Yes — 1099 tax write offs are real, and for a gig worker in 2026 the biggest one is usually your car: 72.5 cents for every business mile you drive. Your phone, supplies, and platform fees count too.

If a cost is ordinary for your line of work and you can prove it, it comes off your profit — and because self-employed profit is taxed twice, every write-off cuts both taxes. I build this list for 1099 clients every spring; here it is, item by item.

Which expenses can a gig worker actually deduct?

Anything "ordinary and necessary" for your work — common and accepted in your field, and helpful and appropriate, in the words of IRC §162(a) and the IRS's Publication 334. For a driver, courier, or freelancer with a personal car and a phone, the practical 2026 list is:

• Mileage — business miles × 72.5¢, plus parking and tolls on Schedule C line 9 (details in the next section).
• Phone and data — the business percentage of your bill. If the phone is 60% work, you deduct 60% of the plan. It goes on Schedule C line 25 (utilities) or in Part V, listed as cell phone with the business percentage.
• Supplies and gear — hot bags, phone mounts, chargers, cleaning supplies. These go on Schedule C line 22. Anything that costs under $2,500 (a phone, a tablet) comes off in full the year you buy it under what the IRS calls the de minimis safe harbor — listed in Part V — instead of being written off a slice at a time over several years.
• Platform commissions and fees — deductible on Schedule C line 10, but only when the platform's 1099 reports your gross before its cut. If the 1099 already shows what hit your bank, there is nothing to deduct twice.
• Self-employed health insurance — your medical, dental, and long-term-care premiums under §162(l), deducted on Schedule 1, line 17 as an adjustment to income — a subtraction that lowers the income your tax is figured on. It does not go on Schedule C, so it lowers income tax but not self-employment tax. It can't exceed your business profit, and it's off for any month you could have joined an employer's or spouse's subsidized plan.
• Home office — only a space used exclusively and regularly for the business. The kitchen table fails; a dedicated desk or room qualifies. The simplified method in Rev. Proc. 2013-13 is $5 per square foot, capped at 300 square feet ($1,500), on Schedule C line 30 — and a qualifying home office also makes the drive from home to your first stop business miles instead of commuting.
• Half your self-employment tax — automatic, on Schedule 1, line 15.
• The 20% QBI deduction — the qualified business income deduction under §199A, a 20% cut off your profit before income tax; automatic if you qualify, and most gig workers do.

"But can we claim phone usage, too? I rely on it 100 percent of the time to navigate between drop-offs and get gigs. If I choose mileage, then can I also use my cell phone bill as a deduction, too, or would that be lumped in with vehicle expenses?"

— one Roadie courier, asking on the TurboTax community

The answer is yes — the phone is its own deduction, separate from the car, whichever mileage method you pick. But a personal phone is never 100% business. Pick a percentage you can defend — hours on the app versus hours the phone is on — because the IRS's rule is to separate the personal part from the business part, and only the business part is deductible.

How does the mileage deduction work in 2026?

Multiply your business miles by 72.5 cents — the 2026 rate in the IRS's 2026 mileage announcement — and add business parking and tolls. Ten thousand business miles in 2026 is a $7,250 deduction. Business miles are the ones driven with the app on — en route to pickups and deliveries, between drop-offs. The drive from home to your starting zone with the app off is commuting, and commuting is never deductible, no matter how far it is. A stop for lunch between two business stops doesn't break the chain; the miles stay deductible (the sandwich doesn't — more below).

Two rules decide whether this deduction survives. First, gas is already inside the 72.5 cents — along with oil, tires, repairs, insurance, registration, and depreciation (the car's wear-and-tear write-off) — so you do not also deduct gas receipts on the standard rate. Our guide to whether you can write off gas, written for the same gig driver, shows when the actual-expense method beats the rate. Second, your car is "listed property" under §280F(d)(4) — the IRS's category for assets that are easy to use personally — which puts it under the no-estimates rule of §274(d): you need a record of miles, date, destination, and purpose made at or near the time. A free tracking app captures all four automatically. Our mileage tracking guide for gig drivers walks through exactly what the log has to show.

What can you not write off as a gig worker?

Anything personal — §262 bars personal, living, and family expenses, and being on shift doesn't convert them. The quick map:

The meal line is the one most people get wrong. A business meal is deductible at 50% only when it's ordinary and necessary, not lavish, you're present, and a current or potential customer, client, or similar business contact is at the table (§274(k) and (n)). A freelancer buying a client coffee to talk through a project has a 50% meal. A Dasher eating alone in the car has lunch.

How much do 1099 write-offs actually save you?

About $1,750 on $30,000 of pay with 10,000 business miles, and every $1,000 you deduct cuts self-employment tax by $141 before any income-tax saving — because every deduction cuts two taxes. Take a single Dasher in 2026 with $30,000 of platform pay, 10,000 business miles, a $100-a-month phone plan used 60% for work, and $150 of supplies. The deductions: $7,250 of mileage, $720 of phone, $150 of supplies — $8,120 total, dropping profit to $21,880. Self-employment tax falls from $4,239 to about $3,092, income tax falls from about $942 to about $339, and the total federal bill drops from roughly $5,181 to roughly $3,430. That is $1,751 saved — about 21.6 cents back per dollar deducted.

The rule of thumb inside that math: every $1,000 of Schedule C deductions cuts self-employment tax by $141 (92.35% × 15.3%) before any income-tax saving. The reason write-offs matter so much for 1099 workers is that SE tax runs on the first dollar of profit over $400 — our self-employment tax explainer shows the full mechanics, and our first-time quarterly taxes guide covers paying it during the year. If you want the numbers run for your own situation, the 1099 tax calculator post does exactly that. If you want the whole year planned — quarterlies, retirement contributions, and whether an S-corp ever makes sense — that is the self-employed and 1099 tax planning work we do for self-employed clients.

What changed for 1099 tax write-offs in 2026?

The standard mileage rate rose to 72.5 cents per business mile for 2026, up from 70 cents in 2025 — and it applies to gas, hybrid, and electric cars alike. The 1099-NEC reporting floor rose to $2,000 for payments made in 2026 (payments made in 2025 used the $600 floor) — but that only changes whether a platform sends a form, not whether the income is taxable. And the 20% qualified business income deduction under §199A is now permanent, and it only starts to shrink above $201,750 of 2026 taxable income for a single filer or $403,500 married filing jointly (the thresholds in Rev. Proc. 2025-32) — far above what most gig workers earn, so the full 20% usually applies.

What records do you need to keep your deductions?

The car needs the contemporaneous log described above — a record made at or near the time of each trip; I have never seen a reconstructed one survive a question. Everything else lives under the ordinary records rule (§6001): keep what shows the amount and the business purpose — receipts, the phone bill with your business percentage noted, the platform's fee statement. A court can sometimes estimate non-vehicle expenses when there's some basis, but it "bears heavily" against a taxpayer who kept nothing.

Tibin v. Commissioner, T.C. Memo. 2024-102, is what that looks like in practice. A Philadelphia driver — Lyft and Uber on the side, plus a small medical-transport company with vans and part-time drivers — walked into Tax Court over his 2020 return with bank statements and his word, so the dollar figures below are that year's. The statements won exactly what they showed: $5,255 of gas, $2,927 of repairs, $640 of supplies, $342 of registrations, and $38,432 of insurance backed by the policies he could hand the judge. His word alone bought half of a $1,300 cash transmission job. His vans escaped the strict mileage-log rule only because they were used solely to carry passengers for hire; the court noted that a rideshare driver who could not show his SUVs were never used personally got no such pass — a personal car that is also the family car stays under §274(d). The $78,900 of rent with no lease and no testimony went to zero, and the $55,000 he "paid himself" was never a deduction at all — a sole proprietor's pay is the profit. One case, one taxpayer's facts, but the move is plain: starting today, pay business costs from one card or account, photograph every receipt into a folder the day you get it, export the platform's fee and mileage statements each month, and keep the phone bill with your business percentage written on it — a deduction is worth exactly what you can hand someone.

The counterpoint is Taylor v. Commissioner (Docket No. 2699-24), a 2025 Tax Court bench opinion about a driver with the same kind of car you have: he had his miles in an app, chose not to claim them because he thought he owed nothing, deleted the data, and lost the deduction for miles the court said he probably drove. Two drivers, two outcomes — the one who kept bank statements and policies was believed to the dollar they proved; the one who deleted his log was not. A one-case decision, not a rule, but it is the same line.

What else do gig workers ask about write-offs?

Want your deduction list and records set up before filing season? N&T Tax & Advisory Group prepares Schedule C returns for gig workers and 1099 contractors, builds the deduction list that fits the work you actually do, and sets up the records that support it — by phone or video, nationwide. Book a meeting with our team here.