Does Shipt Track Your Miles?

Does Shipt track your miles? No. Shipt gives shoppers no mileage log, no trip total, no tax-ready figure anywhere in the app. Drive 100 unlogged miles a week between stores and customers and you are missing about $3,860 a year in deductions at the 2026 IRS rate: 72.5 cents through June, 76 cents after. That gap is yours to close.

Does Shipt track your miles?

Shipt classifies shoppers as independent contractors, not employees. The shopper app shows your order pay, tips, and ratings. It does not show a running mileage total, a per-order distance, or anything you could hand to the IRS. Even the year-end tax summary Shipt sends is built around earnings, not miles. Whatever mileage record you need at tax time, Shipt is not building it for you.

What does Shipt actually pay you for?

Shipt pays per order, plus tips, not per mile. That pay model rewards finishing batches, not logging drive time, so there is no built-in reason for the app to track distance. The upside for Shipt is a simple pay structure. The downside for you is that every mile you drive to earn that pay has to be recorded on your own, or it does not exist at tax time.

What miles can you actually deduct?

• Store to customer, on every delivery
• Between orders while you are on an active shop or batch
• The drive from home to the first store of your shift
• Repositioning between stores or zones while waiting on the next order

What does not count: your ordinary commute. If you are driving from home to your first stop with no active order and no intent to shop yet, the IRS treats that like any other commute, not a business mile. The line the IRS draws is intent and activity, not whether you are technically logged into the app.

What is the 2026 IRS mileage rate?

The IRS standard mileage rate is 72.5 cents per mile from January 1 through June 30, 2026, then 76 cents per mile from July 1 through the end of the year. That is a mid-year change, not a typo, and it means your log needs a split: miles driven in the first half of the year get valued differently than miles driven in the second half. A shopper who drives 5,200 business miles evenly across the year would deduct roughly $1,885 at the first-half rate and about $1,976 at the second-half rate, close to $3,860 total. Source: IRS.gov.

Which miles do shoppers miss most?

The store-to-customer leg is easy to remember because it is the job. The miles that go missing are the ones around it: driving to the store before you have an order, circling a lot for a spot, repositioning to a busier area between batches, and the stretch home after your last delivery when you are technically still working the app. Gig platforms generate a lot of unpaid driving like this, sometimes called deadhead miles, and it is exactly the kind of mile shoppers forget to log because it never shows up as a paid trip.

Where does the deduction actually go on your taxes?

Self-employed shoppers report Shipt income and expenses on Schedule C, and mileage is one of the largest deductions available there. The IRS does not just want a final number. It wants a contemporaneous log, meaning notes taken at or near the time of the trip, not a total reconstructed from memory months later. A log built after the fact, or one that only has a year-end guess, is the kind of thing that falls apart in an audit.

How do you track miles Shipt will not?

You have two real options. One is a manual odometer log: write down start and end mileage for every store run, shift, and reposition, by hand, every time. It works, but most shoppers who try the notebook method for a full year stop somewhere around week six, and the gaps are exactly where the deduction leaks out.

The other option is to let your phone do it. TruMile runs in the background, logs each drive automatically, and separates store runs, customer drops, and repositioning miles so you are not guessing which trips count. It builds the kind of record the IRS actually wants to see, without you doing math in a parking lot. For the full walkthrough on turning a mileage log into an actual deduction on your return, see how to claim mileage on taxes.

Don't let Shipt's blind spot cost you the deduction. Log every store run, every between-order mile, and every reposition automatically with TruMile →

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