Mileage Reimbursement Calculator

The rate moved on July 1, and one number cannot hold both

The IRS set 72.5 cents a mile for business use from January 1 to June 30, 2026 and 76 cents from July 1 to December 31. Both figures sit in the same table on the standard mileage rates page, with the announcements behind them: IR-2025-128 for the first half and IR-2026-29 for the second. A calculator with a single miles box therefore has to pick one of three things — the old rate, the new rate, or an average — and all three are wrong for somebody.

Read from the IRS standard mileage rates table on 2026-10-29. The charity rate is 14 cents in every year that table lists, 2012 through 2026. Medical and moving share a rate but not a rule: medical mileage is deductible as a medical expense, while the moving rate applies to members of the armed forces on active duty moving under orders. For anyone else, moving expenses are not a mileage line at all.

Here is what the choice costs. The same 7,300 business miles, priced four ways:

7,300 business miles, 2026

The best and the worst of those four are $255.50 apart on 7,300 miles. The blended rate — the midpoint of the two halves, 74.25 cents — lands $15.75 below the split figure. That is not rounding. It is a different answer produced by a different method, and it is the answer you get whenever a calculator asks for one number of miles and one rate.

The direction of the error depends on when the miles were driven, and that is the part worth carrying away. If most of the year’s driving happened before July, a blended rate overpays you and the employer is out the difference. If most of it happened after, the blended rate underpays you. In the example above the split is the wrong way round for the blend to be generous: 4,100 miles in the second half against 3,200 in the first, and the blend comes out short.

Reimbursement is not a deduction, and the difference is who you work for

Four of the seven readable results use the word deduction for the result — navan.com labels its own output “Total estimated mileage deduction” — and for a W-2 employee it usually is not one. Publication 463 says so in as many words: “If your expenses equal your reimbursements, you don’t complete Form 2106. You have no deduction since your expenses and reimbursements are equal.” What the employee gets is a reimbursement that never enters income at all — the same publication: “If you meet the three rules for accountable plans, your employer shouldn’t include any reimbursements in your income in box 1 of your Form W-2.”

Those three rules are worth knowing, because the whole tax treatment hangs on them. A plan is accountable when all of the following are true:

• Business connection. You paid or incurred deductible expenses while performing services as an employee.
• Adequate accounting. You account to the employer for the expenses within a reasonable period of time.
• Return of the excess. You return anything paid above the expenses you accounted for, within a reasonable period of time.

“Reasonable” has concrete edges in the same chapter, and they are the numbers an expense policy is usually built on:

The rate itself has a tax edge too, and it is the one nobody in the top ten states plainly. Reimbursement up to the federal rate, adequately accounted for with the excess returned, is not wages. A mileage allowance above the federal rate is a different line in the same table: the amount above the federal rate is reported as wages in box 1 of the W-2. Not the whole allowance — only the part above the rate for that half of the year.

Two consequences follow. A flat company rate that looked generous in January is less generous in July, because the federal rate rose underneath it while the company rate did not — the taxable slice shrinks. And a company rate below the federal rate is not a tax problem at all: the employee is simply reimbursed less than the IRS would have allowed, and the unreimbursed remainder is where the deduction question actually lives, if it lives anywhere.

Which miles count before any rate is applied

The rate is the second question. The first is whether the mile is a business mile, and Publication 463 answers it with a rule that surprises people who drive a lot: “Daily transportation expenses you incur while traveling from home to one or more regular places of business are generally nondeductible commuting expenses.” Home to the regular workplace is not a business mile, however far it is.

The exception that matters most is the temporary work location, which the same publication defines as “a place where your work assignment is realistically expected to last (and does in fact last) one year or less.” The edges around it are narrow, and they are quoted rather than paraphrased:

• Outside the metropolitan area. Without a regular place of business, transportation to a temporary work location is deductible only if the site is outside the metro area where you live.
• Inside it, no. “You can’t deduct daily transportation costs between your home and temporary work sites within your metropolitan area.”
• Two workplaces in a day. Getting from one workplace to the other is deductible; the trip home from the last one is commuting again.
• A second job on a day off. Home to a part-time job on a day off from the main job is commuting, and it is not deductible.

So the miles to type into the boxes are the ones that survive that test: client sites, a second location in the same day, a temporary assignment that genuinely ends inside a year. The definition turns on the expectation as well as the fact — a site “realistically expected to last” more than a year is not a temporary work location even in its first months, and a site that was expected to close and then does not stops qualifying at the point the expectation changes.

What the nine results do not say

Nine organic results came back for this phrase when it was read on 2026-10-29. Two could not be read: timesheets.com answered with a 403 challenge page of 240 bytes, and fmx.cpa.texas.gov timed out. Both are marked unreadable rather than zero, because a block page is not evidence that a word is missing. The other seven were opened and word-counted on the page as delivered.

“Two rates” counts the phrases that would show a half-year split being handled: first half, second half, mid-year, split. “Accountable plan” counts that phrase and W-2. “Commuting” counts the word and its stem. Counted with scripts and styles stripped, on 2026-10-29.

The nearest thing to a split in that list is ramp.com, which prints a footnote saying the 2026 figure shown is “a blended full-year average” and points readers at the historical table for the two halves. Navan offers a half-year selector — its 2026 option reads July–December — but still one miles box, so a year’s driving has to be entered twice and added by hand. Neither lets you type both halves and read one total. That is the gap this page fills, and it is the reason the tool above has two business boxes instead of one.

What this page does not do

• No state rates. A handful of states publish their own mileage rate for state tax purposes, and some differ from the federal one. Nothing here checks state law; the four rates above are federal.
• No actual-expense comparison. The other IRS method adds up fuel, insurance, repairs, depreciation and parking instead of using a rate. Which one is larger is a per-vehicle question and this page does not model it.
• No tolls or parking. Those are reimbursed separately and are not part of a per-mile rate.
• No self-employment tax. A deduction reduces income tax, not the 15.3% self-employment tax on the same profit.
• No record-keeping check. Publication 463 requires date, destination, business purpose, miles and odometer readings per trip. A total without those records is not substantiation, and the accountable-plan treatment depends on substantiation.
• No commute estimate. The tool takes the miles you type. Whether those miles pass the business-purpose test is the section above, not a calculation.

Questions people actually ask

Related pages

General information only — not tax, legal or payroll advice. The four rates are the federal standard mileage rates for 2026 as published by the IRS on 2026-10-29: business 72.5 cents to June 30 and 76 cents from July 1, charity 14 cents, medical and military moving 20.5 and 23.5 cents. The accountable-plan rules, the 30/60/120-day periods and the commuting language are quoted from Publication 463. No state rate, no actual-expense method, no tolls or parking, and no record-keeping review are included.