Mileage log for home health and visiting nurses

The driving is the job

A home health or hospice nurse can visit eight patients in a day, spread across a county. Two hundred, three hundred business miles a week is normal, and it adds up to ten thousand or more in a year. At the 2026 IRS rate of 72.5 cents a mile, ten thousand miles is worth $7,250. That is too much to leave unrecorded — and too much to reconstruct from memory. A route rarely repeats: a patient is discharged, a new admission lands across the county, the order of visits shifts with the day. The mileage is different every week, which is exactly why a written record beats an estimate.

Are you paid as an employee or a contractor?

The answer changes what the log is for, so be clear about which you are.

If you are a W-2 employee of an agency, you can no longer deduct unreimbursed mileage on your federal return — the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act suspended that deduction. For you, the log's job is to claim reimbursement from your employer, tax-free at the standard rate. Many agencies pay mileage between patients, and a dated, per-visit log is what their policy runs on.

If you work per diem or 1099, the miles are a Schedule C deduction, the same as any independent contractor.

The first and last drive of the day

Watch the ends of your route. Driving from home to your first patient, and from your last patient back home, follows the commute rules — often not deductible or reimbursable unless your home qualifies as your business base. Everything in between — patient to patient — is business mileage without question. The business miles vs commuting page draws the line.

How Kilevo builds the log

Your visits are scheduled somewhere — an agency system, Outlook, Google Calendar. If that schedule can reach Kilevo as a calendar, directly or through an ICS feed, Kilevo turns each visit that carries a patient address into a trip. To protect privacy, keep the address in the location field and a neutral label in the title, since the title becomes the trip's business purpose. Kilevo never reads or stores the attendees of an event. The calendar sync runs nightly on a paid plan.

What it will not do

There is no GPS and no mobile app. Kilevo will not follow your car between houses; it reads a schedule. A visit that never made the calendar produces no trip. A telehealth check-in with no address is zero miles. When a patient address lacks a city, Kilevo picks the closest match to your home, flags it as guessed, and one confirmation applies to every visit with the same label.

The IRS asks for a contemporaneous log — date, mileage, destination, purpose — and agencies ask for much the same. Kilevo records it as the visits happen. Whether it becomes a deduction or a reimbursement is a question for your tax professional or your agency (contractors can start with the Schedule C mileage page). When you are ready, create a free account and import a week of visits to see the log build itself.