The invisible miles
Nobody forgets a 300-mile client trip. What goes unclaimed is the drip: the post office run with this week's orders, the craft store for packaging, the thrift shop for props, the fabric wholesaler two towns over, the Saturday craft fair. Each is 5–20 miles; together they compound. A seller making three short business trips a week — say 25 miles of driving — logs about 1,300 miles a year. At the 2026 rate of 72.5¢ per mile, that's a $942 deduction hiding in errands you already ran.
What counts for a maker business
- Shipping runs — post office, UPS, drop-off lockers.
- Supply trips — materials, packaging, tools, the hardware store for the thing your kiln needed.
- Markets and fairs — driving to craft fairs, flea markets, pop-ups, including scouting visits.
- Client and vendor meetings — consignment shops, photographers, your accountant.
- Business services — bank deposits for the business, printer pickups.
Mixed trips take the primary-purpose test: drive to the post office for orders and grab coffee next door, that's business; drive to the mall for a Saturday and drop a package while you're there, it isn't.
The home-office rule that changes everything
Normally the drive from home to a regular work location is nondeductible commuting. But if your home is your principal place of business — which is exactly what a spare-room studio with regular, exclusive business use typically is for an Etsy seller — then trips from home to business stops are business miles from your driveway. The home-office question and the mileage question interact; if you qualify for one, you're probably leaving money on the other. Worth one conversation with a tax pro to settle.
Hobby or business?
One honest caveat: mileage (like any expense) is deductible against a business— an activity run for profit, filed on Schedule C. If your shop is a hobby that occasionally sells, hobby income is taxable but expenses generally aren't deductible. If you're operating like a business — regular sales, records, profit motive — track like one.
Making it effortless
The failure mode for makers isn't the rules, it's the friction: nobody opens a spreadsheet after a post-office run. Two habits fix it:
- Log at the mailbox. Ten seconds, four fields — date, where, why, miles. That's the whole IRS requirement.
- Save your regulars.The post office is the same 6.2 miles every time. A saved “frequent trip” you can re-log in two taps turns your most common deduction into a reflex. (This is exactly why Odo has frequent trips.)
Come January, a year of reflexes exports as one CSV for your preparer — every date, place, purpose, and mile, valued at the right rate. The $942 stops being hypothetical.