Standard Mileage Rate

In the old days, when employees were reimbursed for using their personal car for company errands, they would track their receipts for gas and then get a spiff above that figure for wear and tear on their car, parking costs, and tolls, etc. The same applied to deductions from their costs of car usage in their professional lives when it came to taxes.

But things got very complex, and finally some wise IRS-ish person said, "Why don't we just apply a standard per-mile expense that lets everyone stop having to track every little receipt?"

And that's how most places work these days. Like...someone using their car for work gets reimbursed by the company some standard mileage rate, like 62 cents a mile, or something like that, which then covers "everything" from gas and wear and tear and insurance risk and parking and tolls and whatever else comes along.

That's how things work today. Maybe in the future world of Uber and Lyft, the world will go back to the tracking detail patterns. But we can hope it doesn't; those were ridiculously time-consuming.