A deduction reduces the income you are taxed on, not your tax bill directly — and for most gig workers the deductions left unclaimed are not exotic. They are the ordinary ones: miles that never got logged, the business share of a phone bill, fees a platform withheld before the money arrived. This is a tour of the mechanisms, jurisdiction-neutral by design; the specific rates, thresholds and eligibility rules are your tax authority’s to publish and yours to check.
How do deductions actually work?
You are taxed on profit, not on what the apps paid out. Deductible business expenses come off your gross income first, and tax applies to what remains. That means a deduction is worth roughly its amount multiplied by the rate you would otherwise have paid on that slice of income — real money, but not a refund of the expense itself. It also means deductions only exist if you can substantiate them: a legitimate expense with no record behind it is, for tax purposes, indistinguishable from no expense.
Two habits follow directly. Record expenses when they happen, because reconstruction misses things in only one direction — yours. And keep business and personal spending separable, because every mixed-use claim starts with showing how you split it.
Why is mileage usually the biggest deduction a driver has?
Because the standard mileage method turns every business kilometre into a deductible amount, and driving is the job. Most tax authorities that publish a standard rate design it to bundle the real costs of running a vehicle — fuel, maintenance, insurance, depreciation — into one per-distance figure, so the deduction grows with every business mile whether or not you kept fuel receipts. Some authorities use more than one band: HMRC, for instance, uses a two-band approved mileage structure where the rate changes past an annual distance threshold. Check your tax authority’s current rates rather than trusting any number a blog post could quote — figures change, and articles outlive them.
The alternative in many systems is deducting actual vehicle costs, usually apportioned by business use, which can win for expensive vehicles and demands far more record-keeping. Under either method the mileage log is the foundation: the standard method multiplies the log by a rate, and the actual-cost method uses the log to prove the business proportion. No log, no method. Which is why unlogged miles are the single most common way drivers overpay — the deduction mechanism was available, and the substantiation didn’t exist.
Can you deduct part of your phone bill?
Commonly yes, in proportion to business use — the phone is the dispatch terminal, the navigator and the proof-of-delivery camera, and tax systems that allow mixed-use expenses generally allow a business share of it. The mechanism to understand is apportionment: you claim the business percentage, and you should be able to say how you arrived at it. A consistent, documented method — hours in work apps, or a data-use split — beats a hopeful round number.
The same apportionment logic extends to other mixed-use costs where your jurisdiction permits them: accessories bought for work like mounts and chargers, or a data plan upgraded because of the job. The recurring theme is not "claim everything" but "claim the business share, and be ready to show your working".
What supplies and fees go unclaimed most often?
The small recurring ones, because each purchase feels too minor to record. They compound. Commonly overlooked, subject to your local rules:
Platform commissions deserve a special note. If an app advertises a fare and pays you the fare minus its cut, what you report and what you deduct depend on how the income is documented in your jurisdiction — but either way, the fee should not simply vanish from your math. Money withheld before payout is the easiest expense in the world to forget, because you never saw it leave.
- Insulated bags, phone mounts, chargers and other working equipment
- Platform fees and commissions withheld from payouts
- Parking and tolls incurred on business trips, where rules allow
- A business-use share of vehicle cleaning and consumables
- Bookkeeping or record-keeping software used for the business
What records make these claims stick?
For mileage: a contemporaneous per-trip log with distance, endpoints and business purpose — the audit-survival post on this blog covers the standard in detail. For purchases: the receipt, captured at the moment of purchase, attached to an expense record that says what it was for. For apportioned costs: the bill plus a note of the method behind the split. For platform fees: statements or payout summaries from each platform, kept, not skimmed and deleted.
None of this requires effort in bulk. It requires small captures made at the right moment — which is a workflow problem, and workflow problems are solvable with tools and habit.
What should you actually do next?
Start the log before you optimise anything else, because mileage is the deduction that cannot be reconstructed later and is usually the largest. Then get the receipts flowing into one place, note your apportionment methods once, and take the organised result to a professional who knows your jurisdiction — the drive-classification guide here covers the business-versus-commuting line that trips people up on the way. A tax adviser working from complete records costs the same as one working from a shoebox, and gets you a materially better answer.