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Charitable mileage calculator

14 cents a mile is small enough to feel not worth writing down, right up to the moment you total a year of a weekly drive. Add the routes you drove in service of an organization you volunteer with, and this figures the contribution at the rate for the tax year you pick, with parking and tolls on their own line.

14 cents a mile for driving in service of a qualified organization.

From Notice 2026-10, 2026 standard mileage rates, section 3.

The charitable rate is set by statute rather than by the annual cost study the IRS runs for the business, medical, and moving rates, which is why it has not moved.

Your driving

One row per route. Enter the miles in a single trip, including the drive home, and how many times you made it. Nothing you type here is uploaded, saved, or sent anywhere.

  • Enter the miles

The CSV is a summary of what you typed, not a substitute for the log itself. The IRS states that records may generally be considered reliable if you made them regularly and at or near the time you had the expenses, so the version written each week is the one that counts.

How it works

Four steps, and the last one is the one that matters

The arithmetic here is trivial. The record behind it is the part that decides whether the number survives a question three years later.

  1. 1

    Pick the tax year

    The rate and the rules attach to the year you are filing for, not the year you are sitting in. Only years whose figures were read from an IRS document appear in the selector, so a year we cannot source is missing rather than guessed.

  2. 2

    Add each route you drove

    A row is a route, not a single trip: enter the miles in one drive, including the way home, and how many times you made it. A weekly shift is one row with a trip count rather than fifty rows.

  3. 3

    Put parking and tolls on their own line

    Publication 526 states you can deduct parking fees and tolls whether you use actual expenses or the standard mileage rate, so they are added on top rather than folded into the per-mile figure.

  4. 4

    Keep the log, not just the total

    The publication asks for records showing the organization you served, the dates you drove for it, and the miles. It also says records may generally be considered reliable if you made them regularly and at or near the time, which a total reconstructed in April is not.

Which drives count

Driving for a charity, not driving that involves one

The rate attaches to a narrower thing than most people assume, and the gap between the two is where a deduction gets disallowed.

Publication 526 frames these expenses as unreimbursed out-of-pocket costs of giving services to a qualified organization, and its worked example is a volunteer driving to and from the place they volunteer. That is the shape of the thing: a meal delivery route, a weekly shift, driving a youth group to an event, collecting supplies for an organization you serve. The drive is part of the service.

A trip made only to leave a bag of clothes at a donation center is a different act. Delivering property to a charity is not obviously giving services to it, and we did not find IRS text that answers the case squarely in either direction. So the honest instruction is this: keep those miles separate from your volunteer driving, do not fold them into a total you would defend, and ask a tax professional if the amount matters to you. The goods themselves are a noncash contribution valued on their own, which is a settled question with a separate tool.

Mixed trips are the other common case. For travel away from home, Publication 526 attaches a test that decides most arguments: the expenses are generally claimable only if there is no significant element of personal pleasure, recreation, or vacation in the travel. That test is written for longer trips rather than for a local errand, so read the everyday version of it as a principle instead of a rule: the miles have to be miles you drove for the organization, not miles you were driving anyway.

What it does not do

The honest limits

A tool that overstates what it can do is worth less than one that says where it stops.

  • It does not check the organization. The rate applies to driving in service of a qualified organization, and a group being worthy is not the same as it being qualified. How to check one.
  • It does not judge whether a drive counts. It multiplies the miles you tell it by the rate for the year you picked. Whether a particular trip was in service of the organization is a question about your facts, and the section above is as far as we will go on it.
  • It does not say what the deduction saves you. A contribution is not a refund. What it is worth depends on whether you itemize, on your rate, and for 2026 on rules that changed this year.
  • It does not remember anything. There is no account and no server, so the rows disappear when you close the tab. Download the CSV if you need the summary to survive, and keep the log you wrote at the time either way.
Then what

Most volunteers also give things

Mileage is reported as a cash contribution and the goods are not, so the two halves of the same year land on different lines and follow different rules.

FAQ

Questions about volunteer mileage

What is the charitable mileage rate for 2026?
14 cents a mile. It comes from Notice 2026-10, 2026 standard mileage rates at section 3. The charitable rate is set by statute rather than by the annual cost study the IRS runs for the business, medical, and moving rates, which is why it has not moved. The IRS states that the charitable rate is set by section 170(i) of the Internal Revenue Code, which is why it does not move with inflation the way the business rate does.
Can I deduct the value of my time volunteering?
No. Publication 526 answers this directly in its volunteering questions: you can’t deduct the value of your time or services. The deduction is for what the volunteering cost you out of pocket, never for what your work would have been worth if the organization had paid somebody to do it. Publication 526 sets that out.
Can I deduct gas instead of using the rate?
Publication 526 offers actual expenses as the alternative, and is specific about which ones: the cost of gas and oil directly related to the use of your car in giving services to a charitable organization. It also states you can’t deduct general repair and maintenance expenses, depreciation, registration fees, or the costs of tires or insurance under either method, which is why the charitable rate sits so far below the business one.
Does volunteer mileage go on Form 8283?
No. The Instructions for Form 8283 state that the form is not used for out-of-pocket expenses for volunteer work and that those are treated as cash contributions. That has a useful consequence: mileage does not count toward the $500 of noncash contributions that generally triggers Form 8283, and it is not part of a group of similar items.
Does driving my donations to the drop-off count?
Treat it as unsettled rather than assuming. Publication 526 frames deductible car expenses as expenses of giving services to a qualified organization, and its worked example is a volunteer driving to and from the place they volunteer. Delivering property is not obviously the same act, and we did not find IRS text that answers it squarely, so keep those miles separate from your volunteer driving and ask a tax professional before claiming them. The goods themselves are a separate, noncash contribution: the donation value calculator handles that side.
Do I need a letter from the charity for my mileage?
Only above a threshold. Publication 526 states that unreimbursed out-of-pocket expenses, considered separately, of $250 or more related to services you gave a qualified organization need adequate records of the amount plus an acknowledgment from the organization. Below that, your own reliable records are generally the requirement. The receipts guide covers what to ask for.
Is anything I enter here saved?
No, and there is nowhere for it to go: no account, no server, no analytics on what you type. The calculation happens in your browser and closing the tab discards it. Download the CSV, or use the DeductiBee app, which logs a drive next to the donations it belongs with, on your iPhone.

The rules behind this tool

  1. Publication 526 (2025), Charitable Contributions, full textIRS, IRS publication
  2. Standard mileage rates, rate table for all yearsIRS, IRS guidance
  3. Notice 2026-10, 2026 standard mileage ratesIRS, IRS guidance
  4. Instructions for Form 8283IRS, IRS form
  5. 26 U.S.C. § 170, Charitable, etc., contributions and gifts (see § 170(f)(16))Office of the Law Revision Counsel, U.S. House of Representatives, Statute

Publication 526 and the Instructions for Form 8283 were read from the linked IRS sources on August 5, 2026, and the mileage notice and rate table on August 9, 2026. Publication 526 is still the 2025 edition and does not address the 2026 charitable changes, so anything on this page about them is attributed rather than asserted. This is general information about a rate and a record, not advice about your return, and its author is not a CPA, an enrolled agent, or an attorney. This is record-keeping software, not tax advice.

Written down as it happens

The log is the deduction.

DeductiBee records a drive in seconds, next to the items and cash you gave the same organization, and keeps the date it was entered so a record made at the time reads as one.

Mileage in its own column

Cash-equivalent contributions stay separate from noncash ones, so a year of driving never inflates the total that decides your Form 8283 threshold.

One organization, one record

The drives, the donated goods, and the receipt photo hang off the same charity, on your device.

DeductiBee on the App StoreFree to start, with 20 new item entries a year. Viewing and exporting your own raw data is never paywalled.