What actually counts as a business expense when you drive for a living

Drivers ask this question constantly, and it usually comes phrased as a list: “can I write off my phone? my sunglasses? a car wash?” The honest answer isn’t a list. It’s a two-word test the IRS actually uses, and once it clicks, most of the list questions answer themselves.

The test: ordinary and necessary

A deductible business expense has to be ordinary — common and accepted in your line of work — and necessary — helpful and appropriate for doing it. Not required in some strict legal sense, just genuinely useful to the job.

That’s it. There’s no official master list of approved gig-driver expenses, because the test isn’t about the item, it’s about the connection between the item and the driving.

Running a few real examples through it

• Phone bill. Ordinary for a driver who navigates and accepts trips through an app all day — yes. Necessary — yes, you can’t do the job without it. But it’s also your personal phone, so only the business-use percentage counts, not the whole bill.
• A dash cam. Ordinary among drivers protecting themselves from liability disputes — yes. Necessary — reasonably, given how often disputes come up. Deductible.
• Sunglasses. Ordinary and necessary for driving in general, not specifically for driving for pay — this is where it gets personal-expense-shaped again. Weak case.
• A car wash. If you’re rated on vehicle cleanliness or drive a platform where presentation affects your rating or tips, ordinary and necessary for that business. If you’d wash the car anyway regardless of work, it’s personal.

Notice the pattern: it’s never really about the object, it’s about whether the expense exists because of the driving or just alongside it.

Where drivers actually lose money

Most drivers under-claim, not over-claim — they assume something’s too small or too personal to count and skip it, when a fair chunk of their phone bill, a percentage of a car cleaning kit, or a hot bag for delivery orders would have passed the test easily. The expensive mistake isn’t claiming too much. It’s not tracking the ordinary, necessary stuff at all because it didn’t feel official enough to write down.

TODO — good place for a real example calculation once specific figures are available (e.g. “on a typical month, that phone-bill percentage alone is worth $X in deductions”) — don’t publish a placeholder dollar figure here.