Yes, and it is not a close call. If you drive for DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub, Instacart, Amazon Flex, Spark Driver, Deliveroo, Just Eat, Stuart, Evri, Uber, Lyft or Bolt, your business mileage is usually worth more than every other deduction you have added together — the phone, the bags, the parking, the fees, all of it. It is also the only large deduction you cannot reconstruct later. A fuel purchase leaves a trace on a bank statement; a mile you did not record on the day leaves no trace anywhere at all. That asymmetry, not the size of the number, is the real argument for tracking.
Do I actually need to track my miles?
Yes — because the deduction is the biggest one on a driver’s return, and because nobody else is recording it for you. Delivery and rideshare platforms typically report what they paid you to the tax authority on a form built for exactly that purpose: in the United States something in the 1099 family, in the United Kingdom a summary filed under the digital-platform reporting rules that HMRC now receives. What none of them reports, and none of them can, is what it cost you to earn that money.
So the two halves of your tax position are documented very differently. The income side arrives pre-written by somebody else and is already in the tax authority’s hands. The cost side exists only if you wrote it down. When a driver overpays — and overpaying is the ordinary outcome of a first year, not an unusual one — this is almost always the mechanism: full income, partial costs, tax on the difference.
How much is a business mile actually worth?
Enough that it dominates everything else, because the deduction is per distance and distance is the job. In the United States the standard mileage rate turns each business mile into a deductible amount that lands on Schedule C, line 9, as car and truck expenses. In the United Kingdom the equivalent simplified route is the approved mileage allowance — AMAP — claimed as a vehicle expense on the self-employment pages, SA103S, of your Self Assessment return. Both are designed to bundle the real costs of running a vehicle into a single per-distance figure, and both are republished as the figures change, which is why the current rate belongs on the IRS or HMRC website rather than in an article that will outlive it.
The consequence is structural. A freelance designer’s deductions are a list of purchases, each one bounded. A driver’s largest deduction is a running total that grows every hour they work, whether or not anyone is counting. That is what makes an unlogged working week expensive in a way that a lost receipt never is.
What does "contemporaneous" mean, and why does it decide everything?
It means recorded at or near the time of the trip, per trip, rather than assembled afterwards — and it is the property that separates a record from an assertion. Both the IRS and HMRC describe record-keeping in the same shape: they want to see what you kept while you were working, not what you produced once someone asked. A log written on the day carries four things per trip, and none of them is hard to capture in the moment.
Contemporaneous records also look different from reconstructed ones, and the difference is visible without any accounting expertise. Real driving is uneven — eleven jobs on Friday, two on Tuesday, a personal run to the supermarket in the middle of a shift, odd distances that end in stray fractions. Reconstructions come out tidy: repeated identical trips, round numbers, no personal miles at all. Nobody has to prove a tidy log is false for it to be treated as weak.
- The date of the trip
- The distance, recorded per trip rather than per week
- Where it started and where it ended
- What the driving was for — "food delivery", "passenger trips", "parcel round"
What happens to a mile I did not record?
Nothing happens, and that is the problem — it simply is not deductible in practice, quietly, with no error message anywhere. You still earned the income that mile produced, the platform still reported it, and you still pay tax on it. The cost of earning it is the only part that fell off, and it fell off in silence at the end of a shift when you were tired and went inside.
This is worth sitting with, because it is unlike every other failure in your business. An unpaid invoice nags at you. A missing receipt is a gap you can see. An unrecorded mile leaves no gap at all: your log looks complete, your total looks plausible, and the number is just smaller than it should have been. The only defence is not remembering better — it is not relying on remembering.
Why is a year-end estimate the weakest possible position?
Because an estimate is a claim about evidence that does not exist, and it fails in both directions at once. The usual version — odometer at January, odometer at December, subtract a guess for personal driving — produces a single number with nothing behind it. It cannot tell anyone which trips were business, which were the school run, or which were the drive to a friend’s house on a Sunday. Asked to break it down, you cannot, because the breakdown was never made.
It is also, in practice, usually lower than the truth. Drivers estimating after the fact tend to round down, forget the repositioning legs, forget the multi-app days where the drive between one platform’s drop-off and another’s pickup was genuine business driving, and forget entirely the weeks they worked harder than usual. So the estimate is simultaneously the least defensible number available and a smaller one than the records would have given you. There is no version of this trade that favours the driver.
What is the smallest amount of tracking that actually counts?
Capture every drive automatically, then spend a minute a day deciding which were business. That split matters: the part a phone is strictly better at is being present for all of it and writing down what happened, and the part it cannot do is knowing why you drove. A log that captures everything and gets classified daily satisfies the contemporaneous standard without asking you to remember anything, which is the only kind of habit that survives a bad week.
If you keep it by hand instead, keep it per trip and keep it that day — a notebook in the door pocket filled in while you are still parked beats a spreadsheet filled in on Sunday, and both beat an estimate in April. BrewGig exists for the automatic half of this: on Pro and above it detects drives in the background and records each trip’s endpoints, route, distance and purpose without a start button, then hands you a swipe queue for the one judgement that is yours. BrewGig is an independent product and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or partnered with any delivery or rideshare platform; all platform names mentioned here are the trademarks of their respective owners.