Parking and Tolls: The Vehicle Deduction You Can Still Take On Top of Standard Mileage

Most people who use the standard mileage rate assume it covers everything vehicle-related. It covers a lot. It does not cover parking fees and tolls, and those remain separately deductible on top of your mileage claim.

For anyone driving in a metro area, this is real money that routinely goes unclaimed — because it never occurs to the driver that anything sits outside the per-mile rate.

What the standard mileage rate already includes

When you claim the standard rate, you are deducting a per-mile figure meant to approximate the full operating cost of the vehicle. Baked into it:

Gasoline and oil
Maintenance and repairs
Tires
Insurance
Registration fees
Depreciation or lease payments

You cannot deduct any of those separately. Claiming standard mileage and your gas receipts is double-dipping, and it is one of the more common errors on self-prepared returns.

What sits outside the rate

Four things stay deductible in addition to standard mileage:

Parking fees incurred for business purposes
Tolls paid on business trips
Interest on a vehicle loan, business-use portion, if you are self-employed
Personal property tax on the vehicle, business-use portion

Parking and tolls are the two that show up constantly and get claimed rarely.

The parking rule that catches people

Not all parking counts. The distinction is between parking at your regular place of business and parking somewhere you traveled for business.

Not deductible: what you pay to park at your own office, or your regular workplace. The IRS treats that as a commuting cost, and commuting is personal — same logic that makes the drive itself non-deductible.

Deductible: parking at a client’s office, a job site, a conference venue, an airport while on a business trip, a supplier, or anywhere else you drove for a business purpose.

A contractor who pays a monthly rate at the garage next to their own shop cannot deduct it. The same contractor paying $22 to park near a client’s building downtown can.

Tolls follow the trip

Tolls are simpler: if the trip was deductible business travel, the tolls on it are deductible. If you paid tolls commuting to your regular workplace, they are not.

This is where E-ZPass and similar transponder accounts become genuinely useful. Your statement is a dated, itemized record of every toll — exactly the kind of contemporaneous documentation that holds up. Download the statements rather than relying on a credit card line item showing a $40 account replenishment, which proves nothing about which trips the tolls belonged to.

Why this adds up faster than people expect

Consider a sales rep working the Northeast corridor who makes three client trips a week involving tolls and paid parking:

Item	Per trip	Annual (150 trips)
Tolls (round trip)	$14	$2,100
Parking	$18	$2,700
Total	$32	$4,800

For a self-employed filer in the 22% bracket also paying self-employment tax, $4,800 of additional deduction is worth roughly $1,750 in tax. That is not a rounding error, and it is fully additive to whatever the mileage deduction produced.

If you use actual expenses instead

Same answer. Parking and tolls are deductible under the actual expense method too, and they are still separate from the pool of costs you prorate by business-use percentage.

The difference: under actual expenses, gas and repairs are also deductible (prorated), so there is less risk of someone overlooking parking. Under standard mileage, parking and tolls are the only vehicle costs left to claim, which is precisely why they get forgotten.

Records that hold up

Parking and tolls are individually small and collectively large, which is the worst combination for recordkeeping. What works:

Pull transponder statements quarterly. Do not wait until filing season and try to reconstruct a year of tolls.
Photograph parking receipts immediately. Thermal paper receipts fade to blank within months.
Note the business purpose. A $22 garage receipt proves you paid $22. It does not prove why. A one-line note — “client meeting, Acme Corp” — turns it into support.
Log them alongside mileage. If you already record the trip for mileage, add a column for tolls and parking on the same row. The business purpose is already there.

Employees: the bad news

If you are a W-2 employee, unreimbursed employee business expenses are not deductible on your federal return under current law. That includes parking and tolls, and it includes mileage.

Two things to know anyway. First, some states still allow the deduction on the state return even though the federal deduction is gone — Pennsylvania’s Schedule UE is a notable example. Second, if your employer has an accountable plan, submitting these for reimbursement gets you the full amount tax-free, which beats a deduction.

Frequently asked questions

Can I deduct parking tickets?
No. Fines and penalties paid to a government are never deductible, no matter how business-related the trip was.

What about airport parking on a business trip?
Deductible as a business travel expense. It is not a vehicle expense in that context — it belongs with the rest of your trip costs.

I pay for a monthly parking spot I use for both client visits and my own office. Can I split it?
In principle you would allocate between business and commuting use, but you need a reasonable basis for the split and records to support it. This is one to walk through with a preparer.

Do tolls count if I was driving to a temporary work location?
Generally yes. Travel to a temporary work location outside your normal commuting pattern is typically business travel, and the tolls follow. The rules on what counts as temporary are specific — worth confirming for your situation.

The bottom line

The standard mileage rate absorbs almost every vehicle cost, which is exactly why the exceptions get missed. Parking at destinations you drove to for business, and tolls on business trips, are separately deductible on top of your per-mile claim.

Add two columns to whatever you already use to track mileage. The record is the hard part; the deduction is straightforward.

Related guides

This article is general information, not tax advice. Vehicle expense rules come from IRS Publication 463; verify current guidance at irs.gov or consult a qualified tax professional.