Is travel to a rental property deductible?

Two kinds of trips

Publication 527 treats this in two places. Local transportation covers day trips by car within your area: you may deduct ordinary and necessary local transportation expenses incurred to collect rental income or to manage, conserve or maintain your rental property. Travel expenses cover trips away from home, such as flying to an out-of-state rental. Away-from-home travel is deductible if its primary purpose is the same: collecting rent or managing, conserving or maintaining the property.

In both cases there is a purpose test. The publication also says you must properly allocate your expenses between rental and nonrental activities, so a trip that combines a rental inspection with a family vacation needs to be divided with a reasonable, documented method.

The commuting trap

The most common mistake concerns the simplest drive. Transportation expenses incurred to travel between your home and a rental property generally constitute nondeductible commuting costs unless you use your home as your principal place of business. Publication 587, Business Use of Your Home, explains how to decide whether a home office qualifies as a principal place of business. If it does not, the drive from home to the rental to meet a plumber is generally not deductible on its own, while a trip from the rental to a hardware store to buy a repair part, or to the bank to deposit rent, is not a trip between home and the rental.

The second half of that sentence is our reading of how the rule is likely to apply, not the publication's own wording, so confirm unusual routes with a preparer.

Improvement trips

You cannot deduct the cost of traveling away from home if the primary purpose of the trip is to improve the property. The cost of improvements is recovered by taking depreciation. That ties the travel rule to the repair and improvement test: a week spent supervising an addition is part of the improvement cost, not a rental travel expense, while a week spent fixing a leak is maintenance. See repair or improvement for rental property.

Actual expenses or the standard mileage rate

If you use your personal car, pickup truck or light van for rental activities, you generally choose between actual expenses and the standard mileage rate. For 2025 the standard mileage rate is 70 cents a mile. Publication 463, chapter 4 gives the rules for either method. To deduct car expenses under either method you must keep records that follow the rules in chapter 5 of Publication 463, and you must complete Part V of Form 4562 and attach it to your return. Travel away from home requires records that follow the same chapter 5 rules.

Worked example (our arithmetic with the publication's rate): you make 12 trips to check on a rental, each 35 miles round trip from a separate office where you manage rentals. That is 420 miles x $0.70 = $294 for 2025. If instead the trips start at a home that is not your principal place of business, the same 420 miles are generally commuting and the deduction is $0. Enter your own purpose and miles in the calculator above.

If you also claimed a 2025 deduction on Schedule 1-A (Form 1040) for vehicle loan interest allocable to personal use, you cannot claim that same interest on Schedule E.

Pre-rental and vacant property

You can deduct ordinary and necessary expenses for managing, conserving or maintaining rental property from the time you make it available for rent. While the property is vacant but held for rent you can still deduct those expenses, including depreciation, although you cannot deduct the lost rent. Trips connected with that activity follow the same purpose test. If the property is listed for sale and is no longer held out and available for rent, the expenses are not deductible rental expenses. Compare the rental property depreciation calculator for the building itself.

Sources

• IRS Publication 527, Residential Rental Property (2025): Rental Expenses (Local transportation expenses, Travel expenses, Pre-rental expenses, Vacant rental property). Read November 2, 2026.

Edition read: Publication 527 (2025), for use in preparing 2025 returns. Dollar limits and rates in this publication are for 2025; check the current publication and form instructions for your tax year. Where a figure is described as our arithmetic, it applies the publication’s rule to a made-up example. This page summarizes the publication and does not replace it.