Classify drives

Every new drive waits at the top of the Drives list. Swipe right for business and left for personal. Rules and shift mode handle the drives you make every day so the list stays short.

Purposes

A drive has one purpose. The purposes match the ways the IRS and the CRA treat driving.

Business. Deductible or reimbursable driving. Add a business-purpose note, such as the client name, when the purpose is not obvious from the destination.
Commute. Home to your regular place of work and back. Never deductible, and kept separately because Schedule C asks for commuting miles on its own line.
Personal. Everything else.
Medical, charitable, moving. The other three standard rates. Medical and moving drives are 20.5 cents a mile in 2026 and charitable drives are 14 cents.

The purposes and the commuting rules are the same for Canada, where home to a regular place of work is also personal driving.

Swipe

Swipe right on a drive for business, left for personal. Swipe a little further, or tap and hold, for the other purposes. Select several drives to classify them together. Undo is one tap.

Rules

A rule classifies a drive as soon as it ends, so it never reaches the unclassified list.

Places. A drive to or from Sunset Dental is business. A drive between Home and Work is commute. See places.
Work hours. Drives between 9 and 5 on weekdays are business. Drives after 10 p.m. are personal.
Tags. Drives during a shift are tagged with the platform name, such as DoorDash, and the tag carries into the export.
Vehicle. Every drive in the work van is business.

Rules run in order, and the first one that matches wins. A drive classified by a rule shows the rule that classified it, and you can override the result by swiping.

Shift mode

Delivery and rideshare work is a run of short drives with short stops. Classifying each one is tedious, and Publication 463 does not require it. Chapter 5 allows a route of deliveries that begins and ends at the same place to be accounted for with a single record of the miles driven.

Tap Start shift when you go online and End shift when you go offline, from the app, the Live Activity, Control Center, or a Shortcut. Every drive between the two is business, tagged with the platform you chose, and the drives are combined into one record of the shift with its start time, end time, first and last stop, and total distance. The individual drives stay in the log underneath it, so nothing is lost.

Review note. Whether the drive from home to the first pickup and from the last drop-off home belong to the shift is a product decision, and the tax answer depends on whether your home is your principal place of business. See mileage for DoorDash and Uber drivers.

Places

Places are the addresses that come up again and again. Miles suggests them from your history, and you name them.

Home. The place you live. Drives that begin and end here are what the commuting rules look at.
Work. Your regular place of work, if you have one. Home to Work is a commute.
Home office. A toggle on Home. When your home is your principal place of business, Publication 463 treats drives from home to another work location as business, and Miles classifies them that way.
Temporary work location. A job expected to last a year or less. Drives from Home to a temporary location are business, even when you also have a regular workplace. Miles notes the start date and reminds you when the year is up.
Client and customer places. Any place you name. Drives to or from it are business.

Timely records

Publication 463 says a record kept at or near the time of the drive has more value than one prepared later, and it treats a log kept weekly as timely. Miles records each drive as it happens and stamps the record with the time it was created. Once a week, it reminds you about drives that are still unclassified, so the business purpose is recorded while you remember it.

Video

This page's video shows places and rules end to end. The steps it records are written up in the places and rules video script.