Mileage log for the self-employed
When you work for yourself, business miles are a real deduction — and your own to prove. Kilevo builds the log from the calendar you already keep.
Your miles are a Schedule C deduction
Freelancer, sole proprietor, single-member LLC, gig contractor: if you file a Schedule C, your business driving is deductible. At the 2026 IRS standard rate of 72.5 cents a mile, eight thousand business miles is a $5,800 deduction. That is money you keep, but only if you can show the miles were real and were business.
Unlike a W-2 employee, you have not lost this deduction — it sits on your own return, not behind a suspended itemized deduction. The trade is that the burden of proof is entirely yours.
The home office rewrites the commute rule
Most self-employed people work from home, and that changes everything about mileage. If a room is used regularly and exclusively for your business, and it is where you do your administrative work, your home qualifies as your principal place of business. Then the drive from home to a client is not a commute — it is travel between two business locations, and it counts.
Without a qualifying home office, that same first drive of the day is usually a personal commute. The distinction, and how much it is worth, is on the business miles vs commuting page.
Standard rate or actual expenses
You may deduct 72.5 cents a mile, or the actual cost of running the car for business — gas, insurance, maintenance, depreciation. One rule matters: to keep the standard rate available on a car you own, use it in the first year the car is in business. Start with actual expenses and the standard rate is closed for that vehicle. The mileage calculator shows what the standard rate comes to for your miles.
Where Kilevo fits
Working for yourself means the calendar is already your system of record: client calls, deliveries, site visits, supply runs. Kilevo reads that calendar — Google, Outlook or an ICS feed — and turns each appointment that has an address into a trip from your home or office. The appointment title becomes the business purpose, recorded when the work happened, not months later.
That timing is the point. The IRS wants a contemporaneous log: date, mileage, destination and purpose, recorded at the time. A log rebuilt from memory the week before filing carries little weight.
What it will not do
Kilevo has no GPS, no receipt scanner and no mobile app. It reads a calendar. If you do not keep one, there is nothing to build a log from. A video meeting with no location is zero miles, never an invented distance. When an address arrives without a city, Kilevo picks the nearest match to your home, flags it as guessed, and one click confirms it for every appointment with the same title.
Kilevo keeps the record; it does not give tax advice. Confirm your home office and your method with a professional. The Schedule C mileage page explains where the number goes. When you are ready, create a free account and import last year to see your deduction take shape.
