— This is a guest post from GigMiles co-founder Kayıhan Özgenç —
I fell into the world of e-bike delivery the way a lot of people do now: through YouTube. When my green card was approved, I binged every vlog I could find about making a living in the US, and the ones that stuck with me were the e-bike couriers: riders doing 40-mile days through city traffic, narrating their earnings at every red light. They talked about everything: which apps paid, which neighborhoods tipped, how many batteries they carried. The one thing nobody ever mentioned was what all those miles were doing to their taxes.
I found out why the hard way — not at tax time, but in a code editor. I’m a gig worker and I build gig-driver software for a living, and when I sat down to write the tax logic for two-wheelers, I assumed I’d do what every mileage app does: multiply logged miles by the IRS standard mileage rate. Then I actually read the IRS notice.
The standard mileage rate (76 cents per mile for the second half of 2026) applies to the business use of a car, van, pickup, or panel truck. That’s the IRS’s own wording, not mine. A bicycle, electric or otherwise, is not on that list. Every mile those couriers were grinding out on camera was real. The per-mile deduction most of them assumed they’d claim didn’t exist.
If you deliver on an e-bike, and in a lot of cities more couriers do every year, this is the article I wish someone had handed them. Here’s why standard mileage doesn’t apply to you, what you should be tracking instead, and a simple system you can hand straight to your tax professional in the spring.
Quick framing before we start: everything here is education and planning, not tax advice. Your actual situation may differ, and a licensed tax professional is the right person for the final word.
Why the Standard Mileage Rate Doesn’t Apply to E-Bikes
The standard mileage rate is a convenience the IRS offers so drivers don’t have to itemize every gas receipt and brake job. It bundles fuel, maintenance, insurance, and depreciation into one per-mile number. For 2026 that number is 76 cents per business mile. But the IRS is specific about what it covers: the rate is for the use of a car, van, pickup or panel truck.
Bikes, e-bikes, mopeds, and scooters aren’t “vehicles” for this purpose. There’s no bicycle mileage rate. There’s no e-bike mileage rate. There isn’t a smaller per-mile number you’re supposed to use instead.
What’s left is the actual-expense method: you deduct the real, documented costs of operating your e-bike for business, in proportion to how much of its use is business use. If your bike is 100% a work bike, that math is simpler. If you also ride it personally, you’ll need a reasonable business-use percentage. That’s one more reason your ride log still matters even though the mileage rate doesn’t apply.
Here’s the mindset shift that took me a while: on a car, the mileage log basically is the deduction. On an e-bike, the mileage log is supporting evidence; the deduction itself lives in your receipts and your per-mile cost math. Miss the receipts, and your log alone gets you almost nothing.
The good news? E-bike actual expenses are far easier to track than car expenses. There are really only three buckets.
Bucket 1: Electricity, Cheaper Than You Think but Still Worth Tracking
Charging an e-bike costs shockingly little, which is exactly why couriers skip tracking it. Don’t. Small, documented, and legitimate beats large and imaginary.
The math is straightforward. A typical delivery e-bike gets somewhere around 35 to 40 miles per kilowatt-hour of charge in real-world use. At New York City residential electricity prices, some of the highest in the country, that’s still only pennies per mile. Ride 900 miles in a month and your charging cost might land around six to eight dollars.
Not life-changing. But it’s a real business expense, it’s easy to compute (miles ÷ your bike’s mi/kWh × your utility’s rate per kWh, right off your bill), and getting the small stuff right builds the habit that captures the big stuff. Which brings us to the actual money.
Bucket 2: The Battery, Your E-Bike’s Consumable Engine
This is the cost most couriers completely miss, and it’s the biggest one.
An e-bike battery is not a permanent part of the bike. It’s a consumable with a countdown timer. Most lithium batteries are good for roughly 500 to 1,000 full charge cycles before capacity drops enough that you’re charging mid-shift and shopping for a replacement. A quality replacement battery runs several hundred dollars.
Do the courier math: if you’re riding 40+ miles a day, you’re burning a full charge cycle most working days. A battery that lasts a casual rider five years might last a full-time courier eighteen months. That replacement isn’t a surprise breakdown. It’s a per-mile operating cost you’re incurring on every delivery, months before the bill arrives.
I’ll be honest… I’ve never paid for a replacement battery myself. I learned this line item from building the cost model, not from a repair bill. That’s what makes it so easy to miss. Spread a battery’s price over its cycle life and your miles per charge, and you get a real cents-per-mile number that quietly rivals what you spend on electricity several times over. And the more you ride, the faster that invisible meter runs.
Track it two ways: keep the receipt when you actually buy a replacement battery (that’s the documented expense for your tax pro), and know your per-mile battery cost for your own planning, so you’re pricing your work honestly week to week.
Bucket 3: Mechanical Wear (Tires, Brakes, Chain, Tune-Ups)
Everything below the battery wears out faster on a delivery bike than on a weekend bike. You’re riding daily, loaded, in traffic, in weather.
The recurring cast:
- Tires and tubes: delivery riding eats them; couriers in glass-and-pothole cities can go through several sets a year
- Brake pads: stop-and-go delivery riding is brutal on them
- Chain and drivetrain: chains stretch, cassettes and chainrings follow; a worn chain replaced late takes the expensive parts with it
- Tune-ups and shop labor: periodic service is part of operating cost, not a personal treat
- Rain gear, lights, locks, phone mount, delivery bag: equipment used for the work counts too; keep the receipts and let your tax professional sort classification
None of these are exotic. All of them are deductible business expenses under the actual-expense method if you have the paper trail. The courier who saves every bike-shop receipt in one folder has a deduction. The courier who “knows they spent a lot on the bike this year” has a story.
A Sample Month: What an NYC e-Bike Courier’s Costs Actually Look Like
Let’s put the three buckets together. Every number below is an illustrative example: a realistic-shaped month for a full-time NYC-style delivery courier, not a claim about what you’ll spend or earn. Your bike, your city, and your miles will produce different numbers.
Say a courier rides 900 delivery miles in a month:
- Electricity: 900 miles at ~36 mi/kWh is about 25 kWh. At a high-cost urban rate ($0.24/kWh), call it ~$6.
- Battery wear: a $600 battery rated for ~800 cycles at ~30 miles per charge works out to roughly 2.5 cents per mile: about $22 of battery life consumed this month, even though no bill arrived.
- Mechanical wear: brake pads this month, a chain last month, tires coming soon. Averaged out, another ~$23 at roughly 2.5 cents per mile.
Total operating cost for the month: about $51, or roughly 6 cents per mile.
Two things jump out of that graphic.
First, the invisible costs are five times the visible one. The only bill this courier actually saw this month was six dollars of electricity buried in a utility statement. The other $45 is wear: real cost, incurred now, paid later. If you only track what you’re billed, you’re missing more than 80% of your operating cost.
Second, notice what six cents a mile isn’t: it isn’t 76 cents a mile. An e-bike genuinely costs far less to operate than a car; that’s the whole appeal. But it also means an e-bike courier’s documented deduction will be much smaller than a driver’s standard-mileage deduction on the same miles. Budget your estimated tax set-aside with that in mind, and don’t let a car-driver friend’s rule of thumb set your expectations.
(If you do some of your gig work in a car too, the two methods can coexist across different vehicles, but that’s squarely a question for your tax pro. RSG’s tax guide for rideshare and delivery drivers is a solid primer on how filing works for gig income in general.)
The Recordkeeping Checklist to Hand Your Tax Professional
You don’t need accounting software or a shoebox archaeology project. You need one folder (paper or phone) and five habits:
- A ride log. Miles per shift, dates, platform. A mileage app works fine for this even on a bike; RSG’s roundup of the best mileage tracker apps covers the options. Remember: on an e-bike the log supports your business-use percentage; it isn’t the deduction itself.
- Every bike-related receipt. Battery, tires, pads, chain, tune-ups, gear, the bike itself. Photograph receipts the day you get them.
- Your electricity math, written down once. Bike’s mi/kWh, your utility’s rate, and the monthly miles × rate calculation. One note, updated monthly.
- Business-use percentage. If the bike is work-only, note that. If it’s mixed, your ride log establishes the split.
- An estimated tax set-aside, every payout. Nobody withholds for you. Set aside an estimated slice as you earn so spring is an administrative task, not an emergency. The right slice depends on your state, other income, and deductions. Treat it as a planning estimate, not a final answer.
Hand that folder to a licensed tax professional and you’ve done your job. Clean records in, correct return out.
Full disclosure on tooling: I’m a co-founder of GigMiles, a net-profit and tax tracker for gig drivers, whether they work from a car or an e-bike. The e-bike mode exists because of this exact problem. When it became clear couriers couldn’t legally use standard mileage, I built the actual-expense math (electricity per mile, battery-cycle wear, mechanical wear) into the tracker, because almost no mileage app handles bikes correctly; most just assume you’re in a car. But the checklist above works on paper, and paper beats nothing every time.
The Bottom Line
If you deliver on an e-bike, the 76-cent shortcut isn’t yours, but the actual-expense method is, and it’s honestly not that hard. Track three buckets: electricity, battery cycles, and mechanical wear. Keep every receipt. Log your rides anyway. Set aside an estimated slice for taxes as you earn.
Your e-bike is cheap to run. That’s your edge over every car in the bike lane. Just make sure that when spring comes, you can prove what it cost — because on two wheels, the receipts are the deduction.
Cost figures in this article are illustrative examples for planning purposes only, not tax advice and not earnings claims. Your actual tax situation may differ; consult a licensed tax professional.
Author bio: Kayıhan Özgenç is a co-founder of GigMiles, a net-profit and tax tracker for US gig drivers who work from cars or e-bikes, and an active gig worker himself. He built the app’s e-bike mode after discovering, while coding its tax engine, that the IRS standard mileage rate doesn’t apply to bikes and almost no tracking app did the actual-expense math couriers need. GigMiles is live on the App Store at gigmiles.app.
