What your records have to contain to survive a check by IRS, and the rate DriveHub applies.
$0.76 per mile
In force 2026-07-01 — 2026-12-31.
Publication 463, Travel, Gift, and Car Expenses — "adequate records".
The total miles for the year — Pub. 463 Table 5-1's Transportation row, verbatim: "the cost of the car and any improvements, the date you started using it for business, the mileage for each business use, and the total miles for the year."
The boundary pair remains how the app produces the total, which is a good mechanism and a better one than summing recorded trips — what was wrong was the claim that the IRS asks for it.
No number in the law. 26 CFR § 1.6001-1(e) requires records to be kept "so long as the contents thereof may become material in the administration of any internal revenue law"; IRC § 6001 sets no period at all. In practice the floor is the assessment limitation of IRC § 6501 — three years from filing, six where more than 25 % of gross income was omitted, unlimited for a fraudulent or unfiled return. But a mileage log outlives all of those, because Pub. 463 requires the business-use record "for each year of the recovery period", and a car is 5-year MACRS property depreciated over six calendar years — so a depreciating filer's log sits on a six-plus-three chain, not three years. The clearest employee split of any country here: Pub. 463 says an employee who hands records to the employer and is reimbursed "generally don't have to keep copies", and 26 CFR § 1.274-5T(e) moves the duty to the employer — with four exceptions, including a nonaccountable plan and claiming more than the reimbursement. Failure is not a penalty: under IRC § 274(d) the deduction simply does not exist without substantiation.
A missing element can put the whole deduction at risk on audit; the business-use percentage is the figure that collapses first.
The requirements above are quoted from United States's own tax authority. DriveHub keeps them, and the rate, under version control and re-checks them against the authority's pages — this page is generated from that record, not written separately from it.
DriveHub records this automatically. It tracks each drive in the background, keeps the start and end, the distance and the route, and exports a report in the shape a tax office expects.