Country guide · Germany

Fahrtenbuch or the 1% rule — and why a gap costs the whole year

By Andrei Zamiralov · Updated 1 Oct 2026

The choice, and where it is actually decided

If a car is available to you privately, German tax law values that benefit one of two ways. Either the flat 1% of the list price per month (plus 0.03% per kilometre of commute), or the actual cost apportioned by business use — and the second is allowed only where "ein ordnungsgemäßes Fahrtenbuch" exists (§ 6 Abs. 1 Nr. 4 Satz 3 EStG).

Most articles stop at the arithmetic: an expensive car driven mostly for business, and the logbook wins by a wide margin. That part is easy. The part that decides real cases is whether the logbook is ordnungsgemäß, and that is defined not in the statute but in R 8.1 Abs. 9 Nr. 2 LStR.

What has to be in it

For business trips, R 8.1 Abs. 9 Nr. 2 Satz 3 LStR asks "i. d. R." — as a rule — for the following, in the guideline's own words: "Datum und Kilometerstand zu Beginn und am Ende jeder einzelnen Auswärtstätigkeit, Reiseziel und bei Umwegen auch die Reiseroute, Reisezweck und aufgesuchte Geschäftspartner."

• Date
• odometer at the start and end of each business trip
• destination, and the route where you made a detour
• purpose
• the business partner you visited

Private trips need only "Kilometerangaben". The commute home↔first workplace needs "jeweils ein kurzer Vermerk". Detours must be recorded.

The form requirement is what fails, not the fields

Three things trip people up, and none of them is a missing column.

• The closed chain. The book must be kept "zeitnah und in geschlossener Form", and the entries must reproduce the trips "vollständig und in ihrem fortlaufenden Zusammenhang" including the total odometer at the end of each. One unbroken sequence — private driving included. Not a list of business trips with the rest left out.
• Electronic books must be tamper-evident. Later changes must be technically excluded, or at minimum documented — and documented in the exported file, so the record stands on its own without asking whoever administers the system.
• Automatic capture is not enough on its own. FG Niedersachsen, 23 January 2019 – 3 K 107/18, rejected a GPS logbook: recording the routes automatically does not make a Fahrtenbuch, the purpose of each trip has to be entered promptly as well, and an odometer that was only ever computed and never compared with the car's real reading failed. The seven days come from the tax administration, not from that court. The BMF letter of 3 March 2022, Rz. 29, treats an automatic logbook as kept on time "jedenfalls dann" — at least then — when the driver enters the purpose and the business partner visited "innerhalb eines Zeitraums von bis zu sieben Kalendertagen nach Abschluss der jeweiligen Fahrt". That is a safe harbour rather than an outer limit, and it is short.

There is one piece of relief worth knowing: BFH, 10 April 2008 – VI R 38/06 holds that minor deficiencies alone do not invalidate a logbook.

What it costs to get it wrong

The tax office reverts to the 1% / 0.03% method, which is usually far more expensive than the outcome you were aiming at. And the failure is not per trip: a break in the chain invalidates the logbook for the entire year.

So a gap costs more than the trips it swallows. A logbook with a gap in August falls back to the 1% valuation for the whole year, and the months of careful entries before and after it no longer count. Nor can the missing weeks be rebuilt from a calendar afterwards: a Fahrtenbuch written afterwards is not a Fahrtenbuch. The same whole-year rule decides when you can move from the 1% rule to a logbook: for the same car, only from 1 January — see switching from the 1% rule to a Fahrtenbuch.

Under the list-price method the commute is charged on top, at 0.03% a month. If you rarely drive to work, the 0.002% rule per commuting day may cost less. VAT on the same car is a separate question: see Vorsteuer on a mixed-use car.

Why an app rather than a notebook

Nothing above requires software; a paper book with the same fields is compliant, and courts say so. What software changes is the failure mode — and in Germany the failure mode is precisely a gap, which is a thing that happens to people who are busy rather than to people who are careless.

With location access set to Always, DriveHub records every drive in the background — and if it ever misses one, it tells you, so you can recover or add it before it becomes a gap. It records business and private drives alike, which is what a closed chain needs. The report prints the odometer at the start and end of each trip, the business partner you visited (taken from the client of the place you drove to), and every later change to a trip, on the report itself.

The one thing it cannot do for you is the purpose. Enter it promptly — the tax administration's seven days are the safe window — and write it as a reason, "Angebot besprochen, Müller GmbH", rather than leaving the trip marked only as business. That part is yours.

This page quotes the guideline, the tax administration's letter and the two decisions by name so you can read them. It is not tax advice. It can't account for your circumstances. Where the money matters, ask your Steuerberater — and bring the records.

Longer reads

• Dienstwagen: 0.002% per commuting day instead of 0.03% a month (Einzelbewertung)
• Dienstreise mit eigenem Auto: €0.30 for every kilometre, and what you must be able to show
• Erste Tätigkeitsstätte oder Dienstreise: one is €0.38 once, the other €0.30 both ways