Guide
How to keep mileage records for a repair van
The deduction is not the rate. The deduction is the record, and the record is the only part you cannot go back and create.
The short answer
Write down four things for every business trip, at the time it happens: the date, where you went from and to, why, and how many miles. Everything else in this subject is downstream of having done that. A total assembled from memory months later is the version that falls apart under any kind of question.
Read your odometer on the first day of the year and the last, and write both numbers somewhere they will survive. Those two readings frame everything else, and they are the easiest thing in the world to forget until the moment somebody wants them.
Keep the same log whichever method you eventually use. Both of the usual approaches, the standard mileage rate and claiming actual costs, rest on knowing how much of your driving was for work. The log is the common requirement, so start it now and decide the method later with somebody who does taxes for a living.
This page is not tax advice and states no rule. It tells you what to record and where the official numbers live, and it deliberately does not tell you which of your trips qualify, because that depends on your facts and on rules that are written down by the IRS rather than by anybody here.
The record is the part you cannot reconstruct
Everything else in this subject can be sorted out later. Which method to use, how to treat the vehicle you bought last year, what your accountant prefers: all of that can be worked through in one conversation next spring.
The mileage itself cannot. If you did not write down that you drove to a customer on a Tuesday in March, that trip is gone, and no amount of good intentions in April will bring back the detail that would have made it defensible.
This is why the advice here is deliberately narrow. Do the boring part now, keep it up, and you will have options later. Skip it and the only options left are the bad ones.
Two methods, in plain terms
The first approach is to multiply your business miles by a rate the IRS publishes. It is the simpler one to operate because it needs the miles and not much else, and the rate is intended to stand in for the running costs of the vehicle.
The second is to track what the vehicle actually costs to run and claim the business share of that: fuel, insurance, repairs, tires and the rest, with the share worked out from your mileage. It takes more record keeping and it can suit a vehicle that is expensive to run.
There are rules attached to choosing between them, to switching later, and to vehicles that have already been depreciated or that are leased. This page states none of them, because they are conditions rather than opinions and getting one wrong is expensive. Publication 463, Travel, Gift, and Car Expenses is where the IRS sets out what is deductible and what records are expected, and a tax professional is who should apply it to your van.
What both methods share is the mileage log, which is the reason the log is the recommendation on this page and the method choice is not.
Why a van is a harder case than a commute
Somebody who drives to one office has a simple driving pattern. A mobile mechanic has the opposite: several customers a day at addresses that change, parts runs squeezed between them, a supplier trip on the way home, and a vehicle that may also collect the groceries.
That pattern is exactly the one that is hard to reconstruct and easy to record. Hard to reconstruct because no two days look alike and there is nothing to jog your memory from. Easy to record because every one of those trips already has a reason attached to it, and usually an address in your own job list.
It also means the mixed trip is normal rather than exceptional for you, which is why the purpose field in the log matters as much as the mileage figure.
Where the rate comes from, and why this page will not remember it for you
The standard mileage rate is one of the few numbers in this whole cluster with a real primary source, so here it is with the source attached, and here is the reason to check it yourself anyway.
Read on 29 August 2026 at https://www.irs.gov/tax-professionals/standard-mileage-rates, a page the IRS marks as last updated 28-Jul-2026, the entry for the 2026 tax year reads: "Self-employed and business: 76 cents/mile". That figure is the one that applies from the first of July 2026. The same table gives 72.5 cents a mile for business use for the earlier part of the same tax year.
The split inside one year is not a typo. Announcement 2026-11, printed in Internal Revenue Bulletin 2026-29 at https://www.irs.gov/irb/2026-29_irb, states: "The revised standard mileage rates set forth in this announcement apply to deductible transportation expenses paid or incurred for business, medical, or moving expense purposes on or after July 1, 2026."
Two things follow from that, and they are the reason this section exists. The first is that the rate is set per tax year and can be revised in the middle of one, so which figure applies to a given trip depends on when you drove it. The second is that any page telling you a rate without telling you the year and the date it was checked is telling you something that may already be out of date, and this page is included in that warning: by the time you read it, a newer figure may be published.
So treat the two links above as the destination rather than the answer. It takes a minute to open the IRS page and read the current line, and it is the difference between a number you can point at and a number you half remember.
One consequence for your log: if the rate can change mid year, your record needs dates on it and not only a total. A single annual mileage figure cannot be split across two rates. A log with dates can.
What a log kept as you go actually looks like in a van
The theory is a table with four columns. The practice is that you are covered in oil, it is raining, and the notebook is under a toolbox. So the only log that survives contact with the job is one that takes seconds and happens at a fixed moment.
Pick the moment first. The two that work are getting in the vehicle and getting out of it. Anything that has to happen later, at the kitchen table, in front of a laptop, is the version that lasts a fortnight.
A phone note works. A dictated voice note works. An app that records the trip works. A pad clipped to the dash and a pen that lives in the vehicle works, and has the advantage of not depending on a battery. The best one is whichever you will actually do at that fixed moment, not the most sophisticated.
Whatever you use, capture the same four fields every time: the date, the two ends of the trip, the purpose in three or four words, and the miles. The purpose is the field people drop first and the one that makes the entry meaningful later, because "customer, brake job" and "collected parts" tell a story that "22 miles" does not.
Reconcile once a week against your own job records while the week is still fresh. Your jobs already carry the date, the address and the customer name, so the reconciliation is fast, and it catches the trips you forgot to log rather than trying to remember them in March.
Then get the record off the device it lives on. A phone that dies with a year of untransferred entries in it is a real way to lose the whole thing, so copy or export it somewhere else monthly, or take a photograph of the pad. A record that exists in exactly one place is one accident from not existing.
And keep it for as long as your tax professional tells you to, which is a question for them. The log is the evidence, so its useful life is longer than the tax year it belongs to.
The trips people forget, and the ones they are not sure about
Two different problems get mixed together here. One is trips you simply never wrote down. The other is trips you wrote down but do not know how to classify. The first is yours to fix. The second is not something a web page can answer for you, and this one will not try.
The forgotten ones are predictable. The parts store run in the middle of a job. The second trip back to the same customer because a component was wrong. The drive to a supplier while you were already out. Dropping waste oil somewhere that takes it. Going to look at a car to quote it, with no invoice ever raised. The trip to the bank, the accountant, or a training course. None of those feel like a job, and each of them is a trip with a business reason attached.
The uncertain ones are where people invent rules. Whether the first drive of the day counts, whether it matters that your home is where the business operates from, how a trip that mixes an errand with a customer visit is treated: all of that turns on definitions the IRS sets out, and on the specific facts of how and where you work. Publication 463 is where those definitions live, and a tax professional is who should apply them to your situation. This page does not state any of them, and you should be suspicious of any page that does without saying which year it is describing.
What you can do, without knowing the answer, is record enough that the answer is available later. That means writing the purpose and both ends of the trip rather than only a number, and noting when a trip had two purposes. A log with that detail can be classified correctly by somebody qualified next spring. A log of bare totals cannot, and the missing detail is the part that turns into a guess.
Personal use deserves the same discipline for the same reason. If the van also does the school run, the personal miles are part of the picture, and a record that only ever counts the business trips is quietly asking somebody to take your word for the rest.
The rule of thumb that survives all of this: when in doubt, write the trip down with an honest description of why you made it, and let the classification be somebody qualified problem rather than a decision you made in a parking lot.
Where the short answer stops being the answer
Every rule on this page has a situation it does not survive. Here are the ones worth knowing about before you meet them.
The van is also the family vehicle
Log the personal trips too, or at least log the odometer often enough that the personal share can be worked out. A mixed use vehicle with only business trips recorded leaves the most important ratio in the whole calculation undocumented.
If the mixing is heavy and constant, that is worth raising with whoever prepares your return, because it affects which method makes sense as well as what the records need to show.
You run more than one vehicle
Keep a separate log per vehicle, including separate odometer readings at each end of the year. Merging two vehicles into one set of records makes the whole thing unusable and is very difficult to unpick afterwards.
Label each log with the vehicle it belongs to on every page or in every entry, because a photograph of a page of numbers with no vehicle on it helps nobody a year later.
The van is leased or was financed, or you already claimed depreciation on it
This is precisely where the method choice stops being a preference and starts being a set of conditions. There are rules about which method you may use and when you may switch, and they interact with how the vehicle was acquired and what has been claimed before.
Do not resolve this from a web page, including this one. Take the paperwork on the vehicle to a tax professional once and get an answer that fits your facts, then keep the same log either way while you wait for the appointment.
You have driven half a year with no records at all
Start today rather than waiting for a clean starting point, because the record from today forward is worth more than a perfect plan that begins in January.
For the months behind you, gather what genuinely exists: job records with dates and addresses, appointment history, receipts from suppliers, anything with a location and a date on it. Whether a reconstruction is acceptable, and in what form, is a question for a tax professional and not one this page can answer. Be honest with them about what is a record and what is an estimate.
When it has already gone wrong
Most people find a page like this after the fact rather than before it. This part is for them.
It is filing season and there is no log
Do not invent a plausible number. Assemble the evidence that does exist, tell whoever prepares your return exactly what you have and what you do not, and let them tell you what can be done with it.
Then set up the habit for the current year in the same week, while the discomfort is fresh. This is the single most common version of this problem, and the only reliable cure for it is starting the log on a day when nothing is at stake.
The app you were using lost your trips
Recover what you can from the phone backup, the email receipts, and any export you made. This is the argument for copying the record somewhere else every month rather than trusting one application with a year of history.
Whatever you recover, write down what happened and when, so the gap in the record has an explanation attached rather than looking like months in which you did no driving.
Your odometer readings and your logged miles do not agree
Some difference is normal, because a log of business trips is not supposed to equal every mile the vehicle covered. A large unexplained gap in the other direction, where logged business miles exceed the total the odometer moved, is a real problem and needs finding before anybody else finds it.
Check for double entered trips first, then for a vehicle mix up, then for a month where the odometer was written down wrongly. Correct the record and note the correction rather than quietly overwriting it.
Questions
What is the IRS standard mileage rate for a business vehicle?
Read on 29 August 2026 at https://www.irs.gov/tax-professionals/standard-mileage-rates, the IRS lists for the 2026 tax year "Self-employed and business: 76 cents/mile", applying from 1 July 2026, with 72.5 cents a mile for business use earlier in the same year. Rates are set per tax year and this one was revised mid year, so check that page for the year and dates you are claiming rather than relying on any figure quoted elsewhere, including this one.
Do I need a mileage log if I use the standard rate?
Both approaches rest on knowing how much of your driving was for business, so the log is the common ingredient rather than a feature of one method. What records the IRS expects is set out in Publication 463, Travel, Gift, and Car Expenses, and how it applies to you is a question for a tax professional. This page states no requirement.
Can I use an app instead of writing it down?
An app is fine and for most people it is easier to sustain, because it captures the trip without anybody remembering to. Two cautions: make sure it records the purpose and not only the distance, and copy the data out of it regularly, because a lost phone or a discontinued service should not take a year of records with it.
Do parts runs and supplier trips count?
They have a business purpose and they are exactly the trips people forget to record, so write them down with what they were for. Whether a particular trip qualifies is a question of definitions that live in Publication 463 and of your own facts, so record the detail now and let somebody qualified classify it.
Should I use the standard mileage rate or actual expenses?
This page does not advise either way. The trade is between simplicity and capturing what an expensive vehicle really costs, and the choice has conditions attached involving leasing, depreciation and switching between methods. Keep the same log while you decide, and ask a tax professional who can see your paperwork.