Can a Cleaning Business Deduct Mileage Between Jobs?

You drive more than almost anyone who files a Schedule C. Four houses in a day, a supply run, a drop-in quote across town, back home. At sixty-odd cents a mile it is frequently the largest single deduction a cleaning business takes — and the one most likely to be thrown out, because the miles were never written down in a form anybody can check.

The short answer, before the detail: the drives between jobs are deductible. The first drive of the day and the last one usually are not — unless your home is your principal place of business, in which case they are too. Everything below is how to tell which situation you are in, and what to record so the deduction survives contact with a question.

The rule that catches everyone

The IRS treats travel between your home and your workplace as commuting, and commuting is a personal expense. Not a small one, not a partial one — it is not deductible at all. This is the general rule and it applies to a self-employed cleaner exactly as it applies to somebody driving to an office.

The trap is that a cleaning business does not feel like it has a workplace. You do not go to the same building every morning; you go to Mrs Alvarez on Tuesday and an office park on Thursday. It is natural to conclude that none of it is commuting. That conclusion is wrong often enough to be expensive.

Two things follow from the general rule, and they surprise people:

• Carrying equipment does not change the answer. Loading the van with a vacuum, buckets and chemicals does not convert a commute into business travel. The trip is still from home to work.
• A long drive is not more deductible than a short one. Distance is not one of the tests. Forty miles of commuting is forty miles of commuting.

The three doors out of it

Revenue Ruling 99-7 is the IRS’s own statement of when travel between your home and a work location is deductible. There are three exceptions, and a cleaning business can qualify under any of them:

1. Travel to a temporary work location outside the metropolitan area where you live and normally work. A one-off deep clean two towns over qualifies on distance alone.
2. Travel to a temporary work location, any distance, if you have one or more regular work locations away from home in the same business. If you have a unit or a shop you work out of, the irregular jobs become deductible.
3. Travel between your home and any other work location, if your home is your principal place of business within the meaning of the home-office rules.

A temporary work location is one where you work on an irregular or short-term basis — the IRS frames it as a matter of days or weeks. If you realistically expect an assignment to last a year or less, and it does, the site is temporary. The corollary matters for this trade: the office building you clean every Monday, Wednesday and Friday for the next three years is not temporary. It is a regular work location, and driving from home to it is commuting.

The door most cleaning businesses walk through

Exception three is usually the one. If you have no shop, no unit, no depot — if the administrative work of the business happens at your kitchen table and there is nowhere else it could happen — your home may be your principal place of business. That is a defined test with its own conditions, chiefly that you use the space regularly and exclusively for the business and that you have no other fixed location where you conduct substantial administrative work.

Get through that test and the day changes shape entirely. Home to the first house is deductible. House to house is deductible. Last house home is deductible. The supply run on the way is deductible. Effectively every business mile of the day counts, because there is no commute left in it — you started at work.

Fail that test, and the middle of the day is still yours. Between-job travel is deductible whether or not you have a home office. It is only the two ends that depend on it.

A worked day, both ways

Say the round is: home to the Alvarez house, 11 miles. Alvarez to the office park, 6 miles. Office park to the supply store, 4 miles. Store to a new client’s quote appointment, 8 miles. Home again, 14 miles. Total 43 miles.

• No home office, and the office park is a regular Monday-Wednesday-Friday contract. The first 11 and the last 14 are commuting. The 6, 4 and 8 in the middle are business miles: 18 deductible miles.
• Home qualifies as your principal place of business. All 43 are business miles.

At the second-half-of-2026 rate that is the difference between about $13.68 and about $32.68 — for one ordinary day. Multiply by a working year and you can see why this is worth twenty minutes of getting right rather than guessing at.

In 2026 there is no single rate

This is the detail most templates get wrong. The standard mileage rate changed in the middle of this year:

• 72.5 cents per mile for miles driven 1 January through 30 June 2026
• 76 cents per mile for miles driven 1 July through 31 December 2026

The IRS announced the mid-year increase in July 2026, citing fuel costs; mid-year changes are unusual, which is exactly why a log built for a single rate will quietly compute the wrong figure for half the year. (Rates checked against the IRS’s own announcements on 26 August 2026 — if you are reading this in a later year, check the current figure before you rely on it.)

The practical consequence: your log needs to total first-half and second-half miles separately, then apply a different rate to each. Adding a full year of miles and multiplying by one number will overstate the first half or understate the second.

Standard rate or actual expenses — decide in year one

You have two methods. The standard mileage rate multiplies business miles by the IRS figure and is done. Actual expenses means tracking gas, insurance, repairs, tyres and depreciation, then deducting the business-use percentage of the total.

The trap is a timing rule rather than a maths one. For a car you own, you must choose the standard mileage rate in the first year the car is available for use in your business if you want the option of using it at all. Make that election and you can switch between methods in later years. Start with actual expenses on a car you own and the standard rate is closed to you for that vehicle permanently. For a leased car the rule runs the other way: choose the standard rate and you are committed for the whole lease, renewals included.

For a working van doing heavy miles, actual expenses sometimes wins. But you cannot know that in advance, and electing the standard rate in year one is what keeps both doors open. Either way you are tracking miles, because the business-use percentage under the actual-expenses method is calculated from — a mileage log.

What the log has to contain

Vehicle deductions fall under strict substantiation rules. A number written on a tax return with nothing behind it is routinely disallowed, and reconstructing a year of driving from calendar entries the week before a deadline is precisely the sort of record that gets rejected. Four things per trip:

1. The date.
2. The destination — and the miles driven.
3. The business purpose. “Alvarez — regular clean” is enough. “Errands” is not.
4. The mileage itself, one-way or round trip, recorded consistently.

Two further habits close the gaps. Record your odometer on the first and last day of the tax year, which establishes total annual mileage and therefore your business-use percentage. And write it down at or near the time of the trip — the same day, or at worst the same week. Records made contemporaneously carry weight that a spreadsheet filled in each April simply does not.

The four mistakes worth naming

• Logging the drive out and forgetting the drive back. The single most common way a log undercounts, and it undercounts by roughly half.
• Treating a long-running contract as temporary. Three years of Monday cleans at the same building is a regular work location. Home to it is commuting.
• Claiming the home office end without meeting the home office test. The between-job miles are yours regardless; the two ends are not free.
• Applying one rate to the whole of 2026. Split the year at 30 June.

None of this is exotic. It is a habit — thirty seconds in the van after each job rather than a reconstruction project in April — and a log that asks for the right four fields so you do not have to remember what they were. If you are still deciding what else the business ought to be recording, what to track and what to ignore is the shorter list than most people expect; and once the deduction side is honest, the next question is usually how much to set aside each quarter, which the mileage number feeds directly into.

This is general information about how the rules work, not tax advice for your situation. Your accountant’s numbers win.