Mileage log for W-2 employees

An honest word first: the deduction is gone

If you are a W-2 employee, you can no longer deduct unreimbursed business mileage on your federal return. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act suspended the miscellaneous itemized deduction that used to allow it, and the 2025 reconciliation law made that suspension permanent from tax year 2026. There is no personal deduction to claim, however many business miles you drive.

A few narrow categories are exceptions — Armed Forces reservists, qualified performing artists, fee-basis state or local government officials, and certain disability-related work expenses. If none of those describe you, the door is closed on the deduction. Check your own situation with a tax professional rather than assume.

So the log is for reimbursement

For almost every W-2 employee, a mileage log is no longer a tax document — it is an expense record. It is what you hand to your employer to be reimbursed for the miles you drove on the job, tax-free, at the standard rate. A clean, dated log is exactly what an expense policy asks for and what payroll can pay against without hesitation.

The four things a reimbursement claim needs are the date, the miles, where you went, and why. Vague totals get questioned; a per-trip record does not.

The commute is not reimbursable

Driving from home to your regular office is a commute. It is never deductible and never reimbursable as business mileage, however far it is. Office to a client, client to client, and — if your home qualifies as your place of business — the first drive out can all count. The full breakdown is on the business miles vs commuting page.

What to record on every trip

• the date;
• the miles driven;
• the destination;
• the business purpose of the trip.

Our free mileage log template carries exactly those columns, so you can see what a clean record looks like before you build one.

How Kilevo builds it

If your meetings already live in a calendar, your log is half written. Kilevo reads your Google Calendar, Outlook or an ICS feed and turns every appointment that has an address into a round trip from your default address. The title becomes the purpose, the distance comes from Google Maps. An appointment with no address produces nothing; a video call is zero miles.

Be clear on what it is not: there is no GPS, no phone app, no receipt scanner. Without a calendar to read, there is nothing to build. With one, your month is ready in the morning — the sync runs nightly if you subscribe, and you can start it yourself anytime. A correction you make by hand — an address, a vehicle, a distance — survives the next sync. At month-end it exports a PDF report with a line per trip, ready to attach to an expense claim.

This page is general information, not tax advice: confirm your own case with a tax professional or your employer's policy. Want to try a month? Open a free account. Five trips a month are free to test the method.