No. Rover tracks bookings, messages, and payouts. It does not track the driving you do to get to them. Rover's own sitter tax guide, prepared for Rover by Ernst & Young, tells sitters to determine business miles by reading the vehicle's odometer. That instruction only makes sense because the platform has no mileage number of its own to give you.
What does Rover actually give a sitter at tax time?
Rover gives you an earnings record and, if you cross the reporting threshold, a Form 1099-K with a summary of the fees withheld. Both documents describe payments. Neither describes driving. There is no mileage total, no trip list, and no odometer reading anywhere in your Rover dashboard, which means the single largest deduction available to most sitters is one you have to build yourself.
Which of your drives count as Rover business miles?
Rover's tax guide is unusually specific on this point. It describes business-use miles for a sitter as miles driven between your home and the owner's home, between owners' homes, or for other business purposes such as buying supplies for the animals in your care.
- The drive from your home to a walk, drop-in, or boarding pickup
- The drive from one client's house to the next when you have back-to-back bookings
- The drive to a pet store, vet, or supply run made for a client
- The drive to a dog park or trail when the booking calls for it
- The return drive home after your last booking of the day
The between-clients leg is the one sitters lose most often. It is unpaid, no client sees it, and nothing in the Rover app records it, but it is a deadhead mile in every sense and it is deductible.
How much driving does a normal Rover week actually involve?
Take a sitter running six drop-in visits a day at an average of 4 miles round trip. That is 24 miles a day. Five days a week across 50 weeks is 6,000 miles. At the 2026 rates (72.5 cents per mile through June 30, then 76 cents), those miles are worth about $4,455 in deductions. Your Rover earnings summary shows none of it. Once the tax year closes, miles you did not log at the time are difficult to substantiate if the IRS asks.
Boarding and house-sitting sitters often assume they drive less because the animal comes to them. Then they count the pickups, the drop-offs, the mid-stay supply runs, and the trips back to a client's house to water plants or collect mail, and the total is rarely small.
What mileage rate applies to 2026?
The IRS set the 2026 business standard mileage rate at 72.5 cents per mile from January 1 through June 30, then raised it to 76 cents per mile from July 1 through December 31. A year of Rover work spans both. Rover's own guide walks sitters through splitting the year into the two rate periods and applying each rate to the miles driven inside it. Using one blended figure for the whole year produces the wrong deduction.
What does the IRS want to see behind the number?
A contemporaneous log, which means a record made at or near the time you drove, showing the date, the miles, and the business purpose. A spreadsheet built in April from your Rover booking history is a reconstruction. It also tends to undercount, because your booking history records when a visit happened and holds no information about how far you drove to reach it.
How do you claim Rover miles on your taxes?
As an independent contractor you report Rover income and expenses on Schedule C, with vehicle expenses on line 9. Multiply your logged business miles by the rate in force when you drove them, add the two halves of the year together, and that total reduces the income you are taxed on before self-employment tax is calculated. The full walkthrough is in how to claim mileage on your taxes.
Sources: Rover, documentation on the taxation of business income for Rover sitters (prepared for Rover by Ernst & Young; business-use miles, odometer substantiation, standard mileage versus actual expenses). IRS, Internal Revenue Bulletin 2026-29 (76 cents per mile from July 1, 2026). IRS, Publication 463 (recordkeeping for car expenses). IRS, About Schedule C.
Rover does not record your driving. TruMile records every client drive automatically, splits the year at the July 1 rate change, and keeps the date, distance, and purpose the IRS asks for. Start tracking with TruMile →
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