Being paid for a block rather than per order changes nothing about how you are taxed — you are self-employed either way, taxed on profit, filing a Schedule C — but it changes which miles are worth arguing about. The interesting question in block work is the drive to the station or store before the block starts, because that leg can be commuting or business depending on facts that are specific to you, and it repeats every single shift.
Does being paid by the block change how you are taxed?
No. A block is a scheduling and payment arrangement, not a tax category: you are an independent contractor being paid for a delivery service, and the profit lands on Schedule C exactly as per-order income does. Income tax and self-employment tax both apply to that profit, nothing is withheld on the way, and the year-end information form — usually a 1099-NEC, sometimes a 1099-K depending on how the payments were settled — is a report to the IRS rather than a calculation of what you owe.
What does change is the texture of your day, and therefore your records. Per-order work produces a continuous stream of short trips. Block work produces one long shaped shift: a drive to a pickup point, a wait, a loaded route with many stops, and a drive home. Each of those pieces has a different answer, and they are easy to record wrongly as one undifferentiated lump.
Do the miles from home to the station count?
That is the genuinely contested one, and the honest answer is that it depends on facts the IRS cares about and most drivers have never thought about. The general rule is that travel between your home and a regular place of business is commuting, which is a personal cost and not deductible — and if you take blocks from the same delivery station week after week, that station starts to look like a regular place of business. Travel to a temporary or varying work location, or travel from a home that qualifies as your principal place of business, is treated differently. IRS Publication 463 is where the rules on travel and commuting actually live, and this is a question worth putting to a preparer once, in your own facts, rather than guessing annually.
Because the answer is fact-dependent, the practical move is to record the leg and classify it, rather than deciding not to record it. A recorded trip you later classify as commuting costs you nothing; an unrecorded trip you later learn was deductible is gone. The same logic covers the drive home at the end of a block, which sits in the same category as the drive out.
Which miles inside a block are definitely business miles?
Everything between the first pickup point and the last drop. Once you are loaded and running the route, the driving is unambiguously in the service of the business: station to first stop, stop to stop, the detour back to a missed address, the drive to a locker or a return point at the end. A block that covers a wide suburban route can put serious distance on the odometer inside that window, and it is all of a piece.
Two smaller cases sit inside the same window and are worth recording explicitly. Driving back to the station mid-block for a second load is business driving. So is repositioning within a block at the app’s direction. Where a personal errand interrupts a block — a supermarket stop on the way between two drops — split it at the detour and let each leg take its own classification, exactly as the drive-classification guide on this blog describes.
You finished the block early. Does that affect anything?
Not for tax purposes, because you are deducting miles and costs, not hours. Finishing a block in less than its window is a pay-rate question rather than a tax one: the income is what the block paid, the deduction is what you actually drove, and the difference between the two is your effective hourly rate rather than anything that appears on a return.
It does matter to how you read your own numbers. A block that pays the same whether it takes the full window or well under it is worth measuring properly, and the only way to measure it is to record the hours you actually worked next to the miles you actually drove and the fuel you actually bought. The effective-hourly-rate post on this blog covers the arithmetic; the point here is that the inputs have to be captured during the block, because nobody reconstructs a Tuesday in April.
What if the station or store is a long way from home?
Then the question in the second section stops being academic and becomes the largest single variable in whether the block was worth taking. A long drive to a pickup point costs real gas and real time before the paid window even opens, and if that leg is commuting under your facts, it is a cost with no deduction attached to it at all. That is not a reason to claim it anyway; it is a reason to know the answer and to price the block accordingly.
Drivers who chase blocks across a wide area should settle this early with a preparer, keep the classification consistent once settled, and record every one of those legs so that the position can be applied — or corrected — after the fact. Consistency is itself evidence. A log where the same kind of drive is always classified the same way reads as a system; one where it varies reads as improvisation.
How do you record a block cleanly?
Capture the drives automatically and attach the block’s facts to them at the end, while the shift is still in your head. A complete record of one block is short:
BrewGig does the first half of that list on its own on Pro and above — drives detected in the background with their endpoints and route, waiting for you to classify — which turns the end of a block into a swipe and one earnings figure.
- Each drive of the shift, with date, miles, start and end points, and purpose
- The leg to the pickup point recorded and classified per your settled position
- The block’s pay, recorded against the platform it came from
- Hours actually worked, not the length of the window
- Any tolls, parking or gas bought during the shift, with the receipt photographed
What does a year of clean blocks give you?
A mileage total you can defend, a per-block pay rate you can compare between platforms, and a Schedule C that assembles itself instead of being reconstructed. Those three outputs come from the same small habit repeated at the end of each block, and the habit is the cheapest part of the whole system.
BrewGig is an independent app and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or partnered with Amazon Flex, Spark Driver or any other delivery platform; all platform names here are the trademarks of their respective owners.