Tax deductions for Uber and Lyft driving are narrower than most drivers assume. There's no broad "business expense" catch-all here. What follows is a specific list of what actually qualifies, what doesn't, and how to handle the two categories that trip people up: cell phone costs and loan interest. This is general information, not tax advice specific to your situation. Confirm your own numbers with a tax professional before you file.
What's not deductible
Start here, because it's the most common mistake: meals, snacks, and drinks you buy for yourself while driving are not deductible. It doesn't matter that you're on the road for work. The IRS treats your own food and drink as a personal expense, full stop.
What is deductible
- Mileage, at the federal standard mileage rate, for the miles you actually drive for rideshare
- Platform fees charged to you by Uber and Lyft
- Snacks and refreshments you buy for passengers (this is the mirror image of the rule above: it's deductible when it's for them, not for you)
- Cell phone costs, allocated (see below)
- Tolls incurred while driving
- Parking or airport fees incurred while driving
- A log book used to track your driving activity
- Protective supplies: face masks, dividers, hand sanitizer, and similar items used while driving
- A first aid kit
- USB chargers and cables provided for passengers
- Loan interest, allocated by business-use percentage (see below)
Allocating your cell phone
If you use a phone exclusively for rideshare driving, its entire cost, the monthly bill and any accessories, is deductible. If you use your personal phone for both rideshare and everyday life, you can only deduct the business-use portion. A common approach is estimating what percentage of your phone use is actually rideshare-related and applying that to the bill.
For example: a $100/month phone bill comes to $1,200 for the year. If you estimate 25% of your phone use is for rideshare driving, $300 of that is deductible.
Allocating loan interest
If you have a loan on your vehicle, the interest is deductible in proportion to how much you actually drove for rideshare versus everything else. The math is your rideshare miles divided by your total miles for the year, applied to the interest you paid.
For example: you paid $2,400 in loan interest for the year and drove 20,000 total miles, of which 12,000 were rideshare miles.
Business-use percentage: 12,000 / 20,000 = 60%
Deductible interest: 60% x $2,400 = $1,440
The same logic applies anywhere you're splitting a cost between personal and business use: figure out the honest percentage, and apply it consistently.
What about app subscriptions?
If you're paying for DriveLens, Gridwise, Gig-u, a dedicated mileage tracker, or any similar app specifically to run your driving business, that's generally deductible as an ordinary business expense, the same category as the log book above. The test the IRS applies to a business expense is whether it's ordinary (common for the type of work) and necessary (helpful and appropriate for it), and tracking your mileage and earnings for a driving business clearly clears that bar. As always, confirm with your tax professional, but there's no meaningful difference between a paper log book and a digital one that does the same job.
Why good records matter
Every deduction on this list depends on you actually having the records to back it up: mileage logs, receipts for tolls and parking, a note of what percentage of your phone or loan you're allocating and why. This is exactly what a log book is for, and it's exactly what DriveLens tracks automatically in the background while you drive: mileage, shift history, and expenses, all timestamped and stored on your device. Come tax time, that record is the difference between a deduction you can defend and one you're guessing at.