Solo for Instacart shoppers: mileage, earnings and taxes

Instacart shows an estimated delivery distance for each batch before you accept it, but that only covers the store-to-customer leg. It doesn't log the drive to the store, between stores, repositioning, or the drive home — and it doesn't produce an IRS-compliant mileage log. Solo tracks all of those miles by GPS and classifies them automatically by matching them to your completed batches.

Solo's free tier includes manual mileage tracking with unlimited trips — you tap start and stop around each shift. Automatic mileage tracking and classification, where Solo matches your drives to completed Instacart batches without you pressing anything, starts on the Basic plan at $8/month ($96/year). All plans come with a 7-day free trial.

Download Solo, link your Instacart account, start your free trial, and turn on mileage tracking. Solo's GPS logs every drive in the background. When you complete an Instacart batch, Solo matches it to the drive it already recorded and files those miles as business. No start button, no swiping, no Sunday-night catch-up.

If you claim a mileage deduction and get audited, the IRS expects a contemporaneous log — dates, distances, destinations and business purpose — recorded at or near the time of the trip. Instacart's batch distance estimates and weekly summaries don't meet that standard. Solo's GPS log does: it records every trip as it happens and ties each one to a completed job.

Solo connects to 11 platforms, so your Instacart, DoorDash, Shipt, and Uber Eats earnings all appear on one screen alongside your mileage and expenses. Most mileage trackers only track miles — Solo tracks the whole picture and projects your taxes across every app you work for.

Solo's Smart Schedule predicts what an hour will pay before you decide to work it, using data from over a million gig workers. Shoppers using Smart Schedule earn up to 40% more per year on average. Pay Guarantee can also lock in an hourly floor for a scheduled shift — if you earn less than predicted, Solo pays the difference.

Every mile driven for business purposes is deductible at the IRS standard rate — 76¢ per mile for July through December 2026. That includes the drive to the store, store to customer, between batches, and the drive home after your last delivery. Personal miles (errands, school runs) are excluded. Solo classifies these automatically so only business miles end up in your deduction.

Instacart's batch distance is a pre-acceptance estimate of the delivery leg only. It doesn't include the drive to the store, repositioning, or the drive home, and it doesn't create a log the IRS would accept. On a typical evening, shoppers drive two to three times the distance Instacart shows. Solo captures all of it by GPS, ties each trip to a completed batch, and produces a proper mileage log.

Solo connects to both Instacart and Shipt (and nine other platforms). It matches each completed batch or order to the drive that produced it, regardless of which app the job came from, so you get one mileage log and one earnings view across all your apps. Most other trackers either don't connect to gig platforms at all or only track miles without linking them to jobs.

Both. Solo projects your tax liability year-round based on your tracked earnings, mileage, and expenses — so you always know what you owe before a quarterly deadline. Then, Annual Pro and Pro Plus members can file their federal and state returns directly from the app or on the web, with all of your income and deductions already filled in from a year of tracking.