Mileage · Updated August 2026
The IRS raised the business standard mileage rate mid-year. If you drive to patients, your 2026 log now has two rates in it, and most tools are still showing one.
January 1 – June 30, 2026: 72.5¢ per mile.
July 1 – December 31, 2026: 76¢ per mile.
The IRS announced the increase on July 13, 2026, pointing at fuel prices. It applies to gasoline, diesel, hybrid and electric vehicles alike. The medical/moving rate moved too, from 20.5¢ to 23.5¢.
Mid-year changes are unusual — the rate normally gets set once, in December, and holds for twelve months. That's exactly why this one is easy to miss. Every spreadsheet template, every half-remembered figure, and a fair number of mileage apps are still multiplying the whole year by one number.
Take a fairly ordinary home-health year: 800 business miles a month, 9,600 for the year.
So the flat-rate versions are off by roughly $170 in one direction or the other. Not catastrophic. But it's a number you're putting your name to, it's wrong on its face, and it's wrong for a reason that takes about a minute to fix.
You don't need to reconstruct anything. You need your miles broken into two buckets:
If you already keep a log with dates on it — and this is the argument for keeping one with dates on it — the split is a sort and two sums. If your record is a single annual figure with no dates behind it, you have a bigger problem than the rate change, and it's worth reading what a defensible log actually contains.
If your log lives in a spreadsheet: don't overwrite the rate cell. Add a rate column, fill it per row from the date, and let the deduction column multiply row by row. Overwriting one rate for the whole sheet silently re-prices January.
Two different things get confused here, constantly:
Which is exactly why the log is worth keeping even when you're a W-2 employee and can't deduct the miles: it's the only way to see the gap between what you actually drove and what you were actually paid for driving. That gap is a real number, and most clinicians have never put a figure on it.
If you're self-employed, an agency reimbursement below the standard rate generally doesn't create a separate deduction for the shortfall — you're deducting your business miles, and the reimbursement is income handled its own way. This is a genuinely fiddly area and the answer depends on how you're paid. Worth one conversation with a preparer, once. Nothing on this page is tax advice.
VisitWell stores the published rate for every period — including this mid-year change — and prices each day at the rate that was in force on that day. Your year total is already split correctly; there's nothing to set. The mileage CSV you'd hand a preparer carries a rate column per row, so a year that straddles July 1 shows its work rather than asking anyone to take a single figure on faith.
If your agency reimburses at its own rate, you can type that in instead, and it applies to every date. The screen tells you which of the two you're on and lets you switch back in one tap.
Open VisitWell — free during early accessNo signup. Tap "Explore with sample data" to see a full working month before entering anything.