The 2026 IRS mileage rate changed on July 1 — what that does to your deduction

Published 29 September 2026 · Figures read off irs.gov the same day

The IRS raised the business standard mileage rate in the middle of 2026. If you apply one rate to the whole year — the way almost every mileage template does — every mile you drove after 1 July is priced too low.

The two rates

Both halves are published by the IRS itself. The first-half figure comes from IR-2025-128; the second-half figure from the Internal Revenue Bulletin 2026-29. Links are at the bottom of this page — check them rather than taking our word for it.

The charity rate did not move, and it never does on its own: it is fixed by statute, not by the IRS, which is why it has sat at 14¢ since 2011.

What it costs you to get this wrong

Take someone who drove 10,000 business miles in 2026, spread evenly across the year.

A difference of $175 of deduction on 10,000 miles. At 20,000 miles it is $350, at 30,000 miles $525. That is deduction, not tax — what you actually keep depends on your bracket and your self-employment tax. But it is money left on the table for no reason other than a spreadsheet that was built for a year with one rate.

Why most templates get it wrong

A mid-year change is unusual. It has happened twice in fifteen years — in 2011 and again in 2022, both times because fuel prices moved sharply — and templates written in any ordinary year have one rate cell, because one rate is all any ordinary year needs.

The failure is quiet. Nothing errors. The total at the bottom looks like a total. You find out, if you find out at all, when someone who reads returns for a living notices the number is round in a way it shouldn't be.

What to actually do

• Tag every trip with its half of the year, not just its date. Then the rate follows the trip instead of the file.
• Check any trip dated near 30 June or 1 July twice. That is where a mislabelled trip costs you the difference and where an audit would look first.
• Keep both rates in editable cells. They have moved mid-year before and they will again. A file with the rate hard-coded into the formula is a file you throw away next year.
• Don't reconstruct the year from memory in April. The IRS expects a contemporaneous record — written down at or near the time of the trip.

One more thing nobody mentions

The medical and military-moving rate also changed, from 20.5¢ to 23.5¢ — a bigger proportional jump than the business rate. Coverage of the July change focused almost entirely on the business figure, so if you deduct medical mileage, that one is easy to miss.

Sources

IRS, Standard mileage rates — irs.gov/tax-professionals/standard-mileage-rates
Internal Revenue Bulletin 2026-29 — irs.gov/irb/2026-29_irb
IR-2025-128, the first-half 2026 rate — irs.gov/newsroom