The IRS Changed the 2026 Mileage Rate Mid-Year — Here's What It Means for Your Deduction

Mid-year changes to the IRS standard mileage rate are rare — the last time it happened was 2022, when fuel prices spiked. It happened again in 2026. If you've been using a single flat rate for the whole year, here's exactly what changed and what it means for your deduction.

Source: IRS, Standard Mileage Rates. Verified directly against irs.gov on October 3, 2026. This page is not tax advice.

The two rates

The IRS initially set the 2026 business rate at $0.725/mile — a modest 2.5-cent increase from 2025. Mid-year, it raised the rate again by 3.5 cents, to $0.76/mile, effective July 1. As of today (October 2026), the $0.76 rate is the one that applies.

What this means for your 2026 return

You can't apply one rate to the whole year. Trips taken January through June get $0.725/mile; trips taken July through December get $0.76/mile. If your mileage log doesn't separate the two periods, you'll need to split it before you file — which is a lot more tedious if your log is a spreadsheet than if it's trip-by-trip data a GPS system already timestamped.

A worked example

Say you drove 1,000 business miles a month, evenly, all year — 6,000 miles in the first half, 6,000 in the second:

• Jan–Jun: 6,000 mi × $0.725 = $4,350
• Jul–Dec: 6,000 mi × $0.76 = $4,560
• Total: $8,910 — not 12,000 × either single rate.

Using only the old $0.725 rate for the full year would understate this deduction by about $210— real money left on the table for no reason other than an outdated number.

How this is handled automatically

A trip-by-trip log that already has a date on every entry doesn't need manual splitting — each trip just gets the rate that was actually in effect on its date. That's the advantage of continuous GPS-based logging over a monthly or annual estimate: the rate boundary falls wherever it falls, and nothing has to be recalculated by hand.

For what counts as an adequate record in the first place, see our guide to IRS mileage logs. For how trips get recorded automatically as they happen, see how GPS fleet tracking works.