Does Grubhub Track Your Mileage?

No. Grubhub shows you a distance estimate on each delivery offer, but it doesn't keep a running mileage log and it puts nothing on your 1099. Miss just 20 miles a week of driving between orders and that's over 1,000 miles a year, worth about $772 in deductions at 2026's IRS rates (72.5 cents through June 30, then 76 cents the rest of the year). You have to track the rest yourself.

What does Grubhub actually show you?

Open the Grubhub for Drivers app and you'll see an estimated distance on each delivery offer before you accept it. That number covers the trip from the restaurant to the customer, and sometimes a short leg from your current spot to the restaurant. It's an estimate built for the offer screen, not a GPS-measured record, and it disappears once the order is marked complete. Grubhub doesn't total these up anywhere in the app. Check your driver portal at tax time and you won't find a mileage summary sitting next to your 1099-NEC. The earnings get reported to the IRS. The miles do not.

That gap matters more than it looks like on the surface. A lot of drivers assume that because Grubhub shows a number on the offer screen, the company must be keeping track somewhere behind the scenes. It isn't. Support reps have confirmed there's no mileage export, no year-end summary, and no way to pull a full log of your driving from the app. Whatever the offer screen shows you in the moment is the only number that ever existed.

What miles is Grubhub missing?

• Miles driven between orders while you're online and waiting for the next offer
• The drive to the restaurant before you even pick up the order, when that leg isn't folded into the offer estimate
• Repositioning to a busier zone when your current spot goes quiet
• Deadhead miles driving home after your last delivery of the night

Grubhub's per-offer number only ever covers the delivery itself. Everything else on this list is real driving, on the clock in the eyes of the IRS, and completely invisible to the app. Stack a full shift of these gaps together and the missing total adds up fast, especially on slow nights when you're circling a dead zone waiting for an offer that never comes.

Why does the missing mileage cost real money?

The IRS lets self-employed drivers deduct a set rate per business mile instead of tracking actual gas and repair receipts. For 2026 that rate is 72.5 cents per mile from January 1 through June 30, then it rises to 76 cents per mile from July 1 onward. Every mile you fail to log is a deduction you fail to claim, and that shows up as a bigger tax bill in April.

A driver who logs only Grubhub's restaurant-to-customer miles and skips everything else can easily undercount their year by 2,000 to 3,000 miles. At a blended 2026 rate, that's over $1,500 handed back to the IRS for driving that already happened. Multiply that across a full year of shifts and the number gets harder to ignore. This is money you already earned the right to deduct. The only thing standing between you and it is a log.

What can a Grubhub driver actually deduct?

• Miles driven while online and available for orders, even between deliveries
• The drive from wherever you were to the restaurant for pickup
• Repositioning drives to a different area to find more orders
• The deadhead miles back home once you log off for the night

Your commute from home to the spot where you first go online is not deductible. That's ordinary commuting, the same rule that applies to any job. Once you're online and available for orders, the miles start counting as business use. Self-employed drivers report this on Schedule C, where your total business miles convert into a deduction against your Grubhub earnings before your tax bill is calculated. See how to claim mileage on your taxes for the full walkthrough, including what happens if you also drive for other delivery or rideshare apps in the same shift.

How do you log the miles Grubhub won't?

The IRS wants a contemporaneous log, meaning you record trips as they happen, not reconstructed from memory in March. The manual version is a notebook and your odometer: write the start and end reading for every online period, plus the date and the business purpose of the trip. It's a legitimate method and it holds up if you're ever asked to show your work.

It's also easy to let slip. Ten hours into a shift, bouncing between three delivery apps and a dozen dead zones, nobody wants to pull over and jot down an odometer reading. That's usually where the log falls apart, and where the deduction quietly disappears with it.

TruMile runs in the background and logs every mile automatically, so nothing between offers, restaurants, or drives home gets left off your Schedule C. Start tracking free with TruMile →

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