Delivery Driver Tax Deductions in Australia (2026)

Most delivery driver tax deductions are the ones you would guess. Fuel, the phone, the bag, the commission the app takes before the money reaches you. The part that costs people real money is not the list, it is the method, and the method changes depending on what you are sitting on.

If you deliver on a motorcycle or a scooter, you cannot use the 88 cents per kilometre rate, and you cannot use the logbook method either. Both are written for cars only. A rider who claims the full 5,000 kilometre cap at 88 cents is claiming $4,400 they were never entitled to, and almost every guide ranking for this topic implies the choice is open to them.

This guide covers how each claim actually works for a sole trader delivering, from the vehicle down to the bag. It is the same ground we cover with the drivers whose returns we prepare through our delivery driver accounting page.

What counts as income before you claim anything

Everything the platform pays you is assessable income: delivery fees, tips, bonuses, incentives and surge. The ATO’s guidance on income from providing services through a platform puts it flatly, that it applies “even if this income is to supplement your income from a job or business activities”, and that it does not matter whether you are carrying on a business, an employee or an independent contractor.

Where it goes depends on whether you are carrying on a business. Almost every driver signed up to a platform is, so the income and the deductions go on your individual tax return through the business and professional items schedule. A handful of genuinely one-off jobs goes in as other income instead, with the platform named as the description.

What gets declared is the gross the platform credits you, not the net that lands in your bank. The commission comes out before you are paid and comes back as a deduction. Declaring the net understates both sides and leaves you claiming nothing for the fee.

Nothing is withheld from any of it, which is why a first delivery year often ends with a bill rather than a refund.

The vehicle: work out your method before your kilometres

Work out which method you are allowed to use before you start counting anything, because two of the three options are closed to a lot of drivers.

It resolves in two steps, not one. What are you driving, and what structure are you trading through.

What you drive	Sole trader or partnership	Company or trust
Car (under 1 tonne, fewer than 9 passengers)	Cents per kilometre or logbook	Actual costs
Motorcycle or scooter	Actual costs	Actual costs
Van or ute rated 1 tonne or more	Actual costs	Actual costs
Bicycle or e-bike	Not a motor vehicle, see below	Not a motor vehicle, see below

That comes from the ATO’s page on motor vehicle expense calculation methods, which tells a sole trader that “when claiming for other vehicles, you must use the actual costs method”, and tells a company or trust it must use actual costs “regardless of the type of motor vehicle”.

So the word doing all the work is “car”, and it is narrower than the everyday meaning.

That definition is what removes the two simple methods from the table for a large share of drivers, and the guides ranking for this search almost uniformly present “cents per kilometre or logbook” as a universal choice. It is not. The same structure-then-vehicle order applies to any sole trader claiming a work vehicle, and we work through it in more detail for tradies and their utes.

Cents per kilometre, cars only

You claim a flat rate for every business kilometre, with no receipts for running costs at all.

The ATO’s cents per kilometre rates are 88 cents for the 2024-25 and 2025-26 income years, rising to 91 cents from 2026-27. The 2025-26 return you are lodging now uses 88 cents. The rate you will use on next year’s return is 91 cents.

The cap is 5,000 business kilometres per car per year, so the most this method can produce on the current rate is $4,400. A full-time driver passes 5,000 kilometres inside a few months, and everything above it is lost under this method.

The rate is all-inclusive. It covers “all of your car expenses including decline in value, registration and insurance, maintenance, repairs and fuel costs”, so a service or a set of tyres cannot be added on top. You keep no receipts, but you still need a record of how you arrived at the kilometres, and a diary or the myDeductions tool in the ATO app is enough.

The logbook, cars only

The logbook works out a business-use percentage once and then applies it to everything the car actually costs you.

You keep a logbook for at least 12 continuous weeks, and that period has to be representative of your normal driving. Business kilometres divided by total kilometres gives your percentage, and that percentage comes off your total running costs for the year: fuel, servicing, tyres, registration, insurance and the decline in value of the car.

The ATO’s logbook rules are explicit that the method “is only for sole traders or partnerships claiming for a car”, and that each logbook stays valid for five years. Twelve weeks of work once buys you five returns, as long as your circumstances do not change and you keep recording the odometer at the start and end of each year.

The logbook must show the period start and end, the odometer readings at both ends, total kilometres, the business-use percentage, and the car’s make, model, engine capacity and registration. Each journey needs its reason, its dates, the odometer readings and the kilometres travelled.

The crossover between the two methods sits around 5,000 business kilometres, which a driver doing four or five shifts a week clears well before the year is out.

Actual costs, for scooters, motorbikes, heavy vans and every company

Actual costs means exactly what it says. You claim from receipts, reduced to the business-use share.

The ATO’s actual cost method names your situation directly: a sole trader or partnership uses it “if you are claiming for other vehicles such as a motorcycle or a van”. Into it go fuel, servicing, tyres, chain and brake work, registration, insurance, and the decline in value of the bike itself.

No logbook method is available to you, but you still have to prove a percentage. If a bike is 80% delivery and 20% personal, something has to stand behind that 80%, and twelve weeks of recorded trips is the practical way to do it even though the formal logbook rules are not what you are relying on.

The upside is that there is no 5,000 kilometre ceiling and no capped rate, so a rider covering serious distance on a cheap-to-run bike frequently claims more than the car method would ever have allowed. The car cost limit on depreciation does not apply to a motorcycle either, because it is not a car.

Bicycles and e-bikes

A pushbike or an e-bike is not a motor vehicle, so none of the three methods above touch it. It is a business asset like any other: you claim the work-related portion of what it cost you, and the running costs on the same percentage, so servicing, tyres, tubes and a replacement battery. A bike is always under the $20,000 instant asset write-off threshold, so the business portion can generally be claimed in the year you bought it rather than written down over years. Keep a note of how you arrived at the percentage, the same as any mixed-use asset.

Which kilometres actually count

The test is the purpose of the travel, not whether the app was switched on.

The ATO works this through in its ride-sourcing deductions guidance, and the principle carries across to delivery. Driving toward the city with the app on and no job accepted is private travel where the real purpose of the trip was getting there. Once you accept a job, business travel runs from acceptance to completion. On a shift where you leave home specifically to work, the whole thing counts from leaving to getting back, and it stops the moment the purpose changes because business is slow and you go and meet a friend.

Normal trips between home and work are private for everyone. For a delivery driver that rarely bites, because there is no fixed workplace to commute to, but it is what disqualifies the drive to your regular pickup zone before you have taken a job.

Platform fees and commissions

The fees the platform charges you are deductible, and for a driver whose delivery income is entirely business they come off at 100%. The ATO’s sharing economy guidance says you “may be able to claim service fees or commission charged by a digital platform as a 100% deduction”, which covers the commission taken per delivery, any service or booking fee, and equipment or subscription charges the platform bills you for.

Take them off your platform statement rather than your bank feed. The fee is deducted before you are paid, so your bank shows only the net while the statement shows both halves. If you are registered for GST, the deduction is the fee net of its GST.

Other delivery driver tax deductions

Everything below is claimable on its business-use share, not in full, unless you use it for nothing but delivering.

• Phone and data, at a work-use percentage worked out from a representative period rather than asserted. For a driver whose phone runs the app all shift that percentage is usually high, and it still has to be worked out.
• The insulated bag, thermal bags, phone mount, power bank, helmet and wet-weather gear.
• Tolls and parking incurred on a job. A toll the platform reimburses is not a deduction, because you did not bear the cost.
• Cleaning, where the vehicle or the bag needs it because of the work.
• Servicing and repairs, but only if you are not already claiming them inside the cents per kilometre rate, which covers them.
• Tax agent and accountant fees, deductible on the business side under the ATO’s list of deductible operating expenses, so this year’s return fee comes off next year’s income.
• Union or association fees, where you are a member of one.

What you cannot claim

The driver licence feels deductible and is not. The ATO’s position is that getting and maintaining a private driver licence “is considered a private expense and is not deductible”, even where you plainly cannot work without one. A parking ticket picked up mid-delivery is the same answer from a different direction: it is a penalty imposed under an Australian law, and those are non-deductible whatever you were doing when you got one.

One more sits outside both lists. The instant asset write-off is not available on a car you already owned privately before you started delivering, because the write-off is for assets acquired for the business.

GST: when it starts, and the rideshare trap

Delivery sits under the ordinary $75,000 turnover threshold. You do not register on your first delivery, and you are not required to register at all until your turnover reaches $75,000.

Rideshare is the exception, and it is the one that catches people. Ride-sourcing is taxi travel for GST purposes, so the ATO requires a passenger driver to register for GST before their first trip regardless of what they earn. The standard threshold does not apply to it.

The trap is that you only have one ABN. If you deliver food during the week and drive passengers on weekends, the GST registration your rideshare work forces on you covers everything you do under that ABN. The ATO states it directly: where you have an existing GST registration and use the same ABN for sharing economy activities, “you will need to report and pay GST for all business income”. Your delivery income, which on its own would have been years away from the threshold, is in the GST system from the day you start driving passengers.

Once you are registered you lodge a BAS monthly or quarterly, remit GST on your income, and claim every deduction above net of GST, with the GST itself claimed back as a credit. The mechanics of the threshold and what registration involves sit in our guide to the GST registration threshold, and the platform-by-platform version of the question, including what the two rolling turnover tests mean and what the crossover actually costs, is in do Uber Eats drivers pay GST.

The ATO already has your income

Your platform reports what it paid you, twice a year, without you doing anything.

The Sharing Economy Reporting Regime requires platform operators to report their suppliers’ transactions by 31 January for the July to December half, and by 31 July for January to June. Taxi and ride-sourcing platforms started reporting on 1 July 2023. Food delivery came in with the expansion from 1 July 2024, and the ATO’s list of activities covered by the regime names it outright, under task-based services: “delivery or courier services (for example, food delivery, on demand parcel or package delivery)”.

So the income figure you put in is being compared against a number the ATO already holds, and increasingly it will be pre-filled before you type anything. That is a reason to declare the gross, claim the fee properly and keep the records that support the rest, rather than a reason to be nervous.

Setting money aside and PAYG instalments

Because nothing is withheld, the tax on a year of delivering arrives in one piece when you lodge. The ATO’s own framing is that sharing economy income “may not have tax withheld, which means you might end up with a tax bill”. Two things take the sting out of it.

You can make prepayments against your ATO account at any time, as often as you like, and the money sits there until the assessment absorbs it. Plenty of drivers move a percentage of every payout across as it arrives, which turns a June problem into a non-event.

You can also start PAYG instalments voluntarily rather than waiting for the ATO to enter you into the system, which it does once your business income reaches the entry thresholds. An overpayment comes back at the assessment.

Getting the return right

A delivery driver’s return is not complicated, but it is not a myTax-in-ten-minutes return either. You are reporting business income and deductions through the business schedule, applying the right vehicle method, and apportioning half a dozen mixed-use items in a way that would survive being asked about. What goes wrong in practice is the vehicle method, declaring net platform income instead of gross, and percentages nobody can explain a year later.

What we ask a delivery driver for is short.

• Your annual statements from every platform you drove for
• Your vehicle records: kilometres, logbook or receipts, whichever method applies
• Receipts for the bag, mounts, gear and any tolls you paid yourself
• Your phone bill and the work-use percentage you have worked out
• Purchase details for any bike, scooter or car bought during the year

A sole trader tax return with the business schedule is a fixed $330 including GST with your personal return included, quoted before any work starts, and we typically turn returns around within five business days. The fee itself is deductible next year.