Does Uber Eats Track Your Miles?

Not fully. Uber Eats' Tax Summary reports mileage for the time you're online in the app, but it's an estimate, not a turn-by-turn GPS log, and it skips real driving: the trip to the restaurant, minutes idling between orders, and repositioning to a busier zone. Miss just 10 miles a day and you're looking at roughly 2,600 miles a year, worth close to $1,900 in deductions you never claimed.

What does the Uber Eats Tax Summary actually show?

Log into Uber's driver tax hub and you'll find an annual Tax Summary with an online miles figure. That number is meant to cover every mile you drove while logged into the app and available for orders: waiting for a request, driving to the restaurant, and running the delivery itself. In theory that's a reasonable stand-in for business mileage. In practice it's a modeled estimate built from your trip data, not an actual recorded route, and Uber's own help center reminds drivers to double check it rather than file it blind.

What miles does it leave out?

Even when the online miles number is right, it was never built to capture everything you drive for the job. Three gaps show up over and over.

• Between-order driving while you go offline to reposition to a busier part of town or wait out a lull away from traffic
• The final leg home after you log off for the night, often called deadhead miles
• Short legs the app rounds down or drops entirely, especially on batched or multi-stop orders

One thing that isn't deductible either way: your commute from home to the spot where you first go online. The IRS treats that like any other commute, no matter what any app shows.

Is the mileage number even accurate?

Search a driver forum and you'll find couriers whose Uber Eats Tax Summary showed zero miles for the year, or a number far below what their own odometer logged. Uber's estimate is built from mapped distance between points, not the actual streets you drove, so detours, one-way streets, and reroutes routinely go missing. Tracking mileage accurately is the entire job of a mileage app, and it's the piece Uber Eats never fully solved.

How much is this actually costing you?

Run the math on a single missed leg. Say a courier drives 4 unlogged miles to the restaurant and 4 more repositioning between orders, on every one of the 20 days a month they work. That's 160 miles a month, or about 1,920 miles over a year. At 72.5 cents a mile for the first half of 2026 and 76 cents a mile from July 1 on, that gap is worth somewhere between $1,392 and $1,459 in deductions, gone because the Tax Summary never saw those miles.

What should you actually deduct?

Everything you drive for the business while you're trying to earn, not just the miles with food in the car. That includes driving to pick up an order, circling or repositioning between deliveries, driving to a different zone to find work, and the trip home once you're done for the day. The IRS calls that empty return trip deadhead miles, and it's deductible the same as any other business mile, even though nobody paid you to drive it.

How do you prove it if the IRS asks?

The Tax Summary alone won't hold up in an audit, and neither will a guess at year end. The IRS wants a contemporaneous log: date, starting and ending odometer or mileage, and the business purpose, recorded close to when you drove it. You can keep that by hand on a notepad in the glovebox, updating it every shift, but most drivers who try that for a full year end up with gaps from the days they forgot. TruMile logs the drive automatically in the background, so the record exists whether or not you remembered to write it down.

What about e-bikes and scooters?

Some Uber Eats couriers work by bike or scooter instead of a car. The standard mileage rate is a car and truck deduction, so bike and scooter delivery costs get claimed differently, through actual expenses rather than a per-mile rate. If you drive a car for Uber Eats, everything above applies to you directly.

How do you claim it on your taxes?

Uber Eats couriers are self-employed, so mileage gets claimed on Schedule C against your delivery income, not as an itemized employee expense. Our guide to claiming mileage on taxes walks through the form line by line, including what happens if you also drove for other delivery or rideshare apps in the same year.

Uber Eats will hand you a partial number every January. TruMile tracks every mile automatically, from the second you go online to the second you park at home, so nothing gets left off Schedule C. Start tracking with TruMile →

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