If you deliver for DoorDash you are self-employed, nothing was withheld from what you were paid, and your biggest deduction is almost certainly the miles you drove — not the phone, not the hot bag, not the car wash. That is the short answer to “what can I write off”. The longer answer is an ordered list, two taxes, one form called Schedule C, and a set of records that make each claim survive a question.
Are you an employee of DoorDash, or self-employed?
Self-employed — an independent contractor running a delivery business of one, with the platform as a customer rather than an employer. That single fact drives everything else here: no tax comes out before the money reaches you, you owe both income tax and self-employment tax on your profit, and every business cost you can substantiate reduces the profit those taxes apply to.
It also means the deductions are yours to find. An employee gets a W-2 and a tax position that was largely settled before payday. A contractor gets a payout and a year-end information form, and everything in between — the profit calculation, the estimated payments, the substantiation — is their own work. Nobody at the app is preparing your return.
What does the platform withhold from your pay?
Generally nothing, which is why the first tax bill feels like it arrived from nowhere. Delivery platforms in the US typically pay independent contractors gross: no federal income tax taken out, no Social Security or Medicare withheld at source, no state withholding. Read your own payment statements rather than trusting any article about somebody else’s business — arrangements differ between platforms and change over time — but a payout line with no deductions under it is the shape most drivers are in.
What arrives after the year ends is an information form rather than a settlement. Most delivery work is reported on a 1099-NEC for nonemployee compensation; some payment arrangements are reported on a 1099-K instead. The thresholds and rules behind those forms have shifted more than once, so treat the form as a cross-check on your own ledger, never as the definition of your taxable income.
What can a DoorDash driver actually write off?
The costs that exist because the business exists, roughly in order of size:
Just as important is what does not go on the list. Your own time is not a deduction — unpaid waiting at a restaurant costs you money in the ordinary sense but creates nothing to claim. Nor are traffic tickets, the food you buy for yourself on shift, ordinary clothing, or the commute itself under the rules most drivers fall under. Claiming those is the fastest way to make an otherwise solid return look careless.
- Business miles — the deduction that dwarfs everything else for almost every driver
- The business share of your phone and data plan, apportioned by actual use
- Delivery equipment: insulated and hot bags, drink carriers, a phone mount, car charger, battery pack
- Tolls and parking incurred on a delivery, where the rules allow them
- Commissions, fees and charges withheld before the money reached your account
- Car washes, cleaning and consumables, in their business proportion
- The cost of running the business itself — record-keeping software, a tax preparer’s fee
Why is mileage almost always the biggest deduction?
Because the standard mileage rate turns every business mile into a deductible amount, and driving is the entire job. The rate is designed to bundle the real costs of operating a vehicle — gas, maintenance, tires, insurance, depreciation — into one figure per mile, so the deduction grows with the odometer whether or not you kept a single gas receipt. The IRS publishes the current rate each year; look it up there rather than anywhere that could go stale.
The alternative is the actual expense method: total your real vehicle costs and claim the business-use proportion of them. It can win for an expensive or heavily depreciating vehicle and it demands far more paperwork — every gas fill, every repair, every insurance premium, plus the business-use split. Note that both methods rest on the same foundation. The standard method multiplies your log by a rate; the actual method uses your log to prove the proportion. There is no version of this where an unlogged mile is worth anything, and the choice between methods in the first year you use a vehicle has consequences for later years, which makes it a good question for a preparer.
Where does all of this land on your tax return?
On Schedule C, which is where a sole proprietor reports the profit or loss of a business. Your gross delivery income goes at the top on line 1, and the deductions above have their own homes further down: car and truck expenses on line 9, commissions and fees on line 10, supplies on line 22, and the rest itemised in Part V and carried to line 27a. Part IV of the same schedule asks about the vehicle itself — when it went into service, business and personal miles, whether you have written evidence — which is the IRS asking, on the form, whether your log exists.
The net profit at the bottom of Schedule C then does two jobs. It flows through Schedule 1 into your Form 1040 as income, and it flows into Schedule SE, where self-employment tax is calculated — the Social Security and Medicare contribution an employer would otherwise have split with you. Those are the two taxes. Because neither is withheld, most self-employed drivers with a meaningful profit are expected to make estimated payments through the year on Form 1040-ES rather than settling once in April.
What records make each claim survive a question?
One record per claim, made at the time. For mileage, a per-trip log with the date, the miles, where the trip started and ended, and its business purpose — a year-end total with nothing behind it answers none of the questions the IRS actually asks. For equipment and supplies, the receipt, photographed at the register and attached to an expense entry that says what the thing was for. For the phone, the bill plus a written note of how you arrived at the business share, applied consistently rather than reinvented each year.
For platform fees and gross income, download the statements while the account still exists to download from, and reconcile them against your own ledger before filing rather than after a letter. This is the whole substantiation layer, and it is the part BrewGig is built to keep for you: drives recorded automatically as they happen with their endpoints and route, receipts photographed onto expenses, and a running Schedule C and self-employment estimate that moves as the year does.
What should you do before your next dash?
Start the mileage log, because it is the only deduction on this page that cannot be reconstructed honestly later and it is the one worth the most. Everything else has a paper trail sitting in an inbox or a bank statement somewhere; miles that were never recorded simply do not exist at tax time, and the money they were worth goes to the Treasury by default.
Then take organised records to a preparer who knows self-employment, rather than guessing at the boundary cases on your own. The general deductions primer elsewhere on this blog covers the wider expense landscape, and the guide to classifying business, commuting and personal drives covers the line that catches most new drivers out.
BrewGig is an independent app and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or partnered with DoorDash or any other delivery platform; all platform names here are the trademarks of their respective owners.