Does Walmart Spark Track Your Mileage?

No. The Spark Driver app doesn't track your mileage or hand you a tax-ready total. It shows your per-order pay and sometimes a delivery distance estimate, not your full driving day. Say you log 900 miles a month running Spark orders, but Walmart's own numbers only reflect 750 of them. The missing 150 miles, deadhead, store runs, repositioning, are worth about $114 a month at the current 76 cent rate. That's roughly $1,370 a year you could be leaving off your Schedule C.

What does the Spark Driver app actually show you?

Open the app and you'll see your order queue, your per-trip pay, and sometimes a distance estimate for the delivery you're on. What you won't find is a running mileage total, a monthly summary, or anything you can hand to a tax preparer. Spark is built to route orders and process pay. It was never built to log miles for the IRS.

Does Walmart send you anything for taxes?

If you earned enough on the platform, Walmart sends a 1099-NEC that reports your income. That's it. The 1099 shows what Spark paid you, not what it cost you to earn it. Mileage, gas, your phone bill, none of your deductible expenses show up on that form. Building that side of the return is on you.

Which miles is Spark not counting?

• The drive from home to the store before you accept your first order
• Miles logged while you're active and waiting between orders
• Store-to-customer miles on multi-stop shop-and-deliver routes
• Repositioning drives to a busier zone when orders slow down
• The deadhead miles you drive home after your last drop-off

Every one of those is deductible business driving under IRS rules, as long as you were logged into the app and available for work. Spark's screen shows you the distance for the order you're on. It says nothing about the miles on either side of it. Learn more about what counts as deadhead miles and why they're deductible even without a passenger or order attached.

How much does that gap actually cost you?

Do the math on your own week. A Spark driver running 20 shop-and-deliver orders might rack up 30 miles a day that never show up in the app: driving to the store, circling for parking, repositioning between zones. At 5 driving days a week, that's 150 miles a month gone missing. For the first half of 2026 that's worth $108.75 at 72.5 cents a mile. From July 1 onward it's worth $114 at the new 76 cent rate. Miss it every month and you're looking at over $1,300 in real deductions you never claimed.

Can I just use the distance shown for each order?

Not on its own. The per-order distance in Spark only covers the store-to-customer leg of a delivery you already accepted. It skips the drive to the store, any circling to find parking, and anything you drove while waiting for your next assignment. Add those order-level numbers up at the end of the month and you'll still be short of what you actually drove. An audit-ready log needs every mile you drove for work, not just the segment Spark chose to display.

What should Spark drivers do instead?

You have two real options. Keep a manual odometer log, writing down start and end mileage for every driving block, every day, by hand. It works, but most drivers stop doing it by week three. Or let an app capture the drive automatically, from the second you leave home to the second you're back, so nothing between orders gets dropped. Either way, the IRS wants a contemporaneous log, records made close to the time of the drive, not miles you tried to reconstruct in April.

How does the IRS mileage rate work in 2026?

The standard mileage rate isn't flat this year. It's 72.5 cents per mile from January 1 through June 30, 2026, then 76 cents per mile from July 1, 2026 onward. If you drove Spark routes across both halves of the year, you need your mileage split by date to claim the right rate for each mile. A single flat number for the full year will shortchange the miles you drove after July 1. For the full walkthrough of claiming this on your return, see our guide to claiming mileage on your taxes.

Spark shows you the order. It doesn't show you the drive. TruMile tracks every mile automatically, from the moment you leave home to the moment you're back, so the between-order miles and the store runs don't disappear before tax time. Try TruMile free →

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