Travel Nurse Mileage Deduction Calculator (2026)

The 2026 Rates, And Why The Year Is Split

IRS posts one mileage rate each December for the year ahead. 2026 broke the pattern: the announcement for January through June set the business rate at 72.5 cents (IR-2025-128, Notice 2026-10), and a second release covering July 1 to December 31 moved it to 76 cents (IR-2026-29). The 2025 rate was 70 cents.

Purpose	Jan 1 to Jun 30, 2026	Jul 1 to Dec 31, 2026
Business or self-employment	72.5 cents	76 cents
Medical, or moving for the Armed Forces	20.5 cents	23.5 cents
Charitable volunteer driving	14 cents	14 cents

What that means for a travel nurse in practice: split your mileage log at June 30. If you drove 180 miles a week from February through September, the spring miles are worth 72.5 cents and the autumn miles 76. Mixing them up costs you real money on the spring half and invites questions on the audit of the summer half.

Which Drives Actually Count

This is where travel nurses lose the deduction, and it is not about the rate. The IRS distinguishes between commuting, which is never deductible, and travel away from your tax home, which is. Your tax home is the general area where you normally work and maintain a residence, not the city you are contracted into.

Drive	Deductible?	Why
Tax home to the assignment hospital, on the way up	Yes if the assignment is temporary	You are away from your tax home substantially longer than an ordinary workday
Assignment hospital back to tax home on rotation days off	Yes, same reasoning	Still travel between tax home and temporary work
Rented apartment to the hospital, every shift	No	That is commuting between your residence and your regular work site
Assignment city to a credentialing course or another facility for work	Yes	Travel between work locations during the day, not home to work
Tax home to assignment when you have no tax home	No	With no tax home, the assignment city becomes your tax home and every drive is commuting
Driving to the grocery, the gym, or sightseeing on a day off	No	Personal, whatever the app says about “business miles”

The fifth row is the expensive one. It is the same three-part test that decides whether your per diem survives: the travel nurse tax home rules cover it, and is per diem taxable? applies the same logic. Lose the tax home and you lose the mileage too, in the same stroke.

One more trap specific to travel work: an assignment that is indefinite in duration stops being temporary, and the IRS then treats the assignment city as a new tax home. The usual benchmark is one year: past roughly 12 months in the same area, the travel deduction for that area shuts off.

Worked Example: One 13-Week Contract

A 1099 nurse keeps a log showing 180 deductible miles a week (tax home in Boise to a hospital two hours away, plus the trip home every other rotation) across 13 weeks starting in July. All of it falls in the second-half window at 76.0c.

Line	Amount
Deductible miles (180 times 13)	2,340
Mileage deduction at 76 cents	$1,778.40
Federal income tax not paid, at 22%	$391.25
State income tax not paid, at 5%	$88.92
Self-employment tax not paid, at 15.3%	$272.10
Total tax value	$752.26
Tax value per mile driven	32.1 cents

The $1,778.40 deduction is not $1,778.40 of cash. It is worth about $752.26 (roughly 32.1 cents of every mile) because a deduction reduces taxable income, it is not a credit. On the same contract at 12% federal and no state tax it would be worth closer to $486, and on a W-2 it is worth nothing at all.

If You Are W-2, This Is A Reimbursement Conversation

Mileage is a business expense. For a W-2 employee it used to be an unreimbursed miscellaneous deduction; that deduction is suspended under current law, so on a normal W-2 travel contract the answer is $0. A full season of logs in a mileage app, and no line on the return to put them on.

What does work is an accountable plan: the agency pays you the IRS rate (or anything up to it) against your documented log, that money is tax-free to you, and it is deductible for them. So the ask is not “let me deduct my miles,” it is:

• Does the contract reimburse mileage, at what rate per mile?
• Is the reimbursement paid weekly or at contract end?
• What proof do they require: odometer photos, an app export, a start-and-end-address log?
• Does the agency’s rate move when the IRS rate moves on July 1, or is it frozen at contract signing?

If they pay 50 cents a mile and the IRS rate is 76, the 26.0c gap is a real pay cut disguised as policy. That is negotiable at renewal, not at the tax filing.

What To Keep In Writing

A deduction that cannot be documented gets removed on adjustment, and the interest runs from the original due date. Four things, kept as you drive rather than reconstructed in February:

1. Miles, not hours. Start and end address for each deductible trip, plus the odometer reading at the beginning and end of the assignment.
2. Purpose, in three words: “tax home to assignment,” “hospital to hospital,” “assignment to tax home.”
3. Date, so you can split the year at June 30 and price each half at its own rate.
4. Which miles were reimbursed, and at what rate. Reimbursed miles are not deductible, and reimbursement above the IRS rate is taxable income.

An app export is fine as a starting point; the IRS expects the log to be maintained close to the time of travel, so a weekly habit beats a year-end reconstruction.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I deduct driving from my car to the airport, and the flight itself?

The drive to the airport is deductible if the flight is for the temporary assignment away from your tax home. The airfare belongs with your travel expenses, not your mileage. Do not run the airport trip and the flight as two versions of one journey.

Do I have to use the standard mileage rate?

No. You can instead deduct actual costs (fuel, insurance, maintenance, depreciation) multiplied by the business share of your total miles. For a low-mileage, expensive car that can win; for most nurses it is more bookkeeping for a smaller number. Whichever you choose for a vehicle in the first year tends to bind you for later years.

What if my agency gave me a monthly car allowance?

An allowance paid without a requirement to account for expenses is taxable wages, and it does not block the deduction if you are 1099. If it is paid under an accountable plan with a log requirement, then it is tax-free and those miles are used up.

Is the mileage rate the same in every state?

The federal rate is national. Some states that levy income tax honor the same figure, several do not, and a few have their own rules. Check the state you file in, not the state you work in, if they differ. Multi-state filing explains which return gets which deduction.

Can I deduct miles to my permanent home town on a day off?

No. Personal trips are personal, even when the driving log calls them “travel.” Only the tax-home-to-work legs count.

Related Guides

• Travel nurse tax home rules: the IRS three-part test
• Is per diem taxable? The three tests
• 1099 vs W-2: which actually pays more
• Take-home pay calculator
• Housing stipend calculator, by city and month

Estimates for planning only, not personalized tax advice. Rates checked against the IRS standard mileage rate table on 28 July 2026 guidance; confirm current figures at irs.gov before filing.

Next step: Miles are one line of the package, not the whole picture. This free budget spreadsheet puts the rest on one page: taxable pay, tax-free stipend, estimated tax and monthly take-home.

Sources we checked

Every figure on this page came from one of the documents below, not from another blog. Links checked 10 October 2026.

• IRS Topic No. 511 - Business travel expenses: The rule that an employee's unreimbursed travel and mileage is not deductible, which is why the answer for a W-2 contract is zero.
• Internal Revenue Bulletin 2026-29, Announcement 2026-11: The mid-year notice that raised the 2026 business mileage rate to 76 cents from 1 July 2026.
• IRS news release setting the 2026 business mileage rate: The announcement that split 2026 into two mileage rates mid-year.
• IRS standard mileage rates, by year: The 2026 business rate of 72.5 cents a mile to 30 June and 76.0 cents from 1 July, and every prior-year rate the tables compare against.
• IRS Publication 463 - Travel, Gift, and Car Expenses: The tax-home definition, the temporary-versus-indefinite assignment test and the one-year rule every per-diem answer on this page rests on.