Tax season opened January 27th. Filing deadline is April 15th. And if you drove for Shipt last year without tracking your miles, you're about to either scramble or leave money on the table.
Probably both.
I'm not a tax professional and this isn't tax advice. But I've been doing my own Shipt taxes for a while now and this is what I've learned.
Your biggest deduction by far
Mileage is the single largest write-off most Shipt shoppers have. Not your phone bill, not your insulated bags. Miles.
The IRS rate for 2026 is 72.5 cents per mile. That covers gas, tires, oil changes, insurance, depreciation, all of it rolled into one number. You don't have to save receipts for each expense if you use the standard mileage deduction. You just need the miles.
Think about how much you actually drive. A typical day doing Shipt in a suburban metro, you're putting 50 to 90 miles on your car depending on how spread out your zone is. Five days a week, 50 weeks a year, that's somewhere around 12,500 to 22,500 miles. At 72.5 cents, that's $9,000 to $16,300 in deductions.
That's not a rounding error. That's your entire tax bill for a lot of shoppers.
What the IRS actually wants
People make this more complicated than it is. The IRS wants four things in a mileage log:
- Date of the trip
- Where you drove (destination or route)
- Business purpose
- Total miles
That's it. Write those down and you've got a compliant log. Skip any one of them and your deduction is technically unsupported. Most people never get audited. But if you do, "I drove a lot for Shipt" is not gonna hold up. The IRS wants contemporaneous records, meaning you wrote it down around the time it happened, not reconstructed from memory in March.
How many miles shoppers actually drive
I tracked mine obsessively for a while. Here's what a normal day looked like.
Morning run, three orders. Drive from home to Meijer, 6 miles. Shop the first order. Deliver, 8 miles to the customer's house. Drive back toward the store, 7 miles. Shop the second order. Deliver, 5 miles. Back again, 4 miles. Third order, deliver 11 miles out to a subdivision I try to avoid but the base pay was decent. Return trip, 11 miles back. That's 52 miles before lunch.
Afternoon, two more orders. Shorter runs, maybe 24 miles total including returns. Then the drive home, 6 miles.
82 miles. One day. At 72.5 cents that's $59.45 in deductible vehicle costs. I made about $140 in base pay and tips that day. Without the mileage deduction I'd owe taxes on all $140. With it, I only owe taxes on roughly $80. The difference in actual tax owed is real money, hundreds of dollars over a month.
Multiply across a year. It adds up fast.
The return trip problem
This is the one that gets people. You deliver groceries 9 miles from the store. You drive 9 miles back to pick up your next order. That's 18 miles total but a lot of shoppers only count the 9.
Shipt doesn't pay you for the return trip. They don't reimburse mileage at all, actually. But the IRS counts it. Every mile driven for business purposes is deductible, and driving back to your staging area to pick up the next order is business driving.
Same thing with driving between stores. You finish a Target DO and head to Meijer for your next order, 4 miles away. That's deductible. Whether your drive from home to the first store counts is a gray area that depends on your situation. Worth asking an accountant about.
I've seen shoppers who only tracked delivery miles, store to customer, and missed half their actual mileage. On 25,000 real miles, counting only 12,500 means leaving about $9,000 in deductions on the ground. At a 22% tax rate that's roughly $2,000 in extra taxes you didn't need to pay.
What shoppers actually do
Talked to enough shoppers to know there are basically three camps.
Some people use a mileage tracking app. Turn it on when you start your shift, turn it off when you're done. Everlance, Stride, MileIQ, whatever. They work. Most have a free tier that's limited and a paid version that isn't. Fifteen bucks a month for an app that saves you thousands sounds fine until you realize you forgot to turn it on three days this week and now you've got gaps.
Some people use a notebook. Old school, write down odometer readings, works perfectly for IRS purposes. Pain in the neck when you're juggling two orders and a customer texting about substitutions. The notebook ends up in the backseat under a grocery bag and you forget for four days.
And then there's the biggest camp. Nothing. No tracking at all. These shoppers either don't know they can deduct mileage, or they know and figure they'll "figure it out later." Later turns into tax season and they're staring at a blank Schedule C trying to remember how many miles they drove in June.
Common mistakes that cost you money
Not tracking return trips, like I said. That one's worth thousands.
Only tracking on "good" days. If you drove to the store and sat in the lot for an hour waiting for orders, those miles still count. You were available for business. The IRS doesn't care that you spent the time scrolling Reddit.
Forgetting about non-delivery driving. Drove to Walmart to buy insulated bags? Business miles. Went to the post office to mail something for your Shipt business? Business miles. Drove to a meetup with other shoppers to swap zone info? Probably business miles.
Mixing personal and business without noting it. You shop an order, deliver it, then swing by the grocery store for your own dinner on the way back. That personal stop breaks the business trip. You need to note where business ended and personal began. This is where apps that auto-track can actually mess you up, they'll record the whole thing as business unless you edit it.
And the big one: not tracking at all because you think the standard deduction covers it. The standard deduction and the mileage deduction are different things. You can take the standard deduction on your 1040 and still deduct mileage on your Schedule C. They're not in conflict. A lot of shoppers don't know this and it costs them a fortune.
If you haven't tracked anything yet
You've got until April 15th. If you haven't been tracking, start now. Going forward is easy, just pick a method and stick with it.
For 2025 miles you didn't track, you've got limited options. Some shoppers reconstruct from their Shipt order history, using delivery addresses and Google Maps to estimate distances. It's tedious and imperfect but better than zero. Bank statements showing gas purchases can support general mileage claims.
Not ideal. But some deduction beats no deduction, and a reasonable estimate with supporting records is better than the alternative, which is paying taxes on your full gross income like you had no expenses at all.
Start tracking today. Whatever method you pick, the one you'll actually use every day is the right one.
Auto Tip Map is an Android app for Shipt shoppers that tracks your orders, tips, mileage, earnings stats, and estimated fuel costs.