline receipts, or a repair bill, or your insurance premium, on top of the mileage rate. Those costs are already inside the 72.5 or 76 cents. The only vehicle costs you can add on top are parking fees and tolls incurred on business trips, and the business portion of interest on a car loan if you are self-employed.

This is one of the most common errors in bookkeeping for the self-employed, and it is easy to see why. Fuel purchases show up in the bank feed, they look like business expenses, and they are business expenses. It just happens that you already deducted them through the mileage rate. Software that classifies a gas station charge as deductible without checking whether you also claim mileage is quietly double counting.

The alternative is the actual expense method, where you track every vehicle cost and deduct the business percentage. That can produce a larger deduction for an expensive vehicle driven mostly for business. But you have to choose one method per vehicle, and if you want to use the standard rate you generally need to have used it in the first year the vehicle was in service.

The four things the log has to contain

Regardless of which rate applies, a mileage deduction has to be substantiated, and vehicles are held to a stricter standard than most expenses. Section 274(d) treats vehicles as listed property, which means the normal reasonable records standard does not apply. You need adequate records, or sufficient evidence corroborating your own statement, for four specific elements.

The four are the date of the trip, the mileage or the odometer readings, the destination, and the business purpose. Publication 463 lists them plainly. The business purpose does not need to be an essay. Client meeting at Northwind is enough. Business is not.

What people miss is that these four are not scored. A trip with three out of four is not seventy five percent deductible. It is not substantiated, and on examination it is disallowed entirely. A log with the date and miles but no destinations is a log with no deductible trips in it.

Records kept at or near the time of the trip carry far more weight than records reconstructed later. A log you fill in each week is contemporaneous. A spreadsheet you rebuild from your calendar in March is not, and an examiner is entitled to give it less credit.

How ExactSplit handles it

ExactSplit stores a date on every trip and looks up the rate from that date. A trip on June 30 is priced at 72.5 cents and cites Notice 2026-10. A trip on July 1 is priced at 76 cents and cites Announcement 2026-11. Both rates and both citations are printed on the Schedule C working papers, so your preparer can see exactly which figure applied to which miles.

All four substantiation fields are required. The trip form will not save without a date, a distance, a destination, and a business purpose, because a trip that is missing one of them is a trip that cannot be deducted, and there is no point storing it as if it could.

If you also have fuel or repair transactions classified as deductible, the mileage section tells you. It is the standard rate or actual expenses, never both, and the warning travels into the export so the preparer sees it too.

One last thing worth saying. The rates in this post were confirmed against multiple professional sources, and the structure of the citations checks out, but we always recommend confirming the figures against the IRS notices themselves before another filing season. The numbers are right. Verifying them yourself costs five minutes.