Does Uber Track Your Miles? What the Tax Summary Leaves Out

Yes, Uber tracks miles, but only part of your drive. Its Tax Summary reports "online miles": waiting, pickup, and on-trip driving combined into one number. Say that reads 9,000 miles for the year, but you actually drove 15,000 for Uber. The missing 6,000, mostly deadhead runs home and repositioning between fares, is worth roughly $4,455 in deductions at 2026's rates.

What does Uber's Tax Summary actually show?

Uber's own driver help center defines online miles as the total of three stages: miles driven while waiting for your next ride or delivery, miles driven to get to a pickup address, and on-trip miles while a rider or order is in the car. All three are bundled into one number on the first page of your Tax Summary, with a monthly breakdown further into the document. That's a real, useful figure. It's also Uber's own aggregate estimate, not a mile-by-mile log with dates and business purpose attached to each drive.

Does the online miles number cover everything you can deduct?

No. The IRS lets self-employed drivers deduct more than just the miles Uber counts as "online." The catch is that Uber's tracking only runs while the app shows you as online. The moment you go offline, tracking stops, even if you're still driving for business reasons.

• Miles between trips while you stay online (usually captured)
• Miles driving to a pickup (usually captured)
• Miles repositioning toward a busier area while offline (not captured)
• Deadhead miles driving home after your last drop-off of the day, once you've gone offline (not captured)

That last category is where drivers lose the most. If your shift ends 20 minutes from home and you log off before making the drive back, those miles are still deductible business mileage, they just never touch Uber's online-miles count.

How much does that gap actually cost you?

The 2026 IRS business mileage rate is 72.5 cents per mile for the first half of the year (January 1 through June 30) and 76 cents per mile from July 1 onward, a mid-year increase. Run the math on any stretch of uncounted miles and it adds up fast: 6,000 missed miles, split evenly across the year, works out to about $2,175 for the first half plus $2,280 for the second half, roughly $4,455 total. Multiply that by every driver who assumes Uber's number is the whole picture.

Can you just use Uber's Tax Summary when you file?

You can use it as a starting point, but not as your only record. If the IRS ever asks you to substantiate a mileage deduction on your Schedule C, it wants a contemporaneous log, meaning records you kept close to the time you drove, showing date, distance, and business purpose. A PDF Uber generates once a year, built from its own backend estimate of your online time, doesn't meet that bar on its own. One more thing worth remembering: your drive from home to the spot where you first go online each day is commuting, not deductible, no matter how you track it.

What if you drive for more than one app in a day?

Plenty of drivers switch between apps during a shift, or stay logged into more than one at once. Uber's Tax Summary only knows what happened inside Uber's app. If you go offline in Uber to accept a ride somewhere else, then log back into Uber later, the miles in between aren't part of your online-miles figure at all, even though you were driving for business the whole time. The more you multi-app, the bigger the gap between what Uber reports and what you actually drove for work.

What should you actually track?

Some drivers keep a paper or spreadsheet odometer log, writing down start and end mileage for every online session and every deadhead drive home. It works, but it's easy to forget after a 10-hour shift, and a log built from memory a week later isn't contemporaneous by the IRS's own standard.

The simpler fix is to track your own miles automatically, from the second you go online to the second you get home, not just the trips Uber decides to count. That's the whole job TruMile does: it runs in the background, logs every online mile including the deadhead and repositioning stretches Uber leaves out, and hands you an IRS-ready log at tax time.

Stop relying on someone else's number for your own deduction. Download TruMile and log every deductible mile automatically, on-trip, between trips, and on the drive home. Try TruMile →

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