Mileage Tax Deduction — US, UK, Australia, Canada (2025 Rates)
If you drive for work — gig delivery, sales, real estate, contracting, mobile services — the per-mile or per-kilometre tax deduction is one of the easiest tax breaks you can claim. The catch is it requires a log. Most people lose hundreds or thousands of dollars a year because they don't keep one and can't reconstruct the year at filing time.
Every developed country's tax authority publishes a standard rate. The headline numbers below are 2025 rates. The methods and caveats differ, so the right approach depends on where you file.
United States — IRS Standard Mileage Rate
For 2025, the IRS rate is 70 cents per mile for business driving. Medical and moving (now military-only) is 21¢/mile. Charity is 14¢/mile — that one's set by Congress, not the IRS, and hasn't moved in over a decade.
The IRS gives you two options:
- Standard mileage rate — multiply business miles by the published rate. Simple, no receipts needed beyond the mileage log.
- Actual expenses — sum gas, insurance, repairs, depreciation, registration, multiplied by the percentage of business use. More accurate for high-cost vehicles, but requires keeping every receipt.
Most filers use the standard rate. You have to choose between methods in the first year you use a vehicle for business; switching later has rules. The log itself needs to show date, destination, business purpose, and miles.
United Kingdom — HMRC AMAP
The UK uses Approved Mileage Allowance Payments (AMAP), banded:
- 45p per mile for the first 10,000 business miles in a tax year
- 25p per mile after that
- 24p flat for motorcycles, 20p flat for bicycles
These rates haven't changed since 2011. The UK tax year runs 6 April → 5 April, so the 10,000-mile threshold resets in April. AMAP is what employers reimburse you tax-free; if your employer pays less, you can claim the difference on your self-assessment.
Australia — ATO cents-per-km
The ATO has two methods. The simpler one is "cents per kilometre":
- 88 cents per kilometre for the 2024-25 and 2025-26 income years
- Maximum 5,000 business km per car per income year via this method
That cap is the catch. If you drive more than 5,000 business km in a year, the cents-per-km method can only claim the first 5,000. For anything above, you have to switch to the logbook method — track actual percentages of business use × actual costs (fuel, insurance, registration, depreciation, repairs).
The Australian tax year is 1 July → 30 June. The 88¢ rate is roughly inflation-adjusted from year to year — it was 78¢ in 2022-23, 85¢ in 2023-24.
Canada — CRA Reasonable Allowance
The CRA per-kilometre allowance for 2024 is 70¢/km for the first 5,000 business km, 64¢/km after. (For 2025, 72¢ first / 66¢ after as of the latest CRA tables.) Northwest Territories, Yukon, and Nunavut get a +4¢/km supplement for both bands.
The threshold resets each calendar year. CRA also lets you choose between standard rate and actual-expense methods, with similar tradeoffs to the US.
A multi-region log that does the math right
Buncha's Mileage Log + Fuel Tracker supports all four regions. The region picker sets the distance unit (mi vs km), volume unit (gal vs L), currency, and rate authority defaults. Banded rates work properly: trips that straddle the UK 10,000-mile threshold or the CA 5,000-km threshold blend the two rates pro-rata. The Australian 5,000-km cap shows a live warning chip when you're approaching it.
Save repeat routes (home → office, office → Client A) for one-tap logging. The year-to-date dashboard shows running totals and a stacked monthly bar chart. CSV and printable PDF export at year-end. All on-device — no GPS, no maps API, no cloud sync.
Tips for keeping a log that survives an audit
The standard advice from every tax authority:
- Log at the time, not later. Reconstructing trips from memory is the #1 reason audits go badly. The Buncha mileage tool's saved-routes feature exists for this — one tap and it's logged.
- Include the purpose. "Client A meeting" is fine; "business" alone is too vague.
- Note the odometer at year-start and year-end. Especially for the actual-expense method, the total business / total annual ratio is the multiplier on every expense.
- Keep receipts for the things you can't put on a per-mile basis — tolls, parking, ferries. These are deductible separately.