Every drive you make falls into one of three buckets: business, commuting or personal. Only the first is generally deductible, and most classification mistakes come from treating the three as two — assuming that any drive connected to work must be business driving. Commuting is the category that catches people out, so it gets the longest section below.
What are the three categories, exactly?
Business driving is travel that is itself the work or directly serves it: carrying a passenger, delivering an order, driving between jobs, driving to collect supplies for the business. Personal driving is everything in your life that has nothing to do with work — school runs, groceries, weekends. Commuting sits between them: travel between your home and a regular place of work.
The boundaries are drawn by your tax authority, not by how a drive felt. Plenty of driving that is work-adjacent — done in work clothes, on the way to work, thinking about work — is still not business driving. The classification question is never "was I working?"; it is "which category does this specific trip fall into under my jurisdiction’s rules?".
Why is commuting its own category, and why is it usually not deductible?
Because tax systems generally treat getting yourself to work as a personal cost — everyone has it, employee or self-employed, and where you choose to live relative to your work is treated as a private decision. That is why the daily drive to a fixed workplace is typically excluded from business mileage even though the day it starts is a working day.
For gig workers the interesting question is what counts as a "regular place of work" when there isn’t one. If you drive from home into a city centre every evening before switching the apps on, is that first leg commuting or business? Jurisdictions answer this differently, and the details — regular bases, temporary workplaces, home-as-office rules — genuinely change the answer. The honest guidance is: learn how your tax authority draws this line, and until you are sure, classify conservatively. A log that under-claims a boundary case is defensible; one that assumes every leg from your driveway is business is the first thing an auditor will test.
When does the business clock actually start on a gig shift?
The defensible answer is: record everything and classify by rule, rather than deciding in the moment. The candidate moments — leaving home, going online in the app, accepting the first job, picking up the first order — each have advocates, and tax authorities do not all agree. What every authority does agree on is that you need a record either way, because a classification argument without trip records is over before it starts.
This is a place where automatic tracking quietly helps with a legal problem: if every drive is captured regardless, the classification decision is reversible. You can apply the correct rule for your jurisdiction — or your accountant’s stricter reading of it — after the fact, to trips that already exist. A manual log where the questionable legs were never written down offers no such option.
How do multi-app days work?
Driving between jobs is business driving, and that does not change when the jobs come from different apps. Finish a delivery for one platform, drive across town to a pickup for another, and the connecting drive serves the business — your business, which spans platforms, even though neither platform’s own dashboard will ever show it. This is a real advantage of keeping your own records rather than relying on per-app summaries: the platforms each see a fragment, and the deductible whole only exists in a log you control.
Idle repositioning is the harder case — cruising toward a busier area with no job accepted. Treatment varies by jurisdiction and by how the rest of your facts look, which is exactly why each trip should carry its purpose. "Repositioning between jobs, apps online" is a purpose an accountant can assess; an unlabelled 9-kilometre drive is not.
What about trips that are both — an errand in the middle of a shift?
Split them at the detour. Drive to a personal stop mid-shift and the direct legs serving work remain business; the personal detour does not become business because it happened between two deliveries. In practice the clean version is to let each recorded trip take one classification — the stop at the supermarket naturally splits the driving into separate trips, and you file the legs on their merits.
The habit that makes this painless is classifying daily, while you still remember which stop was which. A queue of last Tuesday’s unlabelled trips is a memory test; today’s is a formality.
How should this work day to day?
Record every drive, then sort with a rule you apply consistently: business right, personal left, boundary cases per your jurisdiction’s guidance. Consistency is itself evidence — a log where the same kind of trip is always classified the same way reads as a system, not an improvisation. The audit-survival guide on this blog covers what that log needs to contain; the deductions primer covers what the business miles are worth once they are classified.