What Your CRA Mileage Log Actually Needs to Show

What every trip entry needs

For each business trip, CRA expects your logbook to record:

• The date
• Your destination
• The purpose of the trip (who you saw or what you did there)
• The number of kilometres driven

On top of the trip-by-trip details, record your vehicle's odometer reading at the start and end of your fiscal period — that's what lets you calculate total kilometres driven for the year, which you need to work out your business-use percentage.

What a good entry looks like versus a vague one

A logbook entry that would satisfy a CRA review looks like:

March 4 — Drove from home office to Acme Corp, 123 Main St, Toronto — client meeting to review Q1 deliverables — 18 km

A vague entry that wouldn't hold up:

March — client stuff — some driving

The difference isn't length — it's specificity. "Client meeting to review Q1 deliverables" tells a reviewer exactly what business purpose the trip served; "client stuff" doesn't establish that the trip was business-related at all, let alone which client or why.

Commuting doesn't count

Driving from home to a regular place of work — even if that "regular place of work" is a client's office you visit often — is generally considered personal commuting, not deductible business travel, the same rule that applies to employees. The distinction that usually matters for freelancers is whether your home qualifies as your actual place of business: if it does, trips from home to a client or job site are business travel; if you have a separate regular workplace elsewhere, the drive to get there each day is commuting. See our what counts as a business trip guide for the specific scenarios that trip people up.

Full logbook vs. simplified logbook

CRA has two accepted approaches:

• Full logbook: track every business trip, all year, every year. The most reliable method, and the only one available in your first year of claiming vehicle expenses.
• Simplified logbook: once you've kept a full logbook for one complete base year, later years only need a 3-month sample. You don't use that sample's percentage directly — you compare it to the same three months from your base year, and scale your base year's annual percentage by the ratio between them. If the sample period comes out more than 10 percentage points different from the base year's, the shortcut doesn't apply for that year and you're back to a full logbook. See our CRA mileage rate guide for a worked example of that scaling calculation.

Digital logs are fine

The CRA doesn't require a paper logbook specifically — a spreadsheet, an app, or a tool like ours that timestamps entries as you add them is acceptable, as long as the same four data points (date, destination, purpose, distance) end up recorded for every trip. What matters more than the format is that entries are made close to when the trip happened, rather than reconstructed months later from memory.

How long to keep it

Keep your mileage log — like your other business records — for six years from the end of the last tax year it relates to, not six years from the date of the trip.

Recording date, destination, purpose, and distance for every trip as you go is far more reliable than reconstructing months of driving from memory at tax time — which is exactly what a running log is for.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Writing vague purposes like "business" or "work" with nothing identifying who or what — see the comparison above.
• Claiming ordinary commuting as business travel because it feels work-related, even though the trip is to a regular workplace.
• Reconstructing months of trips from memory at tax time instead of logging as you go, which both undermines accuracy and looks unreliable if reviewed.
• Losing the base-year logbook before switching to the simplified method — you need that base year's figures to scale the 3-month sample every year afterward, not just the year you established it.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need to log personal trips too, or just business ones? You need enough information to calculate your total kilometres for the period (via odometer readings) as well as your business kilometres — you don't need a purpose/destination entry for every personal errand, just the start/end odometer readings to establish the total.

What if I forget to log a trip on the day it happened? Log it as soon as you remember, with the actual date of the trip, not the date you're writing the entry — a same-week correction is far more credible than a reconstruction from three months later.

Does a GPS or mileage-tracking app replace the need for a purpose field? No — automatic GPS tracking can capture date, distance, and destination reliably, but you still need to record the business purpose yourself, since that's not something a GPS can infer.

Official source: CRA – Motor vehicle records