Money

Tracking Mileage and Drive Time for Tax Deductions

Drive time between stops does two kinds of damage when it isn't tracked: it quietly eats into hours you could bill, and it's a tax deduction most solo operators under-claim simply because they never logged the miles in the first place.

The deduction is real, but only with a record

Business mileage — driving between job sites, to pick up supplies, to a client's property and back — is deductible for a self-employed lawn care operator, but the IRS expects a contemporaneous log, not an end-of-year estimate. "I probably drove about X miles" doesn't hold up if it's ever questioned; a GPS-based log with dates, stops, and distances does.

Separate site time from drive time

The same GPS data that tracks how long you're at a property, tracked correctly, also captures the miles and minutes between them. That single data source answers two completely different questions: is this job priced right (site time), and what's my actual deductible mileage (drive time) — without keeping two separate logs.

Why this also affects pricing

A client 20 minutes out of the way costs real money before the mower even starts — and that cost is invisible unless drive time is tracked separately from site time. Two clients who each take 30 minutes to mow aren't equally profitable if one is next door and the other is across town. Seeing drive time as its own number is what makes that visible.

What to hand your accountant

At tax time, a clean export — dates, stops, mileage, job revenue — turns a scramble through a shoebox of gas receipts into a five-minute handoff. That's real time saved on top of the deduction itself.

This is general information, not tax advice. Talk to a tax professional about what applies to your specific situation.

Read next: The best way to track your lawn care business (full guide) · How to figure out which jobs actually make you money